This strange beast is O2’s newest smartphone. It generously combines a phone, PDA, music player, word processor, web browser, still and video cameras into one chunky unit. You can also load many more third party applications onto it, such as Opera Mini, universal remote control software or, erm, Soduko.

The Zinc runs Windows Mobile, and as such gives you a lot of system information and customisation options at any moment. The Zinc reacts more like a PDA than a phone, down to the point where you’ll have to remove the stylus, tap the start icon and then tap the phone menu before you can dial a number. Luckily, contacts are available through a soft key on the home screen.

There are a lot of input methods available to you. You can choose between a Palm-esque gesture recognition system, a miniature QWERTY keyboard which you tap with the stylus, or a thumb-operated keyboard which slides out to the side of the phone. This flips the display orientation from portrait to landscape to compensate, although it takes roughly one second to redraw the screen -- depending on how many programs you have open. It’s easy to use, and once you get used to transposing keys to access numbers and symbols a lot faster than predictive text, although we found using it for anything longer than two minute bursts started to hurt our hands.

The battery life is surprisingly good for a machine that sports a 2.8 inch, 240 x 320 pixel touch sensitive display. Depending on our Bluetooth, GPRS and Wi-Fi usage, we averaged between three and five days on a single charge. The phone supports 3G networks, but unfortunately doesn’t support Telstra’s NextG network. If you’re not on a 3G network, you can still get online through Wi-Fi, although browsing with multiple windows open chewed through the battery life extremely quickly.

A lot of features, settings and options have been crammed into the phone -- such as a robust calendar and outlook synchronisation -- but you really need to use the stylus to get to the tiny, thumb deterring icons that litter the home screen. Even the phone’s keypad is hidden away under sub menus. And why exactly memory status has to be displayed on the home screen we’ll never know. It’s all too convoluted; if a friend asks to borrow the Zinc to make a quick call, they won’t be able to use it unassisted.

At 170g, and 110 x 59 x 21 mm, it’s not the most pocket friendly phone on the market, but it is very versatile, especially when paired with a Mini-SD card. However the phone still has too many drawbacks (most of which are usability related) and next to offerings from Palm or Dopod -- which has a similar, yet NextG compatible model available -- it’s hard to recommend.