It's rare that a new mobile handset stands out sufficiently for me to pay more than a passing attention to it. The newly announced M600 from Sony Ericsson is the exception. At only 15mm thick, and the same rough shape as an Apple iPod, the new handset certainly looks stylish, and comes with a feature set that puts a lot of other similar devices to shame.

M600 is the second Symbian OS 9.1 and UIQ 3.0 enabled phone in the Sony Ericsson portfolio offering users great customisation opportunities and the ability to buy personal productivity and other applications from the Sony Ericsson Application Shop. New push email applications, remote synchronisation and expandable memory give owners a UMTS phone and email connectivity in a device that easily fits in their pocket.

The handset also comes with 80Mb of on-board memory, a dual-function keypad that provides a full QWERTY keypad as well as a combined number pad, a 2.6 inch QVGA touch-screen that supports 262,000 colours and handwriting recognition.

Bundled with a number of useful applications (although some, like the anti-virus are 'try before you buy' rather than full apps), the handset also comes with a USB connector for data transfer. The handset can also appear as a mass storage device via the USB connector, and on-board memory can be boosted through the use of a memory stick Micro.

And for mobile web fans, the handset even has Opera 8. The M600 is due for release in Quarter 2 this year.