The voice dialing feature, which HTC correctly calls voice speed dial, is not the easiest to use. It requires you to create a voice tag —a recording of you saying a short form of a person's name—for each contact you want to dial by voice. Some other voice features I've tried let you dial by speaking the name of any contact in your list—although they may not interpret the name correctly 100% of the time.

There is also no dedicated button for activating voice dialing, as there is with many smartphones that offer this feature. It takes about three clicks, going through the Windows Start menu, to activate voice dialing - which seriously reduces its utility in my opinion.

Windows Mobile 6 introduced some potentially important software improvements, including Outlook Mobile, which delivers full HTML mail with pictures, formatting, etc. intact. The Office Mobile suite, handheld versions of Excel, Word, Powerpoint, is now a standard component in the operating system, and the applications are improved over past Pocket versions.

It also provides better support for calendaring and introduced Windows Live for Windows Mobile, an online portal providing access to Microsoft's free software-as-a-service (SaaS) messenger, contacts, mail and search applications.

ActiveSync, Microsoft's synchronization utility, has been improved. It worked flawlessly with the 5800 and synched my enormous contact database much faster than past versions. That said, I did have to uninstall a previous version of ActiveSync and reinstall the version that came with this product before it would recognize the 5800.

The mail experience, a crucial consideration for many users, is little different from past Windows Mobile devices. This is not the vaunted push e-mail that the platform supports if you're using the device to connect to a Microsoft Exchange Server—and which Microsoft is leveraging in the enterprise market to make serious inroads on the RIM BlackBerry's market share.

Some mobile operators are partnering with companies such as Visto to provide non-corporate customers with push e-mail service, but Bell, at least now and with this product, is not one. You can set up multiple POP3 and/or IMAP mail accounts and, as with POP3 accounts on the desktop, tell the messaging application to check for mail as frequently as every five minutes.

The application doesn't, by default, download the entire message, but it does get enough in most cases that you won't need to download any more until you get to your desktop.

Windows Mobile 6 attempts to detect your e-mail account settings automatically. It didn't work when I tried to set up my main POP3 account. Windows Mobile assumed my address was an IMAP account, set it up accordingly and then, naturally, couldn't connect. It also wouldn't let me simply modify the settings. I had to delete that account, start over and use the manual set-up option.

The 5800 offers little in the way of software beyond what is included with Windows Mobile. A picture and video viewer is about all.

On Bell's EV-DO (3G_ network, surfing using the Internet Explorer Mobile browser was very quick indeed. Web videos even played okay, in some cases, sort of. When I watched movie trailers at Microsoft's WindowsMedia.com site in 'Hi' (bit rate) mode, the images were clear and reasonably sharp, but motion typically degraded to a slide show. In 'Lo' mode, the video moved, if a little jerkily, but images were fuzzy and pixilated.

This is mainly a bandwidth issue, of course. Given a little more—the smartphoen reported bit rates as low as 28 Kbps at times while it was streaming video —this device could, I'm sure, play video quite well.

To make a voice call - which is what these things are mainly for, remember - you simply dial the number on the front keypad. On the assumption that you may be trying to dial by name using the multi-press number pad entry method, the HTC dialer also presents matching names from your contacts list. To me, it would make more sense to find records with telephone numbers matching your input, but maybe that's just me.

In my voice call testing on the Bell network, audio and connection quality were consistently excellent.

Bottom line: This is a powerful, full-featured smart phone selling at a pretty good price—although, as always, only if you sign up for a multi-year contract.

Its main differentiator is the sliding QWERTY keyboard. If you're not sure you will get maximum benefit from it—if you don't expect to be composing a lot of text messages or e-mails—there are lots of other models that are equally deserving of attention. If you see the keyboard as providing an important benefit, the 5800 should be at or near the top of your list to investigate.