As sceptical as I was, the R380 awed me, in both good, and bad ways. One thing was that it didn’t irk me as much as the A6188, for a number of functionality reasons. On the looks department, it resembles a semi-stylish Ericsson phone - a huge one, that is. It stands at 12.75 by 5 by 2.5 centimetres (HWD) and weighs 164 grams - the R380 is relatively small and light enough to please most mobile phone users. When you flip down the display cover, you will be pleasantly surprised by the 360 by 120 pixel, four-shade PDA touch screen. The price is a little steep… but we do have to remember that we will be paying for its amazing functions available in this gadget.

It comes complete with WAP secure WAP protocol, SMS reading and writing as well as POP3 and IMAP e-mail capabilities. There’s also a good address book, a fairly decent agenda, clock, calculator, notepad, IR modem, voice control of the phone (say “Answer” and the phone will pick itself up), as well as voice dialling. Equipped with the Symbian EPOC-based operating system for personal digital assistants (PDAs), it has full compatibility with Psions’ offerings, with seamless synchronising to Microsoft Office, as well as compatibility with any PDA that supports vCard and vDate standards.

That would about cover the R380 in a nutshell - not much, come to think of it. No - wait… just about forgot to mention - conference call is possible if the lid is open - smart, eh?

So, what is left to be done is to take the little flimsy plastic pen (which, by the way, you will have ample supply of because it comes with 5 extra ones in the box), open the keypad and ‘type’ away on the nifty QWERTY screen for SMS/e-mail (which incidentally can send up to 39,000 characters per message) - or if you prefer, you can write away, with a very graffiti like system. The 2MB RAM won’t be enough to store a whole doctoral thesis, but it should comfortably hold all your contacts (plus e-mail, address and multiple number storage for each contact entered) and appointments, a few score of e-mails and SMS-es, as well as a cached WAP page or two.

Nothing is too bad about the phone - may be, except for its total and utter lack of expandability - both in the hardware and the software department. 2MB can be pretty limiting, and the fact that there’s no additional software that could be uploaded to the device - is a total bummer. As commented by Ericsson themselves, software cannot be added because, “It would induce a random factor in the GSM network, and that factor may just cause instability”. What I don’t understand is - how playing Solitaire can make the GSM network unstable… Ericsson sure has a way of explaining things.