No, it's not a digital pocket which can be installed on your latest pair of groovy slacks - go on, upgrade those jeans - but, unsurprisingly, a pocket digital camera. And unlike many "pocket" or "mini" monickered products, it does actually fit snugly into your average pocket.

To be precise, the Pocket Digital is the same size as a credit card, excepting the fact that it's 9mm thick. It's the most compact camera we've ever laid eyes on, certainly.

Twinned with this compactness is a simple design. It's a sleek silver beast with no apparent lens until you pull a sliding panel open to reveal it. There's a button to take a picture and a small panel on the back of the camera telling you how many shots are left. Two further buttons on the back allow you to change between low and high resolution shots and set a timer to take a picture.

Officially the camera is rated at 1.3 megapixels; you can snap using the high resolution mode at 1280 x 960, or just simple 640 x 480 pics with the lower resolution. In actuality, the high resolution mode is pretty much a waste of time, which is very disappointing. It produces a larger image but seemingly with no more actual detail than the 640 x 480 setting, so you might as well stick with the low resolution mode.

And quality-wise our test pictures didn't seem to live up to the 1.3 megapixel billing. They were fairly sketchy on the whole and not too impressive. Simple landscape photos did come out quite well, but more detailed compositions brought out some rather nasty digital "jaggies" (horrible and unnatural sharp straight edges) at times.

Of course the camera doesn't boast a flash either and you can only snap where there's a decent amount of light. Shots in a dull room turn out rather murky and indistinct, as you would expect, although the camera does have an "autobrite" feature which helps out in medium/low light conditions somewhat.

Obviously you can only expect so much from such a small piece of equipment and it's meant for fun snaps on the move. The camera stores up to 52 pictures and downloads them into your PC via a USB link (which it uses to charge up its internal battery).

Bundled with the Pocket Digital is a copy of MGI's Photosuite SE which is a very user-friendly introduction to image manipulation for those new to digital photography.

As a portable photography solution for the beginner this is a reasonable package in many ways, although we couldn't help feeling the end picture quality was somewhat unsatisfactory overall. It did, however, prove fully reliable, despite the fact that many complaints about similar mini digital cameras scathe them for battery failure and lost picture disasters. We had none of that.

The Pocket Digital is stylishly designed and incredibly compact and convenient. For the price, we had expected slightly better image results though. The high resolution mode was particularly disappointing. Even so, it's a great handy and reliable digital "fun" camera, but just a little pricey for the quality on offer.