When this Samsung Jet handset arrived for review, it came in a special box. On one side there was the handset, on the other a small bottle of Champagne.

Now I gather that this is not the normal set-up so I just wanted you all to know in case you felt that the Champagne might be influencing my review. By that I mean whether I am being bribed to write nice things rather than actually having Champagne dripping over the keyboard as I type. You’ll be pleased to know if I am delaying drinking it until after I have written this article.

Aaaanyway. The launch of the Samsung Jet was heavily promoted through a £5 million advertising campaign over the summer (not sure if the Moët is included in that). The adverts showed sexy young types running around, causing a bit of mayhem. As a result, the company picked up two million pre-orders for the handset – pretty impressive.

So will the two million who pre-ordered be happy? The huge promotional blitz behind the Jet focuses on speed and this is based on the Qualcomm MSM6246 800MHz processor inside. Admittedly, this is not as fast as the 1GHz chip inside Toshiba’s lovely TG01 but it is certainly zippy. You can easily run several applications in separate windows simultaneously on the phone without a glitch.

That’s the inside, what about outside? I like phones that instantly feel comfortable in your hand and the Jet is just that. It is narrow enough to sit easily in your palm and the rounded edges make it a pleasure to hold.

The design is pretty slick. The front face is mainly taken up by a big expanse of screen with just three buttons on its convexly curved, graduated base:send, end and a hexagonal menu button that looks like an ice cube in perspective.

Turn the phone over to its back panel and you could be forgiven for thinking that the Jet can be powered by the sun. The holographic effect panel looks just like a miniature solar panel but sadly, this is just for show. The left edge has smooth volume up and down buttons; the top has a slim USB port and a 3.5mm audio jack; the right edge a shutter button for the camera and a button to lock the phone instantly.

That screen is a revelation – it is pin sharp and colourful, albeit smaller than the iPhone. It is built using AMOLED (active matrix organic LED) technology, which is starting to appear on touchphones and is typically thinner, lighter and uses less power than competing technologies.

The Touchwiz 2.0 user interface is based on the idea of an extended “desktop” which is three screens wide. You move between them with a flick of the finger, similar to the gesture used on Apple’s iPhone.

On this screen real estate, you can anchor various widgets accessible through a hideaway toolbar. These widgets launch applications on the phone, such as the address book, as well as linking through to internet sites. The phone has several widgets installed by default, including Facebook and YouTube, and you can download others from the internet. When you tire of having a particular widget on the desktop, you just file it away into the widget toolbar with a flick of the finger.

The interface has a novel method of zooming in and out. You tap the screen and hold for a couple of seconds. This brings up zoom arrows and moving your finger up and down (or side to side) zooms in and out of the image or web page.

Generally, the touchscreen is pretty responsive although I found that some menu items and buttons were too small on this size of screen to tap effectively.