I went and picked up one of these thar Samsung Z500 handsets from the Vodafone store today. Somewhere useful to park my PAYT SIM - they supply the handset with another SIM so I've got one going spare for yet another handset at some stage!

I had considered the Z500 when I went contract with Vodafone in December 2005, but waited it out for the SE W900i which I do not regret doing.

The current price of the Z500 is £150 in Vodafone shops, and that should include a £20 top up - hence the handset is only £130, but you can't buy it for that price.

The first one I bought today was faulty, no audio but everything else worked. Vodafone swapped it out for another in-store without any quibble, tested it in-store with me, making sure that I left with a working one this time.

Initial feelings about the Z500 is that it is very typical Samsung - neat, and very compact for a 3G handset (yes, I know there are others, but this did rather set the pace back then). The menus are all very intuitive, finding my way around the handset has been a doddle.

Although sourced from Vodafone the handset did need to be configured properly for GPRS and MMS - easy enough to do from the Vodafone website Help pages. The configurations are sent to the handset as a pair of SMS config messages which you have to "install" to make work. A matter of moments and the handset is configured for PAYT GPRS and MMS.

There are articles in another thread on this part of the T3G which suggest how to unlock the handset to accept any other SIM. That makes for a fairly bargain-priced any-network 3G handset - but you will have to configure in the MMS/GPRS stuff, easy enough from Samsung's own website (http://www.samsungmobile.com).

At the £150 price point I can recommend the Z500 to anyone wanting to get into 3G at a bargain basement price coupled with a PAYT SIM to get the hang of the stuff. Later you could "upgrade" to a 30-day SIM-Only from Vodafone which offer some very good deals. The Z500 will be quite happy with one of those stuffed inside its case.

External memory comes with the Z500 in the form of a 32MB Transflash and adapter. Quite weedy by today's memory sizes, but an upgrade of that from the likes of Mobymemory would sort out any storage capacity issues.

So the first day with the Z500 in my hands has been a pleasant experience (once I got a working one that is LOL). It will be getting some stick during the Stop The Clock periods. The SIM is registered for Free Weekends, but as I have a contract handset with Vodafone I'll not be spending sufficient on this to make it worthwhile.

Want an inexpensive but very able 3G handset? Give the Z500 a consideration. There's plenty of life in that particular dog yet.