Huawei Ideos X5 and Ideos X6 review: Hands-on with two new Android smartphones

We were enormous fans of the impressively inexpensive Huawei Ideos, so much so we awarded it our prestigious Editors' Choice award back in September. We're delighted to have unearthed two brand-new Android phones from the manufacturer with the unpronounceable name at CES -- the Ideos X5 and X6 (pictured above).

The Ideos X5 is a fancy little number with rounded edges and a petite design. Underneath the screen you'll find four touch-sensitive buttons common to Android phones -- back, menu, home and search. These are used to navigate through Android's interface.

The X5 is running on version 2.2 (Froyo) of Google's Android operating system. That's not the most recent version of Android (that's 2.3 at the time of writing), but it does mean you get Flash support, so you can watch Flash videos on the phone's browser, and there's nothing to say the X5 couldn't get an update to a newer version of Android in the future.

The display is a 3.8-inch WVGA affair, and as you can tell from our photos, it's looking really bright and clear, which is great to see, and should make watching video or looking at pictures most enjoyable. The X5 is powered by a Qualcomm 7230 CPU, which we believe is clocked at 800MHz.

We're seeing a lot of phones now that run at 1GHz, but that doesn't mean the X5 is slow -- indeed it felt perfectly speedy when we were using it, and a less-than-highest-spec processor might just help keep the price of the handset down.

There's a 5-megapixel camera round the back with LED flash that can also shoot 720p video.

As for the X6, it's a marginally higher-spec mobile. It's still running Android 2.2, but it has one of those newfangled 1GHz processors powering it, and a great big 4.1-inch touchscreen.

Just like the X5, the X6 has a 5-megapixel camera that can handle 720p video recording, but this clever phone also has an HDMI output, so you can export what you're seeing on the phone to an HD telly, which could come in handy for watching movies and so on.

We're most intrigued by the squarish design however -- we really liked the feel of this phone, with its pointy corners and rectangular sensibilities. It's a good looking mobile and no mistake.

Both of these phones are looking rather spiffy, and miles more attractive than the first Ideos. The bad news is that Huawei hasn't yet made any agreements with UK carriers to distribute the phones, but we'd wager it'll wash up on British shores somehow. Stay tuned.