by Al Shield

Created on: October 23, 2009

After my experiences with the errant touch screen buttons on the Sony Ericson k850i, I swore on a bundle of phone manuals that I would never ever own a phone that was solely operated via touch screen. It would race ahead if it even glimpsed my thumb coming anywhere near it and take me to menu options I didn't even know existed nor wanted.

It confused my pocket lint for human touch and jumped onto the internet more times than I could groan 'Where's it taking me now?'

A stupid thing to swear really as when my K850I decided to bite the dust, I discovered that many of the newer phones on the market are 100% touch screen operated. So after a week of hardcore reading, weighing in the pros and cons of each new release, I finally rang up my phone dealer and asked for the Samsung F480.

Of course I managed to in avertedly pick one of the most popular phones they had in stock and since they had none to hand, I ended up on a waiting list instead of with a new phone. Not what you need when you're phoneless and people are looking for you. In the meantime I salvaged an old Motorola V Series and struggled with a phone that couldn't make calls out and took forever to send messages for a week.

Finally the day arrived - the store called me up, I came in ...and sat down for an hour and a half while they wrestled with the computer systems trying to hook it up. Surely it wasn't that hard to put in that I had a new phone? Or maybe I wasn't meant to have a new phone at all. Were the gods angry with my brand choice?

Regardless, after a two weeks + 1 and a half hour wait, I had the shiny new F480 in my hands and after a quick charge, I was learning the wonders of touch screen phones.

My fears of a caveman operator struggling with this not so new technology quickly dissipated after a few minutes of fiddling - I had everything off my sim card, a new background and tailored my sms's to just the way I like it (without predictive text which I struggle with). A couple of hours more playing and I had my favorite mp3's as ring tones, backgrounds of my dogs and a much bigger appreciation of purely touch screen technology. All without consulting the manual once, which is a huge boon for me. Anything that you can figure out without having to refer to the instructions is a definite bonus in my book.

Visually it's very nice piece of kit. It looks like a camera on one side and a mobile/cell phone the other - black with chrome backing (it is also available in pink I believe), large touch screen that

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