One of the problems of geekhood is you want the new toys and you want them now. I still have one of the early PocketPCs, black and white (well green), Windows CE and a battery life of less than a day. I blame stephbu for this, it was his idea to go down Tottenham Court Road shopping.

When Orange released the first Microsoft powered SmartPhone to the market I had just upgraded to the first Nokia picture phone and so I had to wait for a year unless I wanted to get gouged on the handset price. I waited, keeping in mind the old adage of never buying Microsoft's V1 products, and 2 weeks ago the e200 hit the market. After a week of calling around stores I finally found one in stock, caught the tube to the store, handed over my plastic and took delivery of a shining new SPV E200.

Featuring Windows SmartPhone 2003, a built in camera, GPRS, tri-band (so I can use it in the US on their retarded, non-standard phone networks) and Bluetooth it offered more than the latest Nokia. A cradle for syncing to Outlook, via ActiveSync (already mature, having been used for the entire Windows CE/Pocket PC range) and the ability to use Windows Media files for ringtones made it a geek have to have.

Of course there are buts. Some of them are small problems; some of them are simply stupidity on Microsoft or Orange's part.

Orange are pushing Bluetooth hard on this phone, and it does work. You can use a wiresfree headset and use ActiveSync over Bluetooth, but that's where it ends, and it ends hard. Battery life is under 24 hours with Bluetooth on. Not in use, simply on. There's no automatic "on" when an incoming call arrives, so if you're using a Bluetooth headset you either have to put up with daily recharges, or get the phone out of your pocket and turn Bluetooth on as you get a call, and hope that the caller doesn't hang up while you do all this. Worst of all, for me anyway, there's no documentation on how to use the phone as a Bluetooth modem. The available Bluetooth services don't appear to have a DUN service, so for the life of me, and many people on the microsoft.public.smartphone newsgroup, we can't get it working as a modem. This is amazingly stupid. I now cannot connect my laptop to the Internet while I'm on the move. Microsoft stated that they have moved from a 3rd party BlueTooth stack on the PocketPCs to their own stack for the SmartPhones. This begs the question "Why didn't you finish the stack?" (There doesn't appear to be Obex push/receive support either).

The call quality leaves a lot to be desired. There's a noticeable buzz on certain calls. Some people report the camera takes pictures with a green hue. There's a bug in the background checking of emails, if you have multiple accounts, it only checks the currently active one. The joystick is 4 directional only, there are no diagonal directions. This makes some games unplayable (well that's my excuse; it's nothing to do with my poor gaming skills). The T9 dictionary forgets your custom words (this bug has been there since the original SmartPhone). GPRS does not auto-disconnect on idle, which depending on your carrier could cost you money. The MMS implementation doesn't include sound messages. The configuration wizards on the driver CD don't work. IE appears incomplete, it doesn't tell you how big a file is as you download it, you see a progress screen which states xKB of "0 bytes", and it's always 0 bytes. If you click a cab file link which returns a 404 IE displays "CAB file doesn't exist.. We should output 404 headers etc here". Right, you should.

In spite of all that, I still like it. I actually believe these are software faults (for example the joystick in the hardware is apparently 8 way) and we'll see patches. Of course how long it will take to see those patches is another matter.

SmartPhone? No.

"Slightly above average intelligence, but showing a lack of common sense" Phone? Yes

12:25 Damnit, I knew I forgot something. You can't use tunes on your SD card as ringtones. So no using the full track of "I should be so lucky" as a ring.

Hello to theinquirer readers. Especially the astounding amount of browsers from Sony Ericsson proxies, the couple of people from Nokia, and the one lone soul from Vodafone.