When Telstra and Microsoft get together, the results will either be spectacular, or spectacularly bad. Check out our Australian First Take of the O2 xda phone/PDA hybrid.

We've had the O2 xda review unit for just over a day now, and we thought we'd give you a brief run down of our first impressions, considering the two giants who have thrown their weight behind it.

The O2 xda is sleek, and a fairly good size for a combination mobile/PDA. It has an RRP of AU$1699, and will fit into your top shirt pocket, although it will weigh down the shirt in a fairly obvious manner. While this won't bother tech geeks, marketing people may have a problem with that. Of course, it does come with a leather belt pouch, so you can still look good.

The screen, which is the first thing you notice, is quite impressive, with good colour and motion abilities. We've seen short movie clips running on the xda, although not in our own test environment.

There are two customisable hot buttons above the screen, which by default take you to the calendar and contacts functions. Below the screen are the "Call" and "End Call" buttons, on either way of a five-way direction key. So far, we haven't used the direction key, or found any use for it.

Navigation is done via the stylus, and on the whole seems to work quite well. The layout of the software is Windows-based (there's a surprise) so is easy to pick up, and is navigated by tapping the desired menu option. This is exactly the same as the method used on PDAs, but in the O2 xda's case there doesn't seem to be a place in the device to store the stylus, at least not that we could find. This may mean you have to carry the stylus around with the phone, which appears to be a recipe for losing it. Of course, long fingernails or the odd stick will work just as well.

The xda is a very effective pickup tool-especially if you're in the market for male gadget geeks (which we're not), although quite a lot of people will have at least a curious peer at it.

The call clarity is quite clear, standard mobile quality. Although the phone is wider than an average mobile phone, it's not too big to hold up to your ear.

Function-wise, the device has a good calendar system, allowing you to set tasks for days fairly easily, and the tasks for the day are displayed on the start up screen. You can set an alarm for the tasks, but don't depend on hearing it. The alarm doesn't appear to be very loud. The xda seems to rely mostly on flashing screens to get your attention. The "Note" function allows you to write freehand, type text and even record sound, which seems fairly useful.

All in all, we've so far found the xda to be a nifty piece of work. We'll give you our full opinion once we've had a chance to comprehensively test it, so stay tuned.

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