The T28sRegular viewers will know I have a penchant for geeky phones, and Sony Ericsson's in particular. It all started off small, with the teeny tiny Ericsson T28, then got slighty bigger the next year with the T39 (which added mobile internet and something called "predictive text"), and then slightly bigger again with the T68i (with a 256 colour screen!) and then, wow. Suddenly I had a brick on my hands with the P800, and the Giant Phone was born.

It's not often that gadgets gets progressively bigger year on year - generally the trend runs the other way - but as massive as the P800 was, it was a fantastically advanced phone. Being Sony Ericsson's first UIQ Symbian device, it was as much PDA as smelling bone, with a lovely big touchscreen, handwriting recognition, and lots of great software that allowed you to knock up a spreadsheet, maintain a website, and play Lemmings all at the same time.

Smarter than the average bone

The P800 had its faults - it looked kind of odd, the colour screen wasn't particularly colourful, the memory was limited, and the camera was a bit poor - and the phone I eventually replaced it with, the P910 fixed a lot of those, and smoothed over a lot of rough edges. The camera was still rubbish tho, and under the smarter surface it was still very much the same, giant, beast. P800 - the original Giant PhoneOnce you get used to having a whole office in your pocket you don't want to go back to anything smaller and dumber, though. Although I hankered after something that didn't strain the stitching in my jacket pocket, I was (and am) hooked to the touchscreen style that the SE P series made its own...

Of course there are other pretenders to the smartphone crown - Nokia have churned out approximately one billion models based on their Series 60 and Series 80 versions of Symbian - but all of these phones have relied on ordinary phone keypads and joysticks for navigation and text entry, making them basically toys. A smartphone without a touchscreen is like a computer without a mouse, in my opinion - sure, if you know the right key combinations you can get most things done, but it'll take you a lot longer and you probably won't bother trying it twice. The UIQ interface employed by SE actually makes all this clever stuff accessable and easy to use, making their smartphones genuinely useful. And unlike competing Windows Mobile based phones from other manufacturers, UIQ is light and efficient, meaning it doesn't need a massive processor to run, and batteries can actually last longer than a day.

Upgrade time

Anyway, fast forward to this week and the trusty giant P910 has been usurped - and, shockingly, not by a new P series phone (although there is one, the P990, and it's just as giant as its forebears). No, the latest object of my affection is the M600i. It's another Sony Ericsson, naturally, and it's a spiritual cousin to the P series in that it uses UIQ and has a touchscreen - but this is the new UIQ 3, which is a pretty major revamp of the whole interface, and the hardware is very different too. Instead of a flip down phone keypad, there's an innovative qwerty keyboard built in (each key is a rocker switch with letters either side) and nothing to hide the screen - which is slightly smaller but higher resolution, and boosted for the first time by a dedicated graphics processor. P910i - Giant by any other nameIt's 3G, making internet access a lot faster, but unlike other 3G phones it's no good for video calls, since there's no camera. This is squarely aimed at business people, and/or geeks who aren't bothered by the lack of a poor quality phone camera - and I fit somewhere between those two The result is a new giant phone which is still giant in its abilities, but distinctly - well - smaller. It's light and it's thin, but solid with it, and the keyboard has a nice positive feel - not like the rubbery, flimsy attempt at qwerty on the P910.

UIQ 3x3

The M600i is one of three UIQ 3 based phones SE are releasing this year. The second is the aforementioned P990, the more obvious successor to the P800/P900/P910 family, and the third is the W950i- which is virtually identical to the M600i except it swaps the qwerty keyboard for a more conventional number pad, and sports Walkman branding and software - along with a massive 4gb internal (but no expandable) memory for music. Why did I choose the M600i? Firstly on price it has to be said - being the first to be released back in July, it's also now the cheapest. But having initially waited patiently for the P990, the latest in the P series seems disappointing now it's here - it's just as bulky as the older models, and while the flip keypad on the originals was a useful toggle between "phone mode" and PDA operation, on the P990 it seems superfluous as UIQ3 is designed to do both at once. The flip once protected almost half the screen, but on the P990 - because the screen has changed shape and gotten wider in one direction and shorter in the other - it covers almost nothing. Basically, the whole point of the original P series form factor has been lost, making the P990 seem big and cumbersome for no good reason. The M600i on the other hand isn't harking back to anything - it's built around the new interface, rather than the old one - and works well because of that. The W950i benefits in the same way, but I'm not keen on the styling and I prefer the more businesslike gait of the M600i - that keyboard, the bundled office software, and the better messaging support.

M600i - not teeny, but closeDespite not officially being a Walkman phone, the M still has an excellent music player, complete with a "Megabass" setting, which I've been missing since I lost my old cassette Walkman somewhere in the early 1990's. It can also support Bluetooth Stereo headphones, which I personally think is a fantastic idea - no wires! Unlike the old P series, in UIQ 3 you don't have to wait half an hour every time the music application loads for it to update its track listing (regardless of whether it's changed or not) which is a big improvement. The software has moved on in lots of other ways too - the email client lets you read the full subject of emails before you download them, you can actually set SMS delivery reports permanently on (gasp), and you can use ANY music file as a ringtone, including iTunes. The latest Opera internet browser is built in for the first time, the patented small screen rendering making any website fit the screen has been improved, and with 3G it's all lightning fast.

UIQ3 is a new OS and there are still enough kinks and quirks to let you know you're a geek just for using a gadget like the M600i, but overall it's a solid little package, both as a phone and PDA, and - for the very first time - it doesn't hurt your hand to lift it.