The strange-looking Ameo certainly catches the eye, with a large, colourful touchscreen and a keyboard that clings to the screen by magnets.

When open it looks like a kind of Tom Thumb notebook PC. These magnets are so strong that you need to keep them away from credit cards - but then the Ameo won’t fit in a wallet pocket.

Its capabilities are hard to pin down, too: as well as being a phone, it’s almost a handheld computer. It has an 8GB hard disk but it also offers impressive data transfer speeds for web browsing.

The Ameo is controlled in several ways - there’s that full keyboard, though the small keys mean you wouldn’t want to use it for lengthy documents. Then there’s the touchscreen to run programs - it uses the Windows Mobile 5 operating system.

Remove the keyboard and it is used like a tablet PC - it automatically scrolls down the screen as it is tipped one way, and up as you twist it the other. And because there’s a good 3-megapixel camera, there’s a dedicated button for that as well. Smartphones traditionally have poor cameras, so you can see why this machine’s hard to categorise.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Cell Phones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.