O2 Cocoon is a captivating music-centered device manufactured exclusively for the O2 carrier. Although it's a last year edition, it sports all the sweet features you would expect in a contemporary handset - 3G and HSDPA support, large QVGA TFT display, a 2 megapixel snapper and 2GB of internal memory - not to mention the turn-head design.

Quad-band GSM support

2.28" 262K-color TFT display of QVGA resolution

Hidden external LED display

3G and HSDPA support with video calls

2 megapixel auto focus camera with LED flash

2GB of integrated memory

microSD memory card slot

FM radio with RDS

USB port (USB drive mode supported)

Stereo Bluetooth

Stereo speakers

Dedicated music keys

Original design and bold choice of color

Rich accessories pack

Great web browser

Nice music player

Sizably thick at 21mm

External LED display turns off too quickly

Short battery life

Poor file manager

The O2 Cocoon is designed by the Syntes Studio, and manufactured by Pantech exclusively for O2. The user interface isn't just a spin-off but a new creation modeled in close cooperation with the O2 development team themselves.

With prices ranging between 0 and 199 GBP with different O2 plans, the O2 Cocoon can meet a variety of user needs.

The O2 Cocoon is impressive enough to grab attention. Add the audacious white exterior and you get yourself a handset that stands out in the crowd.

The shell-like Cocoon certainly sounds and looks sweet, but we are yet to see about that as this review rolls. We've even spiced it up with some live action videos. So waste no more time and hit the jump to continue.

The O2 Cocoon has one of the nicest retail packages we've seen so far. The lively-colored large but thin box reminds of a luxury gift wrap - the magnetic lock is a nice touch too.

The box is teeming with accessories - the USB data cable is used for charging and an adapter is provided so you can plug it in a regular mains socket too. The adapter itself is modular and can accept one of the two provided tips - one for the domestic UK mains sockets and another one for the more common continental sockets.

You can also use the cradle (the docking station cunningly called "the Cocoon's Nest") to charge the O2 Cocoon - again using the USB cable with or without the mains socket. Since the cradle itself has port duplicators, besides the USB cable you can also plug in the dedicated FM radio antenna and use the Cocoon as a desktop FM radio. The cradle also has a 3.5mm audio jack so you can channel the sound to an external amplifier or regular headphones. Even a 3.5mm audio splitter is supplied in the package, so you can listen on two headsets simultaneously.

Speaking of headphones, you are not tied to using the set supplied in the retail package, although they offer nice sound and nice rubbery buds that come in several sizes for best comfort fit. The supplied wired remote allows you to use third-party headphones with the Cocoon, as it has a standard 3.5mm audio jack. Well, what's more to look for in a music phone retail package!

The O2 Cocoon is middling in terms of size. Standing at 94 x 49 x 21mm, it doesn't look or feel big. When it comes to handling it, the first thing to strike you is that all body panels are made of plastic. There are no chrome or other highlights, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. As we already said, the only thing to take a little away from the Cocoon fashionable looks is the matt white finish. Some glossy pearl white would have suited it much better.

The O2 Cocoon flaunts a relatively large 2.28" 262K-color TFT display of QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) resolution. Truth be said, you can't expect any more than that in a feature phone, so we are quite content with it actually.

Just above the display you might notice the secondary video call camera.

The keypad offers really large keys and some great press feedback. Above the alphanumeric keypad you will find two receiver keys and two context keys.

The navigation D-pad is also nice to work with. Above the keypad you will also notice a scroll wheel - you can use it to adjust volume or scroll web pages in the web browser. It's a really nice addition.

The left-hand side of the O2 Cocoon is where all the music controls are nested. Since they are really easy to activate accidentally, a special lock slider is available to prevent that - and it's much needed, you can take our word on that.

The music keys allow you to start the last playing playlist without even opening the phone. You can of course skip or change tracks too - or even pause them. There's also a dedicated key for switching between the FM radio and the Music player. Another feature is that you can use the pause key to mute the alarm.

