Readers of my personal blog will know the stress I've had recently around moving house and trying to take my ADSL broadband connection with me. To cut a tedious story short, despite claims to the contrary I was without internet access for a little over a fortnight; now that might not sound like much, but to a dedicated net-addict like myself it put a serious dent in my day to day life.

Since my phone line was also waiting to be connected, that meant dial-up was a non-starter, and so as the withdrawal symptoms began to get worse (shaking hands, excess perspiration, a tendency to shout out phrases like “purge the cache!” and “dot com!”) I looked around desperately for a way to sate my need for the interweb.  And then my twitching eye fell onto the Samsung SGH-Z560.

T-Mobile UK had sent me this unassuming clamshell a week or so back, it being one of the first models to support HSDPA on their network. Unfortunately its arrival had coincided with that of a Treo 750v, and the smartphone had gobbled up most of my attention (you can follow my path to push-email redemption in my Treo 750v review).

First impressions of the Z560 hadn’t been great; its black plastic body, although lightweight and attractive enough in design, felt cheap in comparison to the dense, matte casing of the Treo, and while the inside was to some extent saved by virtue of a tactile, fat-finger friendly keypad the screen, bright as it is, failed to make the most of the size and QVGA resolution with Samsung’s standard UI.

Call quality, for both national and international calls, was fair, even when low signal threatened to cut me off completely, and battery life comfortably saw me go at least two days without recharging. Better, then, than the Treo, which ran out of juice after a day or so (albeit with Exchange server synchronising going on in the background) and saw people complain of crackly or hissing audio when on the fringes of network coverage, though not as good as my everyday phone, Nokia’s N80.

This particular handset had been blessed with a Web’n'Walk tariff, amounting to unlimited internet access, and yet even this initially failed to grab me. Oh yes, it was fast enough, but the limitations of the browser made any meaningful surfing awkward and disappointing. Hit and miss results logging into some sites, together with poor screen rendering, made me long for the excellent S60 browser on the N80. I was getting ready to snap a few photos, pack it back into its box and ship it away, with it ending up the subject of a mediocre review.

But the Z560 had an ace up its sleeve, courtesy of the included USB cable and Samsung connectivity software. Tethering the phone to my computer meant I was once again in the land of the internet-living; walked through a simple dial-up account setup (which required only a choice of country and network), I then could enjoy HSDPA speed browsing, advertised as up to 1.8Mbps (in reality I perhaps saw burst-rates close to that and general browsing at half).