The phone watch is an idea that just isn’t going away, with a different spin of the concept produced pretty much every year at CES. But this time, Sony assures us, it’s really going to happen and it’s really going to be fabulous.

The video above shows some of the obvious limitations: if you’ve only got a tiny surface area on which to drag your fingers then it’s difficult to fit too much information on at any one time, and it’s also tricky to hit a tiny 60 x 60 pixel area on something as inherently unstable as your wrist.

Nevertheless, it does kind of work, and it’s worth noting that this screen is multitouch-enabled: press two fingers and it will go back one step. And we’re also pleased to see that it won’t only work with Sony phones (if you missed the news, Sony Ericsson phones are no more, having been sucked into Sony as a subsiduary); all you need is an Android phone with the appropriate app downloaded onto it.

Which leaves us with just one question: does anyone out there want one?

There are many things I’ve learnt to distrust over the years. PRs who start a conversation with the phrase “have you got 30 seconds?”, my Dad’s woefully optimistic assessment of the carnage he’s unleashed on his PC, and West Ham’s back four, for instance. But none more so than the battery indicator on mobile phones.

They are pathological liars. They’ll spend two days displaying five full bars of battery goodness, only to chomp their way through the remaining bars in six-and-a-half minutes. I’ll never buy a Sony Ericsson phone again after the time I left the house with the full five bars of battery, only to end up on the motorway hard shoulder a couple of hours later, barking instructions to my girlfriend in a demented verbal shorthand, because the battery had inexplicably drained down to the last sodding bar.

And what does the phone do when it’s approaching battery Armageddon? Does it go into Apollo 13 mode and start shutting down every last unnecessary amp of power? No, it starts twittering out “battery low” warnings like a budgie on Speed, serving only to chip another few seconds off your remaining talktime in the process.

That is until the Nokia E71 arrived. You may be aware of others, but this is genuinely the first phone I’ve ever owned where the battery indicator actually indicates how much battery life is left. This became gloriously apparent on Friday night, when my train decided to take an unscheduled stop somewhere between Three Bridges and Haywards Heath. For an hour-and-a-chuffing-half.

The train driver is probably right now being head-hunted by the SAS, because if this chap was dropped behind enemy lines and taken prisoner, there’s no amount of nipple-tweaking torture that could persuade him to start talking. Thus, I headed over to the BBC Travel website to find out what the problem was, and then sent a succession of SMS progress reports to my girlfriend, all with my battery indicator dangling on a single precarious bar.

I even managed to fire up the GPS and find out exactly where I was marooned, and read a few angry comments on Twitter from fellow commuters. Indeed, the phone was still perky when I arrived home some three hours later.

So battery indiciators have stopped lying to us. Perhaps, Microsoft can headhunt the person responsible and set them to work on Windows’ progress bars? 

I just got back after a couple of days off work to find two mobile phone watches have landed on my desk. That’s right – mobile phones, in a watch. Watches that are mobile phones. It’s official, the future is here, and it’s come in the form of a chunky plastic wrist accessory.

What next for Pro? Jet-packs? Flying cars? Meals in a pill? Who knows. All I can tell you is that I was running up and down Tottenham Court road at lunch pretending I was the Hoff in Knight Rider.

This particular one that I’m testing today, which strangely came with no product or manufacturer’s name but can be bought here, has Bluetooth, quad-band operation, video recording and an MP3 player, all controlled by a tiny, tiny touchscreen. Keep an eye out in PC Pro for the full reviews.

If you keep close tabs on the smartphone scene – and PC Pro’s reviews section – you’ll know that we weren’t too impressed with HTC’s response the iPhone 3G, the Touch Diamond a couple of months ago.

We liked the fact that it buried most of Windows Mobile’s ugliness under an attractive, finger-friendly touchscreen interface, and we liked its fantastic VGA screen. We were also keen on its fantastic web browser – Opera Mobile 9.5.

But we hated its sluggish performance. The whole point of touchscreen interfaces is that they should be responsive, but this was anything but. Hit a control on screen and, like as not, you’d have to wait a second or so before anything actually happened. It was one of the most frustrating phones we’ve ever had the displeasure to use.

Would the same issues afflict its big brother – the Touch Pro, which arrived in the Labs today?