The left-hand side of the O2 Cocoon hosts the universal connectivity port - used for plugging the charger, data cable, headset or the dedicated FM antenna. Next is the slider that releases the battery cover - a rather ingenious solution though you may find it awkward at first. And finally, the microSD memory card slot is also located on this very side. You can use it to expand the available 2GB of onboard storage with a card of up to 2GB capacity.

Let's close the clamshell now and have a look around. The first thing to notice on the front is the 2 megapixel camera lens. Strangely enough, it does say "auto focus" but we are pretty sure we didn't spot any sign of it - there's no mentioning of it on the official specs sheet either. Well, that sums it up for the "auto bogus" feature. Never mind - we weren't disappointed as we never expected auto focus in the first place.

The scroll wheel volume control is also visible (and quite usable too) when the handset is closed.

On the back, just at the top of the battery cover you might also notice the lanyard eyelet. It's got to be said though, that's a really strange choice of placing the eyelet.

Removing the battery cover is easy once you slide the dedicated release slider on the right-hand side of the handset. The battery itself is quoted at up to 9h of music playback, up to 350h of standby and up to 5h of talk time. The reality is a bit different though. In a 3G network, the O2 Cocoon lasts no more than 2 days with minimal talk times. When you're not using the 3G network support, the battery life extends by roughly a day in the same usage pattern.

Held in hand, the O2 Cocoon looks somewhat big - it's nothing like some compact clamshells by Samsung or LG. However it manages to make up for that size with user-friendly and ergonomic construction plus out-of-the-box design.

The backlighting of the main display and keypad are more than sufficient to allow trouble-free use in both daylight and in the dark. Of course the main display doesn't fare well under direct sunlight, but that's to be expected.

The cool external display has blue backlighting and although it's hardly legible in bright sunlight, legibility becomes superb when you use it in the dark or in the shade. It displays status readings including current time, the currently playing artist and track, the current FM radio station and incoming call ID - be it number only or the contact's name. It can also display the header of an incoming message.

Our only objection to its functionality is that the clock display turns off too quickly even when the maximum setting is used. Other than that, you have three scroll speeds to choose from - we found even the fastest one to be a little slow to allow a quick look of who's calling or what track is currently playing.

Above the LED display there are 5 status icons that can alert you of a preset alarm, new email or text, a missed call, low battery or silent profile on.

The O2 Cocoon offers a nice user interface up to current mobile standards, so no user with some GSM handset experience should have any problems. The Cocoon interface is actually quite visually appealing.

The home screen displays signal strength and battery status plus the time and date and the currently active call profile. At the bottom of the screen there is a shortcut bar, which of course is customizable.

The O2 Cocoon home screen can also be spiced up with some of the nice animated wallpapers. No skinning or other customization of the interface is available beside that.

The Cocoon main menu displays as a 3 x 3 grid of icons, but two alternative styles are also available. Sub-menus however are displayed as lists only.

In terms of telephony, the O2 Cocoon was flawless for the time of our testing. We had no problems with reception. As usual for a clamshell, you can opt for automatic answering or ending of a call with the flip.

Video calls are also an option with the 3G-enabled O2 Cocoon. If you don't want the other party to view your live video feed, you can pick a still picture of your choice to be shown instead.

The Cocoon offers several call profiles and they are enough to suit your needs. A Flight mode is also available - it cuts off all your transceivers and allows using the handset as a portable media player and organizer only. Now, the special music-centric Cocoon profile it's also worth noting, which doesn't cut the network connectivity but suppresses all alerts for calls, messages or alarms until you choose otherwise. When you return to normal mode, a summary is displayed of all events that you have missed while the Cocoon profile was active. It's like a "Do not disturb" sign.

The Call Log is detailed enough and you can filter calls based on their type: incoming, outgoing, missed or all.

The O2 Cocoon loudspeaker performance seems OK. Bear in mind though that it barely made it in the Good category, meaning that it doesn't really shine. In fact it's highly probable that you miss a call or two in noisy environments. You may have to choose your ringtones carefully. Only the loud ones will do a good enough job. Here is how the O2 Cocoon stacks up against some of the other handsets we've measured in our speakerphone loudness test.

The phonebook of the O2 Cocoon can store up to 1000 contacts with multiple fields. Searching employs gradual typing of the contact's name.

