If you fancy a Symbian Series 60 phone, the number of handset makers you can choose between has just doubled, with Siemens' SX1 finally becoming available to buy almost a year after it was first announced. Nokia, of course, has more Series 60 phones to choose from, but at least now you can select between hardware providers as well as between phones.

The Series 60 platform is not quite as PDA-like as the UIQ-based SonyEricsson P800 and P900, but the SX1 is nonetheless a smart enough phone to share diary, contact and task list information with your PC, either via Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes. You get synchronisation software and a connection cable in the box. And the SX1 packs a good range of other features, too, while managing to look like a phone rather than a PDA.

In the looks department Siemens has hedged its bets and kept things low-key, probably hoping that the blue/grey casing and the blue key backlighting will appeal as much to business as to leisure users. While the former will like the data synchronisation and POP3, IMAP4 and SMTP e-mail support, the latter will doubtless enjoy the multimedia features.

These include an FM radio, a digital camera which can capture stills and movies with sound, and, of course, an MP3 player. Looking at each of these in turn, the radio won't work unless you use the hands-free kit, as the antenna is stored within it, but then you are probably going to want to listen to the radio through earphones rather than the SX1's speaker anyway.

The camera captures stills at resolutions up to 640 x 480 and movies (with sound) up to 176 x 144 pixels, and the MP3 player produces great sound quality, and plenty of volume through the phone's speaker.

There is 4MB of memory on board which you can fill with data or applications - either written for Symbian Series 60 or for J2ME - and an MMC card slot is present so you can add more memory if required.

As a phone, incidentally, the SX1 is tri-band GSM/GPRS and has all the usual telephony features on board as well as some good polyphonic ring-tones. Battery life is quoted at 200 hours standby and 140 minutes talk time. We managed a couple of days between charges, though if you thrash the multimedia features you'll need to charge more often.

There is one key feature we've not mentioned yet, that you will pick up on the moment you look at an image of the SX1; the number keys are set out in two columns on either side of the screen. This allows the 65,000 colour display to be a pretty large 176 x 220 pixels without actually compromising the overall size of the phone, which is good.

But it makes it pretty difficult to remember where the keys actually are, at least at first, which is bad. And for those with small hands it's nigh on impossible to use the SX1 single-handed, which is terrible. Try before you buy to see if you can live with the design.

Verdict
The SX1 is a well featured, small, neat and good looking PDA phone, and while it is expensive we expect it to follow the normal trend and fall in price fairly quickly. It is let down by its columnar arrangement of keys though, which we found difficult to get used to.

Company: Siemens

Contact: 01344 396000

Tags: symbian microsoft outlook s60 (software platform) personal digital assistant siemens uiq nokia iphone