If Basil Fawlty were around today it wouldn’t be an Austin 1100 he’d be thrashing in frustration; it would be a Palm Treo 750. They call it a smartphone, but for thousands of users it’s a truly frustrating piece of equipment.

When navigating menus, be prepared to wait an age for the right screen to appear; set the clock and it will randomly reset it (the phone poltergeist also dials numbers behind your back); try to delete a text message and half the time it stubbornly refuses.

The qwerty keyboard that is supposed to make typing text messages and e-mails so hassle-free is too cramped unless you have the fingers of a small child, so you’re forever mis-typing. Try to pick out the mistakes on the screen and again the phone conspires against you: the text is fuzzy and in sunlight the screen can look so washed-out that it can’t be read. Give up and instead call your contact, and you’ll find the sound quality is on a par with bean tins joined by string. And then the battery runs out.

For the privilege of being driven totally mad, Palm charges customers a not-so-smart £400. The maker claims this phone will simplify and speed up your life. It, like other phones prefixed “smart”, has the ability to install extra software and edit Office documents as well as access the web, and it is aimed at the increasing number of tech-savvy customers who want to get at their online data while on the move.

Some 3m of these devices were sold in the UK in 2007, according to leading retail analyst GFK. By the end of 2007 about 16% of all mobile phone owners in Britain had at least one smartphone – double the number from 2005.

But by rushing to embrace the internet revolution, the makers have thrown the Sim card out with the handset. Even ordinary functions handled with ease by conventional mobile phones can seem beyond smartphones. The most common complaint is that they are glacially slow when it comes to simple tasks such as phoning a contact, sending a text message or editing a diary. At the same time they’re poor at new functions such as web browsing.

In the case of the Treo 750, much of this trouble can be put down to software – the operating system, which is responsible for all the main phone tasks. The Treo is reliant on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software, one of the most frustrating to use. It features time-consuming, labyrinthine menus that are simply bewildering to navigate.

Palm made its name producing handheld devices that ran its own highly intuitive software and made the company’s PDAs (personal digital assistants) the best on the market in the late 1990s. Then its products went out of vogue and the firm hit hard times. Bono, the U2 singer, pumped money into Palm through a private equity firm to help the company get back on its feet. But his millions don’t seem to have been enough, and Palm has delayed its next software version until the end of the year.

Not all the Palm’s faults, or those of rival smartphones, can be put down to the operating system, though. InGear has tested a clutch of models from a range of manufacturers over the past year, and the results have mostly been woeful. The hall of shame includes handsets from Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola, each of which runs a variation of the popular Symbian operating system.

Motorola’s Rizr Z3 smartphone looked great, but our review model overheated while recharging and never worked again. The replacement handset did at least function, but was awful – navigation controls were far too small and menus were sluggish. Sony Ericsson’s new range-topping W960i was little better with its clunky menus and fiddly touchscreen.

Steven Boyne, 38, from Hertfordshire, runs a digital marketing company and has had his fill of smartphones. “I’ve had several as I thought they would help with work, particularly e-mail. I was wrong. The various Windows Mobile models I’ve had were the worst phones I’ve ever owned.”

Boyne has since returned to a trusty two-year-old Sony Ericsson handset. “I’m no technophobe but I wouldn’t go back to using a smartphone.”

So why do people buy them? Smartphones are being actively pushed on customers and are heavily subsidised by the networks, partly to promote 3G services (smartphones tend to have 3G). François Mahieu, director of devices for Orange UK, is upfront about the marketing: “The subsidy placed on any handset is driven by the amount of revenue we think it will generate. Smartphones are more likely to bring higher revenues, so we promote them.”

Palm says some of the problems can be ironed out by upgrading to a new version of the Microsoft software, free of charge. “No product is perfect, but sales of the Treo 750 and the experience of owners show that it goes a long way to achieving what they expect of a smartphone – it is the leading device in that sector,” says John Walker, Palm’s product marketing manager.

Despite the headaches it’s not all bad news, according to Mahieu. “We do get a higher rate of return for smartphones than lower-end models,” he says. “They also generate more support calls as they’re harder to operate than basic phones. [But] this is a good thing as it means customers want to learn how to use our services more.”

Maybe so. But then the same could be said about people calling the Samaritans.

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