my ideal mobile phone

Samsung's Soul is another of those mobile phones with a name I can't fathom. Soul? What's that about then? Samsung and LG seem to be joined at the hip when it comes to giving mobiles a name, and ‘Soul' has to be as meaningless as any I've seen.

Still, that's not going to put me off this mobile, which is Samsung's current flagship phone. It sits in the Ultra range, which has seen some impressive models in the past, so I expected great things from it. The network operators clearly like it, as it is available all over the place. I found it online at O2, T-Mobile, Vodafone, and Orange all offering it from free depending on your contract choice.

This is a slider handset, and the build is lovely. Tall and thin in repose measuring a tidy 105.9mm tall, 49.5mm wide and 12.9mm thick it feels slightly lanky in my small hands but comfortable nonetheless. The slide is beautifully sprung so that it doesn't need a lot of force to open or close. Opened, the phone is pretty tall at about 150mm.

There is a fair bit of metal in the casing, yet the Soul manages to be only slightly over 100g in weight - 112g in fact. The metal forms much of the front fascia that isn't screen and also about half of the back fascia. The rest of the outer shell is made of black plastic.

The Soul has a lot of high-end features, but the feature that sticks out like a sore thumb when you first see the phone is the screen beneath the main screen.

The main display of this mobile is a fairly standard 320 x 240 pixel offering measuring 2.2 inches across the diagonal. It can manage 16 million colours which is nice for it, though frankly I think that's overkill in a mobile phone.

The secondary display is the one that people are talking about. This is a touch-sensitive pad Samsung calls the Magical Touch window. Er, Samsung, there's nothing magical about it, actually. I suppose Samsung has chosen that name because the features it offers change depending on what you are doing at the time.

So, when you switch the phone on the Magical Touch window offers five options: messaging, profiles, calendar, music playback and access to the phone's main menu.