Huawei X1

The Huawei Ideos X1 is made to be cheap, no question. We have to make certain allowances when we look at it – okay, it has a slow processor. Okay, it doesn't have a lot of RAM. But it's a smartphone worth less than $200, so how much can we complain?

The first thing we noticed about the X1 was the fact that despite being cheap, it doesn't look cheap. If you want a smartphone as a bit of a status symbol – and let's be honest, there is an element of status to owning a smartphone – then you won't feel bad pulling out your X1 next to your friend's Motorola Defy. It's small, kind of cute, and the back panel looks like aluminium even though it's not. It might not look great next to an iPhone or a Galaxy S II but let’s face it, most phones don't.

Of course, there are always downsides to buying on the lower end of the spectrum. The X1 has a 528MHz processor with 256MB of RAM, so it's not going to be winning any awards for speed and responsiveness. When we attempted to benchmark it, the X1 couldn't even run the app. Playing a basic game like Angry Birds was out of the question because the lag was so bad – we suspect it was running at about ten frames per second, if that.

The display on the X1 is small at 2.8 inches – so small that even typing a text message is a painstaking experience. We can't recommend the phone to anyone who wants to check and write emails while away on business, that's for sure.

However, the display is surprisingly nice for reading. The resolution is fairly low – 240 x 320 pixels – so it appears Huawei must have done some work on the text smoothing. That's great, because blocky text is a major problem on many of the low-end smartphones we've tested. Battery life is also not too bad – the X1 lasted a full four days of moderate use with the Wi-Fi turned off and 3G enabled, although turning Wi-Fi on drained the battery within two days.

The X1 comes with very little on-board storage. In fact, after Android is installed we're talking megabytes of storage, not gigabytes, so if you're thinking about buying the X1 you should factor in the fact that you're looking at another $50 or so for a decent-sized microSD card. Chances are you're not going to use the X1 chiefly for apps, though, as it's really going to be better for basic tasks like web browsing and search. Even using a common Android app like Google Navigation, which comes pre-installed, is a frustratingly slow experience. It took a good minute to find my location via GPS, and another 30 seconds or so to load the necessary map.

While the X1 is undoubtedly the best smartphone you're going to get for $200, our real concern is that a smartphone worth $200 may not be worth having at all. Seeing as you're going to be using it for the same things you can use a 2G phone for – web browsing, texting and calling – you may be better off spending less money on something with a real keypad, or saving an extra couple of hundred dollars for a better phone. When smartphones are in the $100 price bracket next year, if 2degrees' chief exec Eric Hertz's prediction comes true, a $200 smartphone may be pretty good, but we're not there yet.

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