Product Reviews

Smartphones that run Windows Mobile 5 are fantastic for surfing the internet, sending emails, and synchronising your contacts and calendar with your PC. But most of them look rather businesslike - or should we say dull. Not so the Qtek 8500 - the first clamshell Windows Mobile smartphone we've seen.

The 8500 looks similar to Motorola's V3, and is slim and pocket-friendly. The inside of the phone looks very classy indeed. The display has a high resolution for its size and is extremely bright, and while the keypad's flat keys aren't as suited to rapid texting as a normal keypad, their large size makes

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it easy to avoid mis-typing words.

The 8500 is supplied with stereo headphones that sound reasonable - they have plenty of bass, but not much volume. There's even a screen on the outside of the clamshell that displays the ID of a caller. There are also shortcut buttons under the external screen to control Windows Media Player, so you can access your music collection without opening the phone. Unfortunately, the 8500 only has room for a few songs in its 17MB of internal storage. There's a memory card slot to increase the amount of storage available, but it uses the rare TransFlash format instead of the more usual mini-SD. The phone has a 1.3-megapixel camera and while its pictures have accurate colour balance and contrast, they're too noisy to be useful.

Like all Windows Mobile 5 smartphones, the 8500 can synchronise with your PC's contacts, calendar and email, as well as browse the internet. The screen has a high enough resolution to make a good job of displaying web pages and Pocket Internet Explorer runs smoothly, even on graphics-heavy web pages. The handset also comes with software that lets you view Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, as well as PDFs.