It happened by accident, I was fairly happy with my Nokia but it was showing it's age so I thought I should look around for a new 'smart phone'. This small but feature packed effort, badged under Vodafone as a Vodafone Smart but it is actually made by Huwaei model U8180, was the one I chose and at this price of 50 pounds, is a bargain. It does all you would expect from an android phone, email, Internet, VoIP phone and more. The free apps available for this phone continue to boggle the mind and that makes this phone an indispensable tool for communication, shopping, going out and just having fun.
I popped in an 8 gig SD card which allows me to take loads of pictures and videos and the quality is quite good for the spec. The things that amazes me is the call quality on both regular mobile network and VoIP calls is very good, crystal clear even when calling abroad, especially over wifi. The wifi on the phone seems to be very powerful as I am able to pick up signals everywhere making it fairly easy to connect to a wifi hotspot when out and about and there are some very nice free apps that can help the average user with connecting to wifi if they find the built in menus a little tricky.
In general, the phone menus are what you expect and are easy to navigate, you can customise any and all of the screens simply by dragging and dropping icons to and from the apps menu and you can limit the number of screens if you only use a few apps. When recording sound or video, the playback on the phone is incredible and the audio quality is stunning. I tested the phone in several locations under different conditions and found the audio recording to be a big surprise. I was able to record another person in the room comfortably from several feet away and it played back very clearly. I also recorded sounds down at the beach and they too were picked up clearly.
One very useful feature is the built in voice recognition for dictating emails and messages which makes this phone very useful for those with stubby fingers like me or those that need assistance with typing messages like dyslexia. I was not expecting that kind of feature in what is essentially a budget phone.
For those who are looking to get into the android smart phone market, this phone 'punches above it's weight', this is a phone I can highly recommend and it won't break the bank!