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HTC America, U.S. subsidiary of the Taiwanese firm, High Tech Computer Corp., has come out of almost nowhere—since launching its first self-branded phone back in July 2005—to become one of the hottest smart phone companies on the continent.

The 5800, which features HTC's very cool sliding QWERTY keyboard, is a good example. It's a Bluetooth-enabled Swiss Army knife of a CDMA1xEVDO smartphone. It runs Microsoft's new Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition operating system.

Qwest is currently selling it as the Qwest Fusion HTC 5800 for $200 - $200 off the regular price, the company says - with a two-year contract that includes up to 2.9 hours of talk time. Data contracts range in price from $20 (35MB) to $40 (100MB) a month and $1 per MB over.

Bell Canada also has the 5800, for as little as $150 with a three-year contract on which you guarantee to spend at least $45 a month - or as much as $450 with no contract. I reviewed the Bell product.

Verizon Wireless says it intends to start offering the HTC 5800 soon.

The 5800 is a gem and performed well in most functional tests, but it's a little shy of perfect.

In terms of hardware, this is a middling powerful smartphone. It uses the 400MHz Qualcomm MSM7500 processor and, according to HTC, comes with 64 MB RAM and 256 MB flash ROM. The Bell version, in fact, only has 128 MB of flash memory. All versions also have a microSD slot. (1GB microSD cards sell for about $20, the largest-format 6GB cards go for about $90.)

The form factor and interface are among the 5800's most appealing characteristics. This is not the smallest smartphone on the market, but must be close to the smallest with a full QWERTY keyboard. It measures just 4.1 x 2.0 x 0.7 inches (103.5 x 51 x 19 milimiters) and weighs 4.2 ounces (120 grams).

Unlike the similar HTC P4000, a WinMobile 5 device that we reviewed earlier this year, the 5800 has a number pad on the front face as well as the QWERTY keyboard. Not surprisingly, the 5800's bright 65,000-color screen is a little smaller as a result, but not much—2.4-inch versus 2.8-inch for the P400.

One downside: no touch sensitive screen (it is a Windows Mobile 6 Standard, not Professional device, after all), no pen-based control or input. So if you're a stylus-centric kind of smartphone/PDA user, this model is probably not for you.

Below the screen (when viewed in portrait mode) is a five-way navigator (left, right, up, down, OK) and two soft keys that change function according to context. The green Talk and red End keys flank the numeric keypad, which can be used to input text as well using the multi-press technique. There are also dedicated Home menu and Back keys below the number pad.

There's a dedicated button for activating the camera, on the right-hand edge, and a volume up-down slider and power button on the left side round out the hardware controls.

When you slide the QWERTY keyboard out - to the right, as with the P4000 - the screen automatically switches to landscape mode. The keys are of course tiny, but they're well shaped and raised just enough so that you can type fairly quickly using thumbs, cradling the device in both hands. The most frequently used special characters, including the all-important @ sign, are easily accessible using the function key.

HTC also includes word completion software that works well and learns often used words, so you rarely have to type entire words.

The 5800 offers an array of hardware-based capabilities, including the already mentioned Bluetooth, that have by now become almost obligatory in smartphones. The video-capable digital camera has a resolution of 2.0 megapixels. It has no built-in flash, however, as many phone cameras now do. And although the documentation says it has a zoom function, this feature did not work on the unit I tested. (No matter, digital zooming is pointless anyway.)

I am not a great user of or believer in phone cameras, but I appreciate that others find them useful - or at least fun. This one performs no worse than most I've tried, and better than some. Focus, as with all fixed-focus cameras and especially phone cameras, is soft. But exposure controls and color rendition appear better than with many phone cameras.