The feature set is immense and can’t be faulted. The blame for the poor usability lies fairly and squarely at the door of the OS. Windows Mobile just isn’t designed for Mobile Devices – it’s better suited to a PC where you have a decent mouse/keyboard interface. Samsung have done their best trying to accommodate the point of having a touch screen phone with their overlays to functions, but there are so many things you have to return to the awful Windows Mobile interface to accomplish that it ruins the user experience of the phone. I’ve done a comparison with a friends iPhone and the iPhone with it’s reduced functionality wins hands down – just because it’s SO fast and easy to use. The last thing you want to be doing when you’re in a hurry is delving through layers and layers of obscurely placed settings and functions. Customisation is just as bad – it means digging through menus and poking around with a fiddly stylus on those tiny menu items and the stylus doesn’t even slot into the phone itself! It’s a wholly unintuitive design on the part of Microsoft – typical of their slapdash way of arranging things where the layout doesn’t make sense to anyone but the programmers themselves. For this reason I’m thinking of cancelling the contract and biting the bullet to switch to O2 for the iPhone. I can live without MMS and video messaging to be honest, but I can’t live with a phone that needs this much attention just to use a feature that should be one button away as it is on the iPhone.

Verdict: if you like fiddling around with settings and never getting anything done, this phone’s for you. The camera is excellent and the storage capacity is immense for a phone (16Gb, plus 16Gb memory card!). A great phone but let down by the Operating System – perhaps it’d be better running Symbian or Android.

If you just need a phone to work intuitively out of the box and aren’t sold on gizmos, but would rather just get to work straight away, get an iPhone. Not as much bang for your buck on paper, but you WILL use it’s functions (where you’d not use the i900 to it’s full potential) because they don’t frustrate you or hide away behind a myriad pages of tiny buttons – oh and you don’t need to carry a separate stylus everywhere with you!