Review: LG U400 wiki-wiki-wiii DJ phone

This is the LG music phone - the U400. It's a strapping piece of kit, which is slightly bulky owing to its '3Gness'. It's also only available in this black, blue and silver livery. I'm already feeling more masculine just holding it.

It's a slider phone which features the MP3 player controls on the front of the handset, as well as call answer and reject buttons. And yes, that's a scroll wheel you can see on the front there, and very smooth it is too. The numbered keypad is revealed when you slide it open. So far, so good.

Because the MP3 controls are on the front of the handset, you do actually feel like you've got a proper MP3 player. It's got an internal memory of 70MB, and a MiniSD slot which can expend it by a further 1GB. In total this will hold about 500 songs, which doesn't make it the biggest out there, but does mean that it will be able to replace a separate MP3 player for many people out there. It's bundled with a 512MB memory card  to get you started.

Because it's exclusive to 3, it's integrated with the 3 player - their MP3 interface. This allows you to view your library to include the songs you've uploaded onto your phone, as well as those you've bought and crucially, those that 3 have available for you to buy. This makes it really easy for you to spend your gas bill money on tracks at 99p a pop. Learn from my mistake.

There are other things that make this a good music phone. Headphones are bundled with it, and appear as standard in-ear headphones, connected into an in-line remote via a 35 mm jack. This means you can quickly discard them and insert your own.  It's also got stereo Bluetooth, so if you're so inclined, you can even stream music without the wires. And once you've gone wire free you'll never go back.

There's also a 2 Megapixel camera which isn't hidden under the slide like many of these types of phones. This way you can shoot as you would a normal camera. The screen is also bright and crisp, so you can see the pictures in all their glory.

On the other hand, five minutes out of the box and the U400 was covered in finger prints - it's got a nice finish but it's just not equipped for the real life situation for being touched by a human hand. I don't consider my fingers to be particularly grubbier than others, so I'm going to assume this happens to everyone. There's also a problem using the softkeys. They're situated on each side of the scrollwheel, which is itself to the left of the phone. Getting to them requires a bit of finger gymnastics and a lot of getting used to.

It's a music phone, so you're expecting some weird and seemingly pointless features, and LG have come up with a doozy (I've never actually said doozy before. I like it). Once you've loaded the songs, there is a horrible DJing function that means you can put a kind of 'wiki-wii-wik' scratching noise over the top. So, Chris Martin's singing 'Yellow' and you can interrupt him halfway to create "Ye-ye-wiki-wiki-yello-wiiiii". Nice.

The LG U400 is a good MP3 player, with everything you'd want included in an MP3 player.You do get the feeling that LG concentrated so hard on the music part of the phone that everything else kind of fell by the wayside. This is particularly obvious when you try to write messages, find contacts or any of that phone type stuff - there aren't the familiar soft keys that we've quickly become to depend on.  I think there will be people out there who love it, and I can see why. But for me? I'll keep to my separate phone and MP3 player for the time being.