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No matter your phone, little is more frustrating than getting to it just as a call goes into voice mail. At least the Verizon Wireless SMT5800 offers a few on-the-fly features to help you get quickly into your voice mail or your e-mail inbox.

When an incoming call gets routed to voice mail, the lower-right button temporarily switches to "message" and pressing it immediately dials your voice mail and lets you here the new message quickly. Similarly, when your email is coming in, that button again turns to "message" and a click brings up your email as the new messages arrive.

In both cases, the button soon reverts to whatever is appropriate for the application you have open.

If you don’t what to be interrupted, this is a quick way to access incoming information without the multi-click process of dialing voice mail or opening your e-mail. And if you were ignoring the phone on purpose, no problem: just carry on—your messages will be there when you're ready, even if the "message" button isn't.

The SMT5800, based on original design manufacturer HTC's Libra design, is a candy bar-shaped smartphone with numeric keypad on the front and a QWERTY thumb-keyboard that slides out the side. Because the SMT5800 is a Windows Mobile 6 Standard device, it - among other things - doesn't sport a touch screen.

This smartphone goes by a variety of names, depending on who's offering it. There's the HTC 5800 and plain old 5800, for example See here for our review of the Fusion HTC 5800 version of this smartphone, offered by Qwest in Canada.