The Orange SPV smartphone is the first phone to use Microsoft's Smartphone 2002 operating system and the results are pretty impressive.

Orange has managed to keep the size of the handset down to that of a large mobile phone and still include a large colour screen. Its's smaller than standard handheld computers.

The numeric keypad is a little fiddly and all navigating must be done using it, as there's no touch screen.

However, we soon got used to it and found it preferable to enter contacts and appointments into Microsoft Outlook on a PC and transfer the results using the USB docking station.

The phone then displays contacts in the same form as Outlook. However, unless you store all of your phone numbers using international dial codes, such as +44 for the UK, the SPV won't recognise who text messages are from, which is irritating.

The SPV can also be used to surf the web, email and play MP3s. The 16MB of memory is unlikely to be enough for the latter task so you might want to fork out for an MMC memory card as well.

The SPV won't be to everyone's taste, but we found it easy to use and it provided a method for always having our electronic contacts and diary with us.

Contact: Orange 0500 802080
www.orange.co.uk