Spec-sheet comparisons are all very well, but how good are the Nokia N95 8GB, the Apple iPhone 3G and the HTC Diamond in real life? The AAS team has come up with a dozen things that we all like to do with our phones and Steve was then set to accomplishing all of them on all three devices. Can the sheer usability and likeability of the iPhone triumph over Nokia's N95 design and S60? Is the HTC Touch Diamond a competitor here? Find out in the full usability feature.

"Regular readers may know that, in the interests of knowing what to recommend, I'm fond of device advocacy, i.e. comparing the pros and cons of different phones to try and come up with some kind of ranking. Usually these pieces are centred around specification or feature lists, not unnaturally, but here I'm going to take a dozen real world tasks, things that you or I do (or would like to do) every single day, and then assess how easy and/or quick these tasks are to perform.

For the purposes of this comparison, I'm going to take the six month old Nokia N95 8GB, typical of the current S60 range, the brand new Apple iPhone 3G and the also-new HTC Touch Diamond. If Apple (and HTC's) marketing is to be believed, the iPhone should be an easy winner in a usability test, but the extra maturity and featurettes in S60 3rd Edition also make it a hard act to follow."

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