Building on their ever-popular range of sliding case mobile phones, Samsung have once again brought out a winner with their E840 handset. It's not perfect in any way, with some issues regarding the battery life in particular, but it's still an extremely attractive phone that deserves your attention. One thing that certainly can't be denied is that the E840 is one hell of a good-looking phone. Not only has Samsung managed to create one of the slimmest slide phones around today, they've also managed to make one of the most stylish. With its shiny aluminium finish setting off its 2.22 inch LCD screen to perfection, it's not a handset that could ever be called ugly.

The only slight problem here is to keep the design slim, Samsung has made the keypad buttons extremely flat and smooth, and it's not always easy to know if you've pressed a keypad or not, especially if you have fingers that are on the larger side.

Feature-wise, the Samsung E840 is pretty well catered for, too. The 2.0 mega pixel camera combines with the screen to produce extremely sharp photographs, which can be adjusted in size before you take them, allowing you to come up with some interesting and fun results. Not only that, but you can also choose what quality the pictures are taken in (Economy, Normal, Fine and Super-Fine) which helps to save precious battery power. On the sound side, there's the usual support for MP3 playback, although surprisingly there's no radio with this phone. Although you might think that a radio is really just an added bonus on a mobile phone anyway, the fact that it's pretty much a standard feature on similar handsets from Samsung's competitors make its absence on the E840 all the more conspicuous.

Another slight annoyance is the fact that the phone doesn't come supplied with a USB cable, so you'll have to rely on Bluetooth to connect to a laptop or PC, should you want to transfer files. The clarity of the audio performance on this handset is generally excellent, although on speakerphone it can have a tendency to come across as a little too loud.

Memory-wise, the E840 doesn't exactly set the world on fire, with its internal 82MB than previous Samsung handsets. However, there is an option to upgrade this via the use of a Micro SD card, the housing for which is handily set at the top of the phone. Sadly, the battery seems to run down fairly quickly, especially when making calls, and this is a definite negative for this handset. Catering for business users as well as normal everyday use, the E840 continues with Samsung's policy in offering support to MS Office software such as Word and Excel, which you can view on a monitor or TV screen (although, rather annoyingly, this feature requires a cable, which isn't supplied with the phone).

There's much to admire about the Samsung E840 - it's good-looking, stylish and has a host of useful functions. It just seems that there have been some compromises made on the way, and giving a mobile phone software that you need to buy an extra cable for seems a bit unfair as well.