Magicbox Torque home phone

The Magicbox Torque (despite the tortuous name - it's a phone, geddit?) is a cordless landline phone for homes.

The press release describes it as ‘stunning' and ‘the most gorgeous phone on the planet' and while we wouldn't go that far, it's certainly good looking.

The plastic handset has a white backing and a shiny black front without physical buttons – instead the buttons are in the form of touch-sensitive panels which light up when the phone is active. There's a small black-and-white screen which was clear enough.

It was pleasant to hold, with a nicely textured back panel and good size, but as with modern mobile phones, the front panel got quickly covered with grease and fingerprints. However, unlike with some touch-panel devices, the buttons here actually worked and were quite responsive.

When the phone is held up to a face, it detects this and deactivates the keypad. The downside of this is that if you need to enter numbers on the keypad, it takes a second or so to reactivate, a long delay when you're dealing with an automated system.

We found that, if anything, the keys were too responsive and it was too easy to accidentally press one or more.

The base unit is a large white square plate. It looked good, but it can't be wall-mounted, so it must sit somewhere, taking up a lot of space.

It also has a bright white light in a ring around the bottom of the base, which stays on all the time. It is particularly distracting if you're trying to get to sleep and the base is in the same room. We eventually found the page in the supplied printed manual that explains how to turn it off.

An Eco mode cuts the amount of power the phone uses, though Magicbox told us that it was unlikely to affect reception. At the time of writing Magicbox hadn't been able to give us the figures on what the power difference would be with or without Eco mode enabled.

It can handle SMS text messages, though you need Caller ID enabled on your phone line first. With that done, it worked well. Call clarity was fine, the ring tone selection reasonable and the answering machine worked well.