There's one thing that's immediately noticeable and annoying about the otherwise superb Xphone II: it's incredibly slow to turn on and boot up. We clocked about 72 seconds from pressing the power button to connecting to our service, with about a minute of that taken up by just booting the phone's OS. So unfortunately urgent phone calls are out of the question.

This lag aside, the Xphone II is not just an update of the original Xphone but an entirely new thing. Gone is the large form-factor, the chunky buttons and the dominating presence, in their stead is a slimline phone with a tiny bezel, large-looking display and attractive styling.

By far the aesthetic pick of the bunch, the phone also features 32MB Flash RAM (about 28MB useable) plus an expansion slot for more under the battery. Its buttons are small for T9 texting, but they have a pronounced raised edge which makes it hard to accidentally press keys from other rows. This is an advantage over the XDA IIs' and i-mate PDA2k's small QWERTY keyboard keys.