Sony Ericsson is probably best known for its Walkman and Cybershot branded handsets, but the company also turns its hand to smartphones. There have been several smartphones over the years, all running the UIQ operating system.

Under the hood UIQ is very clever indeed, but its problem has always been - at least for this reviewer - that it is pesky to get to grips with from a user point of view. Sad to say, that rather fundamental problem remains with the W960i, and does an injustice to what should be a capable smartphone with good credentials for the general consumer.

For a start, the phone looks good. A candybar-style handset, the W960i weighs in at 119g and measures 109mm tall, 55mm wide and 16mm thick. It has a large front screen which I measured at 2.6 inches across the diagonal. Its 240 x 320 pixels are clear and sharp, and it is touch-sensitive.

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The W960i is Walkman-branded and it has 8GB of built-in memory for your tunes and anything else you want to store. There is no support for memory expansion, so the 8GB is all you'll ever have access to, but if that is all you need then this phone does well as a music player.

Beneath the screen you'll find that when music is playing, three touch-sensitive buttons allow you to pause and go back and forwards through tracks. One of the tasks of a left-side-mounted scroll wheel is to move through playlists, and it does this efficiently.

Sound output is good, and the only problem is the tiny icons on screen that you need to hit when you want to shuffle and repeat tunes or get to the equaliser. I did say the interface is pesky!

Communications are no problem as the handset is 3G with tri-band GSM. A front-facing camera takes care of two-way video calling while the main camera manages 3.2-megapixels, has a good macro mode, and has a twin LED flash which seemed to perform better than many single LED flash units.

The W960i will synchronise contacts and calendar with a PC, has a fairly good Web browser and supports mobile e-mail. The touch-screen allows for handwriting recognition, making it relatively easy to get large chunks of information into the phone. There is Wi-Fi for those times when you want to use your own or another network.

But that user interface, with its tiny, tiny icons that are difficult to hit with a fingertip, and sometimes confusing way of organising applications and services, is just annoying to work with. You, of course, may find it heaven on Earth, but if you don't like it, it mars what is otherwise a very good smartphone.

With 8GB of storage, a touch-screen and full smartphone credentials, it is a real shame that the user interface lets things down for this music-playing smartphone.