Technofile: If you've ever tried tapping out a reply to an email received on a mobile phone, you'll know the difficulty of saying anything beyond "yes" or "no".
The problem is leading mobile handset makers into ever more innovative ways of squeezing a QWERTY keyboard onto a mobile.
The latest attempt to alleviate our thumb ache is from Siemens. Their SK65 handset hits the shops soon, and employs aoriginal device to cram in a full keyboard. Unlike the fold-out designs favoured by the likes of Nokia and Sony Ericsson, or the tiny keypad used by Palm One's Treo 600, the SK65 twists in half to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard in a cross-hairs design.
So it's for mobile messaging that the SK65 is built. To this end, it is one of the very few mobile phones to incorporate the few full-blown versions of the famed Blackberry service, code-named the Crackberry in the US for its addictive properties. This means that, with the right SIM card or a network upgrade, you can have your desktop emails "pushed" to your SK65 literally as they arrive.
The advantage is not just the ability to be fully mobile, but that the Blackberry service will synchronise your email so that any email you delete on the phone will, simultaneously, be deleted from your desktop, saving you having to double up the work.
However, the SK65 can also handle the good old-fashioned POP3 email, so you don't need to use the Blackberry service at all.
That it does not feature a camera might seem like an oversight from Siemens, until you hear that, as part of its research, it found most businesses don't want their staff brandishing cameras ready to snap commercial secrets.
Alongside its uber-messaging functions, the triband SK65 features all the usual extras we have come to expect from business-standard phones such as Bluetooth wireless, 30MB of storage space, Web access and includes a handy voice recorder for those on-the-fly voice notes.
Ultimately, Siemens is hoping the launch of this new business-focused mobile phone is the start of better news to come, especially after it experienced two poor financial quarters in a row and delays to its new handset launches.
But the company is keen to point out that the SK65 is just the first of a wave of new handsets it will be producing in the year to come.
