Nokia 7280 mobile phone

It's one for the ladies, but they won't be enjoying much text in the city

If ever there was a phone that should be wearing lipstick and high heels, it's this pert stick of mincing femininity. Doesn't it just scream "handbag"? Still, if you manfully overlook the mirrored screen, pseudo-suede panels and fashion tag (yes, really), you'll find this is actually a very solidly built, pocketable handset, with a classy piano-black finish and an art deco-y design, but, er, no keypad.

That said, those girlie touches, so blatantly aimed at the Jimmy Choo-wearing Sex and the City brigade, are bound to ensure that no man with any self-respect will go anywhere near this mobile. So we're pulling a Mel Gibson for this review and deciding whether this is really what women want.

Well, they're going to love the aesthetics, aren't they? This Nokia is slim and exclusive-looking like no other phone so far - including the Motorola V3 (T3 104, 4/5). And the mirrored screen is actually incredibly bright and clear, if very small, even when framing shots with the reasonable VGA camera.

The interface - with a scroll wheel to cycle through numbers, letters and menu options - is bizarre. Sure, it looks nice, but it's not practical in any way. The idea is that you set up contacts with voice tags, so you don't really have to play with the controls much, but how many people actually use voice dialling?

And what about the habit no lady can seem to break - texting? With the 7280, we found it took about two or three times as long to write a text as it does on a phone with T9 and a normal keypad. We can't imagine that going down too well. You have to use the wheel to scroll through the alphabet as you would to enter a high score on a games console, although you're "assisted" by character prediction, which puts the most likely letters first in the list. In practice, it rarely gets it right.

Yes, we're absolutely certain that plenty of ladies will totter out in their droves, squealing with delight, to snap up this phone-cum-fashion-accessory. But just watch them turn red in embarrassment when they try to enter a text or add a contact.

Judging by Nokia's recent form, it probably won't be long before the company launches this mobile with a sensible keypad, and then it might be worth buying.

FEATURES
Free with contract
65,536-colour, 104 x 208-pixel mirrored LCD. VGA camera. FM radio. Tri-band. Bluetooth. Infrared. GPRS. 3 hours' talk time, 240 hours' standby. 32 x 115 x 19mm. Weighs 84g.