Huawei IDEOS review

Huawei is not a household name in the UK, but the Chinese company's mobiles phones, mobile broadband dongles and portable Wi-Fi routers have been rebadged and resold by British network operators for quite some time. The IDEOS is the first handset the manufacturer has sold in the UK under its own name though. It has yet to be picked up by a network operator, but you can find it online SIM free for around £199 inc VAT at the time of writing.

Despite its low cost, the IDEOS runs Android 2.2 and is the first handset we’ve seen to come with it pre-installed rather than via a software upgrade. For that reason alone it deserves some attention.

Android has been left unskinned, so that you get to see it in its vanilla format. That’s not a bad thing. We have seen some terrible skins as well as some superb ones, but the standard Android interface is actually pretty good in its own right. This should also mean that future upgrades to the operating system will be available more quickly than with skinned handsets.

The presence of Android 2.2 is especially welcome since it has far better Exchange email, address book, calendar and security support than previous versions of Android. Exchange administrators can even remote wipe data in the event the phone is lost.

However, there are some let-downs. Android 2.2 is the first version of Google's operating system to support Flash. That means you should be able to view streaming video and other interactive content on the web, but you don’t get Flash support on the IDEOS because the processor isn’t powerful enough to handle it. Depending on how much you value streaming media content, this factor alone could be enough to prejudice you against the IDEOS entirely.

The 528MHz processor doesn't sound very impressive, compared to the 1GHz processors found in more expensive smartphones. However, apart from the Flash issue, it actually performs quite well with the interface feeling smooth and lag-free overall. However, due to the meagre 256MB of RAM available, running lots of applications simultaneously can cause slowdowns.

Another potentially big point against the IDEOS is that it doesn’t support multitouch. The presence of a capacitive screen would lead you to think that multitouch, with its pinch-to-zoom support would be here, so its absence is a real disappointment.

It is most noticeable when browsing web sites, where you are left using the standard Android feature of a double tap to zoom in, another double tap to zoom out, or the zoom buttons which appear when you make a single tap and which give you finer control. It isn’t the worst system in the world, but we think multitouch pinch-to-zoom feels much more natural.

Another very practical consideration is that the screen is small. Measuring just 2.8 inches diagonally and with a cramped resolution of just 320 x 240 pixels, any app which displays a lot of data has a decidedly cramped feel to it. Web browsing, for example, is not the most satisfactory experience – you’ll have to do a lot of panning around or zooming in and out with almost all the pages you visit.

Text entry too can be a trial. With the handset in tall mode the QWERTY keyboard is likely to be too small for all but the daintiest of fingers to get to grips with. It is better in wide screen mode, but even there the keys feel cramped.

Disappointingly, but not unexpectedly, battery life was rather short in our experience. Even with light usage, we needed to charge the battery once a day. Anyone using GPS or 3G a lot may need to charge the battery more often.