OK, so I've lived with the phone for a couple of days now.

I really like the slider form factor. It's a very natural way to answer and hang up the phone. When you close the phone, it locks automatically. Mechanically, the slider has been done well. It feels solid and smooth, and a spring-loaded mechanism pops it open or closed once you push it past a certain point. Just below the screen is a small ridge of grippy stuff so that you can get a nice purchase on it.

The ability to use MP3 ringtones is excellent; 80MB of memory means that I can use lots of proper MP3s for the various call groups (Iron Maiden's Wasted Years by default, [link|http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/magical+trevor/|Magical Trevor] for friends, [link|http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/kenya/|Kenya] for family, Stop The Rock for colleagues/work). Silly, yes.

The camera is spiffy. [link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org/pics/family/cats/d500_merlin2.jpg|Obligatory Cat Picture] was taken at 1152x864, superfine quality. The CCD in the camera is 1.3 megapixel.

There's a little fringing where the sun is reflecting off the window frame, but on the whole it's really rather good.

The phone ships with a little speaker that plugs into the side; this makes MP3 playing and handsfree voice quality much better.

In daily use, the keypad isn't too bad for a big-fingered chap like me, so normal people are going to find it pretty pleasant. The keys are reasonably sized and have a nice positive click.

The menus are clearly laid out with items being where you'd expect them to be. You can customise the phone to a reasonable degree, but it's impossible to get yourself into a position where you make the phone unusable (in stark contrast to my old Siemens C35, which cheerfully let me change the language to Turkish).

The games are a bit meh, but I don't care. I don't play them. I did get a very spiffy map of the London Underground off the Orange website, though; even has a route finder!

Telephony is superb. The call list is intuitive and the voice quality excellent. Contacts are easy to manage and search.

Texting is good, too; the T9 is well implemented and I can send my usual grammatically-correct and properly spelt SMS messages without too much difficulty. I'm not sure that I like the lack of a symbol key, though; you have to press 1 and then a little menu pops up, from which you choose the non-alpha symbol you want. A bit fiddly, especially for normal punctuation.

Overall, I'm still very impressed with the phone. Things that are likely to get on my nerves include the slide mechanism loosing its current silky smoothness, and the lack of a scientific calculator (I need to convert decimal to octal to hex on a daily basis, and can't do it reliably in my head).