LG Panther on the prowl with MS Office on Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 is still a few months away from launch, but we've just had our hands on the LG phone that could first escort Microsoft's software debutant onto the dance floor -- and it's running the mobile version of Microsoft Office.

Code-named the LG Panther, the phone is still at the prototype stage, as is the Windows Phone 7 operating system. The phone struck us as workhorse rather than a show pony, with a thick body concealing a slide-out Qwerty keyboard. We also clocked its 5-megapixel camera, although we didn't test it out.

When we took the phone for a spin, we were impressed by how polished the OS looked. Everything from music to maps proved smoothly responsive to our touch, and the operating system seemed to be living up to its promise.

Viewing and editing documents is a massive pain on the small screen, and we can't recommend that you ditch your laptop for a mobile phone. But Office in WinPhev is focused on quickly jotting down notes -- not analysing your yearly sales figures or writing your novel.

The OneNote app lets you take notes in the form of text, images or voice recordings. It can sync them wirelessly with your company's SharePoint server, if it has one, or to the cloud via Windows Live SkyDrive, which sounds pretty cool.

Click 'Continue' for a look into WinPhev's Office. Then check out our early review and video of Windows Phone 7 to get soaked from head to toe by a fountain of facts.

The Office hub is the place to go to view Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents, and make basic edits to them. You can save them locally, or to SharePoint, or email them.

The Word app shows off WinPhev's polished typeface, which looks good no matter how closely you zoom in. We love these Office fonts for their clarity and confidence.

The Excel app can handle graphs and big spreadsheets. Using Excel is never going to be much fun on a small screen, though.

Zooming in helps to make the spreadsheet clearer, and you can edit cells with a double tap.

We also had a go on the Panther's on-screen keyboard. This was a prototype model, so we can't comment on speed, but the keyboard's already usable and it automatically corrected our typing in some apps.

The Panther may not be the sexiest stunner on the handset catwalk, but we can't argue with its practicality. Show us your 5-megapixel snapper!