Review: T-Mobile Ameo smartphone

The strange-looking Ameo certainly catches the eye, with a large, colourful touchscreen and a keyboard that clings to the screen by magnets.

When open it looks like a kind of Tom Thumb notebook PC. These magnets are so strong that you need to keep them away from credit cards - but then the Ameo won’t fit in a wallet pocket.

Its capabilities are hard to pin down, too: as well as being a phone, it's almost a handheld computer. It has an 8GB hard disk but it also offers impressive data transfer speeds for web browsing.

The Ameo is controlled in several ways - there’s that full keyboard, though the small keys mean you wouldn’t want to use it for lengthy documents. Then there’s the touchscreen to run programs - it uses the Windows Mobile 5 operating system.

Remove the keyboard and it is used like a tablet PC - it automatically scrolls down the screen as it is tipped one way, and up as you twist it the other. And because there’s a good 3-megapixel camera, there’s a dedicated button for that as well. Smartphones traditionally have poor cameras, so you can see why this machine’s hard to categorise.

It's particularly cumbersome when you hold it to your ear to make a phone call. It includes both satellite navigation and wifi, but both are tricky to use.

Still, the 5in screen is so big and bright that it’s hard not to like the Ameo. Apart from anything else, the data transfer speed means that it can at least be used for quickly surfing the internet, for instance.

Vista compatible: Yes