T-Mobile Vibe: Pink and black budget slider phone for £40
ZTE has built a bargain £40 touchscreen slider phone, now available from T-Mobile. It's colourful and capable of social networking, but is that enough?
We like our budget phones. We recognise that all many people need is a device that can text and make calls, perhaps wrapped up in a good-looking package. This is exactly what you get with the T-Mobile Vibe.
For just £40 on T-Mobile pay as you go, the Vibe is a ZTE-made handset that features a 2.8-inch touchscreen, 2-megapixel camera and slide-out Qwerty keyboard. Available in pink and black, it's another one of those colourful feature phones that we've seen from the likes of Alcatel. They do the job, but there's nothing particularly fancy about them.
Like a few others around this price range, the Vibe is geared towards young people who are looking for a cheap device that manages their social-networking needs. It comes with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Bebo preloaded. You can access Facebook with a one-touch icon, and the other services can be accessed easily via bookmarks.
As you might have guessed, there aren't many more features on offer for this price, but you do get an FM radio and MP3 player to play with, as well as Bluetooth connectivity. Unfortunately, you're going to have to rely on dodgy old GPRS, as the Vibe doesn't have Wi-Fi or 3G capability.
With these sorts of phones, you really are getting what you pay for. It's not the first budget device from ZTE, either. It recently released the T-Mobile Vairy Touch 2 for £30, but the low price meant shonky design and materials. We have to give the Vibe our full review treatment before we know if it suffers the same fate.
We've seen Android phones become much cheaper in the last few months, and for a splash more cash it is possible to buy a phone that's smarter than the Vibe and carries more features. But if you really are content with just the basics, the Vibe looks like it'll do the job as well as any for the price.
Image credit: Recombu