About 10 fields of information are available for each contact. You can store up to 5 numbers for each contact, plus an email address, URL and a note. Each contact can also be assigned a specific ringtone and picture. The picture appears as a thumbnail next to the name in the contacts list. The thumbnails are rather discreet and the image pops up once you select a contact.

Contacts can be organized in groups, but calls cannot be filtered on the base of created groups. Unfortunately there is no birthday field in the contacts' details.

O2 Cocoon manages SMS, MMS, and emails. SMS and MMS share one and the same editor. The message is automatically converted to MMS once you attach a file. T9 dictionary is there to assist you; both browsing and adding new words is fast and intuitive.

The email client is nice and has numerous options. It manages POP and IMAP and runs SSL for mail servers that support this security feature. Unfortunately, despite the SSL support, we couldn't get it to sync with Gmail.

The client can be set up to check mail at predefined intervals (user-configurable, of course). Message blocking is available here, based on sender address or subject.

The O2 Cocoon file browser is rather strange. Multimedia files are sorted based on their type but they are grouped in a hardly intuitive manner. Images are stored separately, while video, sounds and music are grouped in one folder. This folder has three sub-folders for sound files, while the video files don't have a sub-folder of their own. What's more, there is no option to create new folders or move things around.

You don't even have the option to browse files and folders on your memory card - the multimedia files stored there get automatically scanned and added to the library, but that is little consolation. In fact, the memory card cannot even be used if it's not formatted by the phone itself. And after that you have to use the system-created folder to store content - otherwise it won't be accessible with the Cocoon.

Another drawback is that if you don't sort the files accordingly, they won't be accessible either. For example, if you put images in the Other files folder, they won't be accessible to the handset. This reminds us of several LG handsets that exhibited similar behavior.

All music files put in the Sounds folder and the Music folder on the memory card appear in the Music folder in the file browser - this goes way beyond any logic.

Furthermore, you can't rename music files since they are presented to you with their ID3 tag names. All other files can be renamed without any problems.

The O2 Cocoon picture gallery is part of the file manager and not a separate application. Accessing it is as simple as opening the Pictures folder. Images are presented as thumbnails. The thumbnails and the large images themselves generally take time to show up, which speaks of a poor read rate. You can't view the images fullscreen but you can zoom on them to see more detail. Landscape viewing is not possible either.

A rather illogical solution is that images stored on the memory card always get listed before the ones on the embedded memory - that's yet another "what were they thinking" solution that we just can't comprehend. Besides, images cannot be sorted in any special way (by date for example) and browsing the Pictures folder can soon become a chore.

Another one of those mysterious file browser shortcomings is that you cannot choose a picture and assign it as a contact picture. Instead you have to go to the Contacts list and assign an image from the contacts menu.

Armed with the whopping 2 gigs of storage and up to 2GB microSD expansion, it's obvious the O2 Cocoon is designed to use as a portable music player - and we are not even counting the dedicated music keys here.

Luckily, the Music player application is excellent too. It allows filtering tracks by artist, album or genre. Creating custom playlists is a breeze. Albums can be browsed either as a list or as album art thumbnails. You can either copy-paste your music to the O2 Cocoon or you can use Media Player 11 to copy CDs, transfer tracks and create playlists.

The player has seven equalizer presets plus several bass and surround settings, which might come in handy when you are listening to music on your headset. There are also several effects to add some stage sound flavor to the sonic experience.

We are very pleasued with O2 Cocoon's audio quality. It is definetely on the better side of the bunch of devices we have tesed so far. For instance, the frequency response is virtually identical to that of the Apple iPod. The Apple iPod is equipped with audio hardware produced by Samsung - the same as the one on the Apple iPhone and the majority of Samsung handsets out there. And all these certainly lead the pack when it comes to audio quality.

The O2 Cocoon also comes complete with an FM radio - it's directly accessible from the music player. There is RDS support and you can set user-defined names to the stations just so you know which one to choose next time you go out.

Both the Music player and the FM radio have a similar interface; the same holds true for the video player. It doesn't have many features but it can play video files in fullscreen landscape mode and you can fast-forward and rewind videos.

