When Nokia first dropped the 7500 Prism last year, us gadget hounds were cooing at its nifty style, neat looking keys and the, er, interchangeable coloured centre.

Alas, initial excitement subsided and once we had a play, found the keypad a bit of a pain and its style the wrong side of niche. Now though, Nok is back for seconds, offering up the slinky 7900 Prism.

This time around, we’re talking a far more sturdy bod’, with cheap plastic being eschewed for a more metallic vibe. This means that while it’s slimmer, it weighs a ton and you’ll certainly notice the heft when you shove it in your jeans pocket.

The keypad has improved this time round, with the raised buttons of the 7500 being given the heave for a more flush to the body design. Still, they’re shaped like triangles, are tiny and caused our podgy digits no end of pain when we tried to fire off a few missives to AQA during the local pub quiz.

On board, you’re looking at a pretty standard Nokia cell. There’s an average 2-meg snapper, which just doesn’t cut it these days, 3G and 1GB of internal memory for stashing your tunes. Screen-wise, we’re talking a lovely OLED viewer, something which is quickly becoming the norm.

The music player is fair enough, but with Nokia’s Music Store shackled to the high end N Series, we couldn’t get the Boston or Foreigner tracks we were after when we were on the go.

Being a so-called fashion phone, the wallpapers have been specially created by creative designer Frédérique Daubal. Their ‘laser-etched’ style does look pretty neat, but we’d rather have a picture of our mutt or missus staring back at us to be honest.

The 7900 Prism is a more than passable fashion phone, that’ll draw plenty of envious glances from trendy types down the pub. Still, if you want a cell with a bit of grunt, we’d look elsewhere.