It was in February this year that we first got a glance at the Voq, a Windows Smartphone from Sierra Wireless. It was a pre-production device, and it has taken until now, the tail end of the year, for Sierra Wireless to come up with a final unit. Sometimes, it seems, squeezing all the required technology into a smartphone can take some time.

That point noted, the Voq is a very interesting smartphone indeed. Let's cover the basics first. It runs Windows Smartphone 2003, and is tri-band. There is 48MB of Flash memory and 32MB of SDRAM, and the review sample had 25MB of available memory when we took it out of its box.

There's a slot for an SD card in the right-hand side. The 2.2-inch screen is capable of sixty-four thousand colours, and has the usual Windows Smartphone resolution of 176 x 220 pixels. Sierra Wireless reckons you should get up to 6 hours of talktime and 100 hours standby. On test we wouldn't argue too much with that. There is no Bluetooth, and no camera.

The Voq is big and heavy (133 x 53 x 23mm, 145g) and looks like a clunky thing when compared to smaller, neater smartphones. But the size and weight are here for a good reason, and this is where we finally get to what makes the Voq special. The number keys sit on a hinged section, and if you lift it, underneath you'll find a qwerty keypad. The keys are nicely spaced, there's a separate number row, and, because there are so many keys, you only need to use a single shift key to get to a host of symbols.

There are plenty of mobile communications devices with qwerty keypads these days, but Sierra Wireless has thought carefully about integration, and when you open the hinge you are automatically sent to a set of tools no other Windows Smartphone offers. Called 'MyVoq', this can automatically search the Contacts, Notes and Favourites applications as well as your Inbox. Each time you type a letter the search narrows, until you get what you were looking for. It's very clever.

There's another extra application, VoqMail, which can be used by companies to push e-mail out to the Voq. You'll have got the message by now, then, that this is really a smartphone for professional users. To top that idea off, as an added bonus, a set of software from ClearVue is bundled on the ROM which can read Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, PDFs and images (BMP, JPEG and PNG). There's an MMS client too, but as there's no camera you'll have to get images into the phone via the SD card.

The Voq's really clever ideas, its keyboard and MyVoq software, are a bit overshadowed by the lack of Bluetooth and its overall size and weight, though the missing camera may not be a problem for many business users.