O2 Cocoon features a 2 megapixel camera with a LED flash, which can take pictures at a maximum resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels. There is no dedicated camera key, you shoot images with the center key on the D-pad instead.

We already made a reference to the "auto focus" sign on the camera lens, which seems out of place in a device with no trace of auto focus functionality. Even if the user manual states that the camera is an auto focus unit, there are no autofocus marks in the viewfinder, close-ups are out of the question and there's no way of selectively focusing on a foreground or background subject.

It turns out there is an undocumented way to actually engage the camera auto focus. We got tipped that when you press and hold the D-pad longer, the auto focus comes into action. We tried it ourselves and as it turned out, now the O2 Cocoon could even take macro shots. Great feature, but poor documentation.

Anyways, this auto focus setup is not the best one yet - that way you can't take advantage of the old "focus-and-recompose" trick that offers a more creative way of composing your shots. In case you are not familiar with it, google it. You will find this a wonderful technique with any point-and-shoot digital camera.

Now that we got all that straight, we can continue with a few words on the camera itself. An interesting solution is the landscape and portrait modes. Toggling between those two you can change the default image orientation.

In plain English, the portrait mode allows you to shoot images with vertical (portrait) orientation. Even if you do rotate the handset sideways before shooting, the images will turn out in portrait orientation. When you set the landscape orientation images will turn out in horizontal orientation no matter how you hold the camera.

Now, that may be a bit confusing for the casual snapper but just remember this: if you shoot holding the handset vertically, choose portrait mode; if you shoot horizontally, choose the landscape mode. 

That way you won't have to rotate your images later on when you transfer them to the computer.

Still if all that still sounds confusing, you can go ahead and neglect that setting for good and always shoot in portrait mode - later on you can always do a quick rotate with any imaging software on your computer.

The selected landscape mode even changes the orientation of the onscreen overlays, but doesn't change the orientation of the context menus.

Beside that odd solution, the O2 Cocoon camera interface is intuitive and follows the current trend of showing settings on a bar of icons in the bottom of the screen, while options appear as popup menus. The only drawback we noticed is that once you set an option, the interface exits the settings menu and you have to dig back again in order to change another setting. That kind of reminds us of the LG Chocolate - it had similarly styled camera menu and the same illogical behavior.

The Cocoon camera settings include picture size, color effects (black and white, negative, sepia), clip art, funny frames, white balance, and flash setup. Additionally, the shutter sound can be turned off if you like.

You can't expect miracles from the 2 megapixel snapper of the Cocoon. Dynamic range is low, so is the contrast. The low contrast issue is seems like a case of some bad quality optics. There's some significant purple fringing too.

Compared to what Apple iPhone can do, Cocoon certainly prevails. The iPhone images don't capture the same amount of detail and they have lower contrast. However, the iPhone doesn't apply that much sharpening and has no purple fringing issues.

The camera is also able to shoot video. Recording length is only limited by the available memory. The user interface of the camcorder is pretty much the same as the one of the still camera.

The O2 Cocoon captures 3GP/MPEG-4 videos with a maximum resolution of QVGA (320 x 240 pixels) at 10 fps. If you set video resolution to 176x144 pixels, you'll get a better framerate of around 17fps. You should know that generally the human eye needs at least 18 fps for what's perceived as a smooth video playback.

Now, we bet you remember the whole landscape/portrait mess. The thing is it gets even trickier when shooting video because shooting videos in portrait mode actually produces (can you guess)… portrait videos. We hadn't seen a handset, or a digital camera for that matter, to create portrait videos - not until now.

It's an interesting effect that you may come to like though. If you don't however, you can always switch the camera to landscape mode and turn the handset to a horizontal position and shoot just like you would with a regular camcorder.

Check out both the portrait sample video and the landscape sample video produced by the O2 Cocoon video camera. You can see that the low frame rate really makes it unusable.

The O2 Cocoon is well geared in the connectivity department. Besides EDGE, you also get 3G and even HSDPA for fast wireless data transfers. They allow you to take full advantage of the nice web browser that is coming up later on.

