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T-Mobile have announced the Ameo – a quad band Windows 5.0 smart phone that combines laptop and mobile phone features. It's quite large measuring 133 x 97 x 24 mm and it also weighs in at 350 grams, so it will weigh down your pocket, but it does have some brilliant features.

It has a 3 mega pixel camera, 5” screen display, 8Gb internal memory plus mini SD expandable memory.  It has WiFi with 3G/3.5G connections, a video recorder and video out port along with stereo speakers for media playback.  The Ameo supports BlackBerry push email and Microsofts DirectPush system and it can even be used to drive a projector to present PowerPoint slides.

The most exciting feature is the QWERTY keyboard which has an interesting twist on other QWERTY keyboard devices that are often well received for writing SMS messages and emails, but don't go down as well due to the extra weight and size imposed on the pocket. The Ameo's QWERTY keyboard can be detached and re-attached to the bottom of the handset via a magnetic strip.  The main navigation is via a stylus so it will probably be a bit awkward to make a quick phone call.

The main let down of this mobile phone is the size and weight which places it neither here nor there between a mobile phone and a laptop.

We think that the Ameo could have had vast appeal and brought smart phones to the market had it been made with the same screen size as the T-Mobile MDA Vario, the detachable keyboard and had a flash drive instead of 8Gb hard drive.

Indications are that these changes could have resulted in a sub 10cm length smart phone which was light weight without the keyboard, yet accessible enough with the keyboard to allow easy email - creating a fashionable smart phone. Hopefully T-Mobile will take this into account for their next smart phone, or maybe Apple will decide to include a detachable keyboard for their hotly tipped iPhone.

The Ameo is due for release in March 2007. Why not check out the other T-Mobile smart phones in our all mobile phones section.