The screen is a clear and bright 2.2in, QVGA (240 x 320 pixels), 16-million colour display. While not the largest you’ll get in a GPS-enabled smartphone, it does the job effectively enough for such a compact handset - it measures 108 x 46.5 x 15.2mm, and weighs 90g. There’s no accelerometer auto flipping between landscape and portrait views, however, on this model, although the camera does automatically switch viewfinder action into widescreen mode.

The quality 5-megapixel Carl Zeiss camera package adds minimal depth to the phone’s profile, despite having a protective sliding lens cover built in. Flicking this open automatically fires up the camera, as well as keeping the lens under wraps when not in use – or at least it should do; we found the slider control toggled open much too easily in our pocket to offer robust protection for the optics.

The 5-megapixel snappy is of reasonable quality

The Xenon flash is positioned beneath the lens, as you hold it in landscape ‘camera’ fashion, with typical cameraphone snapper button and volume/zoom keys on the side/top.

On the opposite side, there’s a button set-up for fast firing up of the Nokia Maps A-GPS software with a blue light to let you know GPS is active, though this button can be re-programmed for your application of choice. Similarly user-settable are the standby screen’s shortcut icons, which propel you into six applications, and the softkeys.

Although the S60 user interface is similar in operation to Nokia’s Nseries models, we did find the responsiveness of onscreen action to button pressing a touch casual – not slow exactly, but just some fractional hesitancy switching between some applications.