Loads of telephones in the past few years have been selling with lots of Smartphone features. Early models such as the Nokia Communicator were impressively good to use with built in telnet clients and web browsers. Then, Sony livened up the scene with the introduction of the P800 – a telephone with a stylus, and lots more PDA style features.

Until very recently indeed, I have always preferred to carry a PDA and telephone, because the phone’s ‘diary’ features have been poor. The Palm TX was the tool of choice, because it had wifi (even though the mail client and browser were poor). Palm Desktop has been a consistantly good PIM for the desktop, and sync’d perfectly with the TX (although I do wish that the bundled Apple tools integrated better with the TX, without jumping through the hoops that the iSync Conduit caused you to).

The Palm/Treo 630 came close to being the single device of choice, being a phone which ran PalmOS, but the “Being a Telephone” application, and sms tools were so poor that it was a shockingly bad phone. It didn’t do wifi which meant no cheeky free wifi, or cheap connectivity to the device at home.

The Nokia E61 is the first smartphone which had made me abandon the traditional PDA. It does wifi, and will also run a day-diary really well. It integrates perfectly with iCal and the Apple Address book. It has a SIP client (which I am yet to test, but I will do so that my Devonshire IT DDI can ring my mobile when I am in range of free wifi).

The browser is neat – two features which really make it standout are the thumbnail of the entire page when you are fast-scrolling around the page on the screen which appears to aid navigation, and the ‘back’ button which brings up a rolling 3d map of thumbnails of the places you have visited recently.

The IMAP client is really good – but does tend to force you to write upside down (reply on top) emails. Still, I have found it a help at driving down response times to customers.

A world of J2ME applications will run on it, so you can quickly get access to Messenger services with Agile Messenger.

A PuTTY port exists, and I have found the QWERTY keyboard makes it easy to support servers on the move.

The Wifi does seem to be a little flaky – my laptop picks up service from the Access Point at home, at much greater ranges than the handset seems to.

It seems to be free on a Vodafone business tarriff right now.