The Intrepid has a full physical QWERTY keyboard as well as a 2.5-inch, 320-by-240-pixel touchscreen. That might seem like the best of both worlds--the convenience of a touchscreen with the typing power of physical keys--and it would be, except for the fact that the commands are split between the touchscreen and the keyboard. It's hard to know when you can use just the touchscreen, when you can use just the keyboard, and when you have to use both in order to get anything done. For example, to set a photo as the background, you can use the touchscreen to select the photo and choose its transparency, but then you must press the physical OK button on the keyboard to set the photo. This procedure is not intuitive; figuring it out cost me an hour of frustration.

Another annoyance: The Intrepid doesn't seem to have a Clear (or similar) button to press to go back. Instead, I ended up having to exit out of whatever app I was running and start over again. I tried pressing the power button (which only set the phone to sleep mode), the delete button (which did nothing, except when it started deleting text), and the phone-off button (which exited the app). I may be missing something, but this was really annoying.

, to put it mildly, doesn't have the slickest user interface. It definitely slowed down the phone--I saw as much as a 2-second lag in some cases--and unfortunately it still requires users to go through several steps to perform tasks. You do get a customizable home screen, which is convenient; you can set it to show anything from new messages in your inbox to the time. The start menu is somewhat haphazardly arranged (the icons are in an every-other-square type of grid, which Microsoft has dubbed a "honeycomb interface"), but it is touch-friendly and easy enough to navigate.

The Intrepid supports (YouTube videos played easily, but somewhat choppily), and it has the Internet Explorer Mobile browser, which works reasonably well. Most pages were fairly quick to load, even if they had a lot of images. The Intrepid has a built-in 802.11 b/g wireless modem, too, for connecting to the Internet without using the network. Music plays well in the drab Windows Media Player, which supports the MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA, and MIDI formats. The audio was pretty true over headphones, and just slightly tinny on the speakers.

The Intrepid's camera is only 3 megapixels--average, for a cell phone--but it took some decent-quality photos, even under low light. It does not have a flash, but it does have a little mirror on the back for self-portraits.