The F490 from Samsung is another of those all-front-screen mobile phones that seem to be gathering momentum at the moment thanks to Apple's iPhone. It measures 115mm tall, 53mm wide and 12mm thick and weighs 102g, making it slightly smaller and lighter than Apple's first generation offering. It is a Vodafone exclusive at the time of writing and is free on some contracts from that operator.

The large front screen displays 240 pixels wide and 432 pixels tall. As you may have guessed by now it is touch-sensitive. Icons are mostly large so you can tap at them easily with a thumb. The home screen has a nifty feature: it displays the time towards its bottom end, and if you swipe a finger across this display horizontally it changes to show a calendar instead. You can tap any date to see appointments and to add new ones.

Beneath the screen are three touch-sensitive buttons. Call and End are the obvious ones, and the third takes you to the phone's main menu where you can choose from all that the phone has to offer. Alternatively you can tap at the centre of the main screen to get into a grid that offers you the phone's main applications.

You can often drag a finger around vertically within applications to scroll. A side-mounted sliding button turns the phone on and off and doubles to lock the screen against accidental presses while the phone is in your pocket or bag.

There is a lot here by way of features, and many of them put the first generation iPhone to shame. The F490 is 3G, for example, with HSDPA support to 3.6Mbps. Its Web browser therefore works quickly and efficiently. It has a nice feature that shows a Web page in thumbnail form, making it easy to scroll through long pages and get to the precise bit you want.

It has a 5-megapixel main camera and a front-facing camera for video calling. The main camera has a flash and autofocus. In everyday use the camera wasn't as good as we might have anticipated, though. Some shutter lag made shooting moving objects a bit of a challenge, and outdoors the lens didn't always seem able to let in enough light.

There is 130MB of built-in memory and a microSD card slot under the battery cover so you can add more. The music player worked well enough and the phone really benefits from having a 3.5mm jack on its top edge. Battery life for music playback was good, too. We got more than 14 hours of continuous music from a full charge.

Phones with full frontal touch-screens are now becoming widespread enough that there is some real choice to be had. With 3G on board and a nice user interface, the Samsung F490 is certainly an option to consider and its long battery life is another point in its favour.