Despite the small resistive screen and the rather uninspired design of the virtual Qwerty keyboard, the Mini proved easy to use without once having to wield the stylus.

The virtual Qwerty layout is uninspired

The full keyboard works better in landscape, and the display quickly flips over when the phone is turned into its side. If you do find the full keyboard too small, you can chose from two alternative key pads with either two or three letters per key and an efficient predictive text system.

As an antidote to its rather diminutive size the Mini supports 15 home screen panels. As well as the usual five or seven arrayed left to right, the rest of the 5 x 3 grid can be accessed by swiping up and down.

If you get lost among all those screens, you can tap the centre of the navpad or one of the on-screen menu buttons and the main view zooms out to show all 15 letting you to move directly from one to another. Fifteen is frankly overkill for shortcuts - you could site 240 of the things - but it does let you deploy a useful number of full-page widgets.

More home screens than you can shake a stick at aside, the Mini runs Android as nature intended so you don't get any of the extras that HTC offers in its Sense overlay and nor do you get anything in the way of social network aggregation as you do with Motorola's Motoblur.

You get 15 home screens, no less, all accessible from an expanded view

That said, Android in the nude is still a looker and alongside the basics you have access to all the apps in the Android Marketplace.