The Vodafone 710 is an astonishingly dull 3G phone. As the name suggest, this is strictly a Vodafone-only affair, and other carriers won’t exactly have any sleepless nights over this particular phone.

There is something slightly interesting about the Vodafone 710 which is that it’s made by Huawei Mobile of China, and it’s the first time we’ve seen a Huawei handset launched as a mainstream European phone.

It’s not like we haven’t been teased here at Engadget Mobile with all the spy pics taken of the LG VX9900 lately. And with release dates coming and going, it’s begun to wear a bit on our patience.

LG’s VX9800 multimedia/communicator cellphone just got one of the highest forms of praise possible by a reviewer. Not much of a surprise, then, that MTR gives the VX9800 five out of five stars and their Editor’s Choice designation; the only real fault they can find with the phone itself is that the speakerphone doesn’t work with the clamshell closed.

This handset goes a long way to addressing a serious issue with Nokia’s lineup of phones – they have no mainstream 3G clamshell devices. Oh yes, they have the Nokia N90, N92 and N93 phones but these are completely over-the-top for most customers.

The Nokia 7390 on the other hand is a very promising looking 3G handset, except that it’s a fashion phone so it won’t appeal to business. The only other phone in that category is the Nokia N75, but that’s aimed at the US market only.

The SGH-P900 (pictured) is an unusual looking phone that is slightly reminiscent of the Samsung Z130, with an unusual rotating display. However, the display on the SGH-P900 is designed for digital TV rather than video calling.

The Samsung SGH-P900 is a tri-band GSM device with GPRS and EDGE, a 2 megapixel digital camera, T-DMB receiver, 240×320 pixel display in 262,000 colours, 128Mb of internal memory plus microSD expansion, an MP3/AAC player, dual speakers and Bluetooth. It’s a large device for a GSM phone, at 95×48x27mm and 124 grams, but substantially lighter than the Nokia N92.

Positioned one notch above the lightweight Z500 3G phone in Samsung’s range, the SGH-Z520 has a 240×320 pixel display main, 2 megapixel primary camera, 40Mb of internal memory with microSD expansion, and MP3/multimedia player, inbuilt “digital power amp” and Bluetooth. There are external media controls too, so the Z520 can be used as an MP3 player when closed.

This swivelling clamshell comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera, a 2.2″ 240×320 pixel display, Bluetooth, 128Mb of internal memory with microSD expansion, an MP3/multimedia player, FM radio and TV output. Being a “Z series” handset, this is also a 3G phone.

There are a few camera phones around like this – designed to look as much like a dedicated camera as well as a phone, and the Z710 certainly looks the part, although there’s no optical zoom on this device. Physically, the SGH-Z710 measures 96×48x20mm and weighs 107 grams.

The Motorola W220 is a RAZR-like clamshell phone with a 128×128 pixel CSTN display in 65,000 colours that weighs 93 grams. It has a long battery life giving up to 8 hours talktime and 12 days standby time, and there’s a built-in FM radio. And really that’s about it.. no camera, no Bluetooth, no MP3 player. It’s only a dual-band GSM device, but it does at least have GPRS and a WAP browser.

The Samsung E420 is a low cost member of Samsung’s “La Fleur” series of fashion phones with a 128×160 pixel OLED display in 65,000 colours, a VGA resolution (0.3. megapixel) camera and that’s really about it, apart from the E420’s attractive looks.

In fact, it’s the SGH-E420’s looks that give the game away – the interior and basic specifications mark it out as an upgrade to the Samsung X400 (see below) from 2003. Yup, this is essentially a three-year-old phone with a bit of a facelift and a few new features.