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I have a confession to make: I've never fully grasped the smart-phone craze. I've played around with most of them, yet never ended up needing them at my side. I thought it was me, but I'm starting to realize that it was them.

My attitude towards smart phones, or mobile PDAs, began to change when I met RIM's BlackBerry Pearl this summer. I could suddenly see a long-term commitment to this device: it was slim and phone-shaped, easy to use but smart enough to bear the BlackBerry name. (With a T-Mobile monthly plan of around $60, it was also surprisingly low maintenance.) Since then, I've been on the prowl for other mobile PDAs that appeal to people who don't need mobile e-mail, but would go for it provided it wasn't an inconvenience. Nokia's new E62 isn't perfect, but out of the box it has many user-friendly traits for ordinary people — those who haven't been joined at the hip to a BlackBerry, Treo or Windows Mobile device for years.

It's not going to beat the Pearl in a beauty contest, but the 5-oz. E62 fits into jacket pockets or purses just fine—it's definitely thinner than a Palm Treo. It's got a bright 3-in. screen of decent resolution, a wide, well planned QWERTY keyboard and a sturdy body backed by a nice aluminum plate. It takes MiniSD cards, and although you need to remove the back plate to insert them, you do not need to remove the battery - that's a step in the right direction for Nokia. There's no camera, but you probably already have a camera.

When you power up the E62, you see a screen like many other smart devices: a row of icons indicating e-mail, calendar, web browser, media player and note pad. There's a hot button for your Address Book at the bottom right.

E-mail setup is fairly straightforward as long as you know the correct names of your incoming and outgoing mail servers (example: pop.mail.yahoo.com and smtp.mail.yahoo.com). T-Mobile's setup is easier, but like the BlackBerry Pearl, the E62 won't download Hotmail. Unlike many business PDAs, the E62 doesn't "push" mail to you automatically. Instead, you set it to check for mail, as frequently as every five minutes. I'm not that crazy—I set it to check every 15 minutes, and only between 9am and 12 midnight. Annoyingly, it often forgets to check, sometimes for hours at a time. That's not a deal breaker for casual e-mail checkers, but it is something that needs improvement. Hopefully no one will e-mail to say that your house is on fire.

The E62 has a pretty smart browser. Type in a website and on the E62's screen you glimpse just a corner of the page. Use the joystick to move a cursor around on the page. Fast movement brings up a thumbnail image - a rough but handy treasure map showing everything you might want. After you've browsed a few pages, click the Back button and you'll see thumbnails of the pages you 've visited, so you can quickly pick the one you actually wanted to return to. As nice as the browsing experience was, I was foiled in my attempt to set up a collection of RSS news feeds despite the option clearly marked "Web feeds." I sense a tech support call in the near future.

The latest version of the Nokia PC Suite comes in very handy. For starters, it synchs with Outlook painlessly, copying your calendar and contacts right over. It let me browse all of the music on my PC and copy over any MP3 I wanted. It offered to convert the MP3s to a more streamlined format, but when I said OK, it failed. Whatever the case, I was able to choose any MP3 as my incoming call ringtone.

Since it's a Cingular device, it uses GSM and its relevant data networks, the low bandwidth GPRS and the tolerably fast EDGE. EDGE isn't as fast as the "broadband"EVDO used by Verizon Wireless and Sprint, nor is it as fast as Cingular's own high-speed data network, but operating on a slower network has the benefit of power efficiency. In the day and a half since I last charged its battery, after plenty of e-mails and some light calling, it hasn't dropped a bar's worth of juice.

Cingular's big problem here is that it doesn't have a good plan for the converts, people who want mobile e-mail but don't have the corporate allowance to cover the high monthly fee. T-Mobile knows this: unlimited web browsing and e-mail on a BlackBerry is just $20 on top of most regular voice plans. At Cingular, unlimited data will cost you $40 a month, in addition to a $40 450-minute voice plan. That's $80 per month before all of those weird extra charges. Cingular does have a $20 SmartPhone Connect Unlimited plan for two of its Windows Mobile phones. Hey Cingular, how about offering that rate to E62 buyers? That's how to get non-corporate types to fall in love.

• WILSON ROTHMAN
• Are smart phones ready for the masses?