Once upon a time, you just had one mountain bike that you did everything on. There were no XC, DH, trials, freeride, slalom, jump, blah and blah bikes. Just mountain bikes, that you went mountain biking on.

The Giant VT is Giant’s effort to return us to a simpler age. It’s intended as a do-it-all bike. Light enough to climb, burly enough to descend, not super slack or frighteningly sharp. Sounds like a good thing to us…

There are a few notable features on the VT. First is some cunning tube manipulation. We’re used to this on Giants, and the VT sports “ALUXX SL FluidForm aluminium tubing”, which seems to mean swoopy tubes with ridges on the outside which is if nothing else distincive.

Rear suspension is essentially a single-pivot swingarm with a linkage-driven shock. The main pivot is low down, which usually leads to a plush ride but a fair amount of wallow under pedalling. But the Giant VT comes with Manitou’s Swinger rear shock, complete with SPV “pedalling platform” valving to counter the dreaded bob. The shock’s driven by a linkage (travel’s adjustable, with either 5 or 5.7in of travel) which allows Giant to fiddle with leverage ratios through the suspension stroke, puts the weight of the shock low down in the frame and also looks a bit different which is always important.

So, it looks pretty good. At £1,100 for the frame, Giant are competing with some pretty capable machinery. Plenty of people seem convinced already – most of the first batch of frames into the UK has already been sold – but we’ll chuck some bits at this one and see how it shapes up…

More VT info from www.giant-bicycles.com – it’s not listed on the UK site yet, so pretend you’re in the US…