I was cruising around a toy fair when I first saw the Bajca. Grabbing a pamphlet I went running off to show Alex and she agreed it was very cute. A week later it turned up on our doorstep and that’s when I got an enormous surprise. The Bajca turned up with matching jewellery! A gadget with its own fashion accessories - very cool. It gets better though as all the emoticons are interchangeable. I’m getting ahead of myself now so I’ll start at the beginning.

The Bajca is a USB keypad. Instead of having letters or numbers, the Bajca instead has Smileys! With 16 different smiley’s all relaying a different expression, it doesn’t take long to realise that the Bajca is an emoticon keypad. Instead of talking with words, you communicate with emotion.

Some of you will be thinking that sounds all awful and tacky. On the contrary the Bajca somehow manages to look cute and sturdy. It caught my eye when I first saw it and I’ve since shown it to others who were also quite taken with it. Mine is silver and orange with yellow smileys, but you can also get it in red, pink, black and white. The smileys come in three different colours, with 3 different types of smiley! So there is a lot of choice there when it comes to appearance.

The Bajca only works with MSN messenger and live messenger but considering a lot of my friends prefer MSN over other kinds of chat, this could be a useful thing to have, particularly if you like your gadgets. Some of the smileys are animated and they all look on the computer just like they do on your keypad.

To set up is fairly easy provided you follow the instructions. First you download the software from Bajca.com, and then you plug in the keypad. You should end up with a little smiley icon on your desktop. In use the Bajca is fairly reliable providing your recipient has a compatible system. The first time I used the Bajca I messaged a friend at work and all she got was code. Later, while messaging a friend who is currently abroad, we discovered that sending more than two smileys often resulted in failure. Overall however the Bajca was fairly successful and a lot of fun.

The jewellery is something else however. Since the day the Bajca arrived I’ve been wearing around a very cool Bajca bracelet. They also come in rings, necklaces, key rings and phone accessories. The keypad and all of the accessories come with plastic pliers so you can swap the little smiley faces around if you fancy a change.

Women love emoticons and expressive text speak and have done since someone first realised that a ‘;’ next to a ‘)’ could convey much more than words. I’m only surprised that it took so long for someone to dream this up.

RRP is £41.99, and around £13 for the extra smiley sets. Full retail details will follow as soon as available.

See www.bajca.com for software and more info

www.elron.co.uk