I used to be a huge fan of Sony phones - just because they looked sexy and were so small.

When I first saw the original nGage by Nokia, I fell in love with a new kind of monster.

PDAs, Laptops, Notebooks, Cameras, are all gadgets that I fall in love with easily and can't resist playing with.

The nGage is HUGE for a phone - it has a decent sized colour screen in the middle, the usual number pad on the right, and the direction pad plus some other buttons on the left.

Some people don't see the point of the nGage because it is a huge phone, but doesn't have a camera built in. Most phones with cameras, however, have useless cameras that can't beat the quality of the one I already have as a separate, so why bother. The nGage has everything that matters - it is a phone, a radio, an MP3 player, a video player, and a games machine.

Looking at each feature in turn:

*****The Phone:*****

Side talking is in! Well, I wish it was - you see the nGage has the speaker and mic at the edge of the phone - you have two choices, rest the screen against your face and get oils all over it, unable to hear the person you are talking to or have them hear you - or look 'like a prat with a game boy on your head'. Or, use the hands free option.

I went for looking like a prat myself. If you use the phone the way you're meant to then you can hear the person you're speaking to, and they can hear you without you needing to yell - 'HELLOOO??? AAAHM ON THE TRAIN!!'

No more being a nuisance to people in public - finally a phone that's crystal clear.

The contacts list options are good on this phone, and you can have MP3 ring tones. You can also send SMS messages, and, if you are feeling posh, multi media and picture messages too.

It has a bluetooth option and I do enjoy 'toothing' people on public transport - if you get an anonymous bluetooth message it could well be me!

*****The Radio:*****

The radio can be used through the internal speaker, which is a bit tinny, but still clear, or the handsfree kit. It's an FM radio and tuning is a bit fiddly, but the auto seek tends to miss stations so you do need to get used to it. I don't use the radio much, as reception isn't very good in the area that I live even with a normal radio. I've tested it out a few times though and it's good enough to use if you need a radio fix on the move. I prefer the MP3 feature though.

*****The MP3 Player*****

The MP3 player is great. You need a large memory card to take advantage of it, but this phone can play a variety of sound formats. You can set MP3s as ring tones, and you can play them through the built in MP3 / Real One player.

Sound quality on the MP3s is great for a mobile phone. You can save on space on the memory card by compressing the songs though - remember that this phone only has one speaker, so if you're playing through the speaker instead of through headphones then all you will hear is mono anyways.

I tend to reduce the bitrate to half of whatever the original was on my PC before putting them on the phone - I can get most songs down to about 1 / 1.5 meg and still have them sound pretty good.

*****The Video Player:*****

For this you need to go to the nokia website and download a tool to convert your video files into a format playable on the nGage.

Then you can watch whatever you want, on the small screen :)

I've got an episode of Futurama and some episodes of Trapdoor on my phone at the moment. I did, a while ago, rip one of my copies of The Lord of The Rings from dvd, compressed that down to SVCD, then again so that it was playable on the nGage - the final file size was 75Mb, and my memory card is a 256Mb, so there was ample space - in theory you could convert the entire trilogy and put it on there.

Of course, the screen is small so staring at it for three hours isn't the greatest idea. I normally just put music videos on to show friends, since they're nice and short.

The quality is good, you can certainly see most of whats going on, but obviously you do loose some clarity. The sound is good enough to hear whats being said, but you will naturally not get the full surround sound atmospheric effects!

*****The Games Machine:*****

There nGage has a variety of titles available for it - The Sims, Tomb Raider, Pandaemonium, Tony Hawks 4, Puzzle Bobble, Doom, etc. The selection isn't huge, but some of the games are pretty good, and there are some even better ones in the works.

That isn't the main appeal of this phone though - you see, it also supports most of the java games out there, so you can play almost everything that is available these days.

On top of that, you can get emulators for the Commodore 64, NES, and the MAME arcade machine emulator.

So you can play Final Fantasy, Phoenix, Commando, everything!

I've got a huge selection of games at the moment, and I change them regularly.

Sometimes the controls get a bit fiddly, especially with the emulators, but because there's a D-Pad as well as the numeric keypad you can usually work out some decent controls.

If you do put a third party memory card in for extra storage space, then you will find yourself in a bit of a bad position when it comes to playing your legitimately purchased games - usually they won't run unless you have the original memory card in, so you will have to get a crack for them.

Cracks are widely available with only small amount of searching, and I don't *personally* have a problem with cracking a game that I actually already own, but not everyone thinks this way. It would be better if Nokia and their partners had considered that people don't want to be switching memory cards all the time, but since they haven't we have no other choice.

*****Other Stuff:*****

To conclude, I think the nGage is a great phone. The nGage QD is out now, but that has some problems with crashing, and although you can swap memory cards more easily I prefer the larger original nGage - the original nGage is lacking in a good backlight, but the buttons are larger and easier to use.

There are some problems if you use cheap memory cards - the phone can become very slow and sluggish, but with a good card that isn't a problem.

Signals are always good as the aerial is powerful, and battery life is also very long for both standby, game play and talk time.

If you don't want a SMALL phone, but instead want one with a lot of functions, I highly recommend the nGage - I've had mine about 7 months now and it's still going strong. I have no plans to upgrade for a fair while either!