Of course, you also have Bluetooth connectivity at hand for short range data transfers. Plus, as this is a music-centric handset, you also get stereo Bluetooth support (A2DP).

And finally, there's USB. The USB data cable is supplied in the rich retail package. When connected to a PC, the handset gets charged, too. The supplied Cocoon PC Suite software allows you to seamlessly sync the O2 Cocoon with Microsoft Outlook. It does a bunch of other stuff, but we'll not get into detail.

There are three USB modes with the Cocoon: Sync, Music and Transfer Files. The first one enables pairing with the above mentioned Cocoon PC Suite. The second one allows you to sync the Cocoon with your Windows Media Player 11 music collection, if you prefer it that way.

And finally, the third Transfer Files one allows you to directly access the 2GB of Cocoon storage memory as a Removable drive on your computer. If you have a microSD memory card plugged into the Cocoon as well, you get it as a Removable drive too. In this mode you can directly copy and paste music files from your computer. Only make sure you put them in the right place in the phone's memory.

USB connectivity worked flawlessly in all the three modes both under Windows XP and Windows Vista. However, the benefits of the straightforward USB connectivity are dubious in the light of the seriously crippled integrated file browser that the O2 Cocoon offers (see the relevant part of this review).

As we already mentioned, with the O2 Cocoon you can count on EDGE and 3G/HSDPA for browsing internet on the go.

The O2 Cocoon web browser of the O2 Cocoon is excellent - it renders web pages with a nice system font that is readable almost throughout the whole range of zoom levels. Plus, it offers fullscreen view mode, which we found to be our preferred setting.

There are several rendering modes - the Text wrap deserves pointing out, as it proved a great combo for the fullscreen setup. It fits web pages so that the whole text paragraphs are visible and readable. Some of the other rendering modes are Text only and Screen optimized.

Further, the Cocoon web browser offers several Navigation modes, which make browsing a bit easier. We found that we preferred to switch between two of them - "4-way navigation" and "scrolling". The 4-way navigation mode jumps along hyperlinks highlighting them one after the other. The scrolling mode neglects the hyperlinks and instead scrolls around the webpage as on a desktop browser. Scrolling is way faster with it and using the volume wheel for scrolling up and down was a real treat.

And finally, the web browser offers a mini-map of the web page so that you know your way around elaborate web pages.

In conclusion, the O2 Cocoon web browser is among the best ones we've seen on a feature phone and smartphone web browsers are within reaching distance. It's safe to say that it's on par with the Netfront 3.4 web browser, so highly pitched by Sony Ericsson lately. And you've got to remember here that the O2 Cocoon is a last-year's model, which makes its web implementation even more impressive.

The O2 Cocoon sports a calendar capable of storing up to 100 scheduled events - the week starts on Monday.

Additionally, a single alarm slot is available in the Clock application. There are no special settings for the alarms, such as repetition or snooze time. You can have a music track or the FM radio alert you when the alarm goes off.

The phone also offers a Notes application (stores up to 20 notes), voice recorder, world time application (besides the dual-zone clock), calculator and a unit converter. A stopwatch will cater to sports-minded users. A countdown timer is not available.

O2 Cocoon, like the majority of feature phones, relies on Java MDIP 2.0 for mobile gaming. There are three games pre-installed but you can download some more of course.

The first game is a demo version of the popular title Sims 2. Next, there is a demo of a Tetris game and, finally, a full version of the EA Air Hockey game.

The O2 Cocoon offers a good feature package and some sweet design decisions. It boasts a number of niceties such as the 2GB of on-board storage, worldwide GSM support, the HSDPA data transfers, the 2 megapixel auto focus camera and the nice display. The excellent web browser also scores a mark. The intriguing design, the external LED display and the rich retail box do add bonus points too.

When it comes to day-to-day operation, the O2 Cocoon file browser is something to really put us off. If you add the relatively large size and the high price tag, the O2 Cocoon might just not seem that sweet a deal as it did in the beginning. That being said, there are some O2 plans that can get you the device for free and thus tip the scale in favor of the Cocoon. After all, the final choice is always yours. The good and the bad of it is here for the taking.