The SP3i measures 107.5 x 44.5 x 18mm and is far from a large phone, in fact it's roughly the dimensions of the Sony Ericsson T610 but a bit longer to accommodate the extended large screen. Weighing only 102 grams its not exactly a porker either and undercuts many of the current smart phones by 30 grams.

IMate have certainly produced a small and yet surprisingly useable smartphone, the keypad is not as large as a P910 or the Nokia communicator but it's very useable and is a traditional keyboard not a thumb board or touch screen. The screen itself is a more than ample 2.2 inch, 176x220 pixels TFT transflective LCD with 64k colours, it is bright clear and is probably the most striking feature about the phone, you could be unkind and say the large screen and the small keyboard gives it a kind of "tefal man" look after those chaps in the advert with the huge foreheads.

Before our review sample arrived we had got wind of some build quality issues, namely the death of the joystick, bearing in mind that our test K700i died after only 6 months this will be something that users need to keep an eye out for, but initial thoughts on build quality are that overall it's a sound design and only the battery cover looks a little cheap.

Navigation of the iMate SP3i is though the Windows Mobile™ 2003 OS for Smartphone (2nd Edition), it is vastly better than the 1st edition we saw a year ago, boot up time is quick and apart form the occasional lag when opening an application it is a fast operating system. The bonus of using a windows OS is that it all feels very familiar with the start button giving access to the applications and a pocket PC like home screen that shows upcoming calendar appointments and email / text messages. We are big fans of this unified view which means you have all the key data whenever you first access the phone.

The next Achilles heel of the average smartphone is storage and the standard 64MB ROM, 32MB RAM of the SP3i doesn't go very far, but the iMate has a mini SD card slot into which you can place up to 1gb of SD storage card. This is essential which left us a little perplexed as to why there is no card supplied with the phone, instead we had to use a 256mb mini SD card for the test which would cost around £22 to purchase.

Once you have added extra memory many of the pocket PC like features become useful, now you can store vast amounts of email and contacts lists all with photos, plus the MP3 player on the SP3i is very good as its a cut down of windows media 10 and does a great job of decoding tracks and playing them through the supplied headphones. The external speaker while loud can distort on its highest setting and so we ended up with it set to level 4 as a compromise.

As a tri band phone the iMate SP3i performs without fault with strong RF credentials holding onto calls that our Motorola V600 would drop and offering excellent sonic reproduction, battery standby is a claimed 140hrs with 3.5hrs talk time. Charging the Lithium Ion battery is so simple its worth telling you about, you can either use the supplied AC charger (although it may struggle to fit in tight plug sockets) or better still use the mini USB cable to charge from your host PC.

There is nothing special about the Mini USB lead we used the one from a Canon camera and obtained a full charge plus were able to connect via Active sync. Active sync provides the gateway between the phone and the PC, you can't mount the phone as a mass storage device (which is a shame) but once partnered with a machine, you can sync contacts, calendar and emails plus access all the folder on the phone.

We quickly synchronised our email inbox and were able to read, write and reply to emails sent to us here at lordpercy.com, the screen and the font used makes reading emails very comfortable despite the 2.2" screen being smaller than some of the other smartphones.

Being a  windows OS it's easy to load more applications most of which were written for the pocket PC platform plus some windows mobile specific apps, they can be run from either the phones memory or direct from the storage card. All of the memory is secure and will not lose data if and when your phone runs flat, there is also a java platform enabled on the SP3i which makes for some great games and opens doors to programmers to write some rather special applications to automate mobile tasks.

Connectivity is another key area for the smartphone, again iMate have it covered here with support for the Bluetooth 1.1 standard using both headset and hands free profile, plus allowing direct data connections over BT like using active sync wirelessly. There is also a good old fashioned infa red capability and using the mini USB connection allows for more serious file transfer too.

We were worried about the Bluetooth connectivity as there have been many publicised cases of poorly implemented BT stacks proving unreliable, but we have paired a variety of headsets to the SP3i without issue and have it using a TDK Bluetooth adaptor on a Sony Vaio without issue, so it seems bombproof.

For truly wireless communication there is full GPRS support allowing for email and even MSN messenger to operate over your network connection, configuration isn't too bad but iMate do like to have several levels of menu which takes a little getting used to. As a nice bonus Club IMate which you automatically get access to offer a free exchange server account so you can really make the most of mobile email, this allows you to download email to your phone but for it still to be available to your main PC account for download when you get home.

There is of course a camera tucked in the rear although its only VGA quality, it can also capture video and the images can be used as photos against contacts within the phonebook.

You may by now get the impression that this is a feature packed phone and indeed it is, it is not perfect, the SD card being under the battery makes it inaccessible to quickly transfer data and also stops any possibility of using a wifi mini SD card (not that anyone makes them yet). But we really struggled to find much to fault about the SP3i, instead it seems to have everything we were looking for in a Smartphone minus the bulk that you can clearly see from our photos of a P800 side by side with the SP3i.

For those on the move who are demanding of their phones but don't want to carry a small house brick this really is worth considering, the iMate SP3i smartphone is available SIM free for under £300 and is slowly becoming available on the main UK networks.

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