Essentially this is a Touch Diamond with a slide-out Qwerty keyboard bolted on, and a few other tweaks, but initial impressions are good. Responsiveness is up, despite the phone boasting the same 528MHz processor. Perhaps the increased RAM, up from 192MB to 288MB is responsible for this.

The battery capacity has also been increased from 900mAh to 1,340mAh, which should result in longer periods between charges, but it’s not as dramatic an upgrade as we’d hoped for.

Elsewhere it looks a solid handset. Features are, as you’d expect from a flagship HTC phone, second to none, with fast HSDPA mobile data (for speeds of up to 7.2Mb/sec), a three-megapixel camera (this time with an LED flash) and VGA video phone, a GPS receiver, Bluetooth 2.0 an, of course, 802.11bg Wi-Fi.

Build quality seems excellent too – the Pro has a decent heft to it, and the sliding mechanism is smooth and the the keyboard it reveals seems of decent quality too. It’s also worth noting that HTC has done away with the nasty, glossy plasticky rear of the Diamond, replacing it instead with a thicker panel covered in rubbery, soft-touch black plastic.

One disappointintment is that it’s a very chunky, phone, measuring 18mm thick. We were expecting something a little more svelte.

But the thing that took our breath away wasn’t the looks or the build quality it was finding out how expensive this phone is. SIM free, it’s set to cost a whopping £451 (exc VAT). Is it worth it? Can any phone be worth spending that much money on? Be sure to check back at the beginning of next week, after we’ve given it a thorough going over, to find out…

We’ve been arguing about mobile phones in the office today, specifically when and where it’s appropriate to have one, and if anyone ever goes out without it. It all started around holidays and traveling – do you really need to take a mobile phone with you; is it an unnecessary distraction, or a useful backup in case of trouble?

Nowadays we seem to have them on us at all times of the day and night. For many people its even the first thing they see in the morning, as they use it as an alarm clock. We are even protesting to be able to use them on planes.

One unnamed debater, who ironically has the loudest and most irritating ring tone I have ever heard, argued that they should be left at home when on holiday at least. Another suggested that in case of an accident you may be grateful that you have it with you.

Personally, I’m terrible at keeping hold of them – I’ve lost several in the last few months, rarely keep them charged and never remember to transfer friend’s numbers to new handsets. It’s currently been around two weeks since I last turned mine on, and the world has yet to crumble around me. I simply don’t feel like I need it in my day to day life. However, when I travel it comes with me and when I go on a long solo bike ride it comes with me – you never know what will happen.

A quick call to Vodafone and a replacement was on its way, but I had to return the broken one. Fine I said, but how do I erase my personal data on this phone? All its suggestions involved using the keyboard, not much help really. Why not have a reset button on these phone that will clear all the data on them? Better than that, why can’t the service provider ( Vodafone in this case ) send a signal to the phone to instruct it to erase all the data on it, obviously with your permssion?

Is it any surprise that personal data theft is a big problem nowadays when such small devices that can easily get lost or stolen can contain such a wealth of private information?

Come on you phone providers, think about security: the more information we store on these devices the more important it is that this information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Or am I just being paranoid?

The answer, according to those lovely folks over at BT and TalkTalk, appears to be “as difficult as we can possibly make it without sticking two fingers up and suggesting yoghurt pots and a piece of string”.

Here’s the deal: the current TalkTalk line is in the process of being transferred to the previous tenant’s new address, but I’ve been told that’ll take a whopping four weeks (starting, bizarrely, from a week after I moved in). Both TalkTalk and BT have insisted I cannot do anything with the perfectly good phone line in my house until after that point – despite the fact that it’s currently taking and making no calls. It’s effectively useless.

Even worse, though, is that both companies then proceeded to fight to not have to take my custom. TalkTalk insisted the line would automatically revert to BT after that, and they could no longer help me – odd seeing as most of their new customers are switched over from BT lines. BT countered by saying the line was now TalkTalk’s property, and I’d have to stump up £125 to get it switched back over.

Faced with the not wholly attractive prospect of waiting four weeks to find I have no line at all, I gave up on the both of them.

Five minutes later, I got off the phone to Virgin Media. My broadband is already activated, I can install it myself and I’ll be online (with a far more reliable connection than ADSL, I’d imagine) in days. Now if only they still showed Sky One…