EE Rook is the cheapest 4G EE phone yet at just £39 on PAYG

EE has once again expanded its aviary of bird-themed handsets with the EE Rook, its cheapest 4G smartphone yet. Costing just £39 for existing EE customers or £49 for new EE customers, the Rook is even cheaper than the EE Harrier and Harrier Mini, which cost £200 and £100 respectively on EE’s Pay As You Go tariff.

However, whereas the Harrier Mini has pretty decent specs for a £100 handset, the Rook runs on a decidedly more entry-level set of specifications. Running Android 5.1, the Rook has a 4in screen with a resolution of just 800×480, and it’s powered by a 64-bit quad-core Mediatek MT6735M and 1GB of RAM. It has a 5-megapixel rear camera and a 0.3-megapixel front facing camera as well, but there’s no flash or auto-focus. Storage clocks in at 8GB, but depending on how much room is taken up by Android, the actual figure available to the user is more likely to be around 4GB or 5GB. However, you’ll be able to expand the phone’s storage up to 32GB via a microSD card.

The Rook has a 1,500mAh battery, which EE says should last for “five hours of talk time and over 400 hours in standby-time on a single charge.” This doesn’t bode well for video playback, but we’ll have to wait and see how it fares with our continuous video playback test when we get one in for review.

The EE Rook’s main selling point, though, is that it will be the only £50 phone available which supports 4G, allowing you to access EE’s super-fast download speeds if you live in a 4G area. The Rook will also be available with EE’s double-speed 4G on contract. It’s available now from EE stores, EE telesales and online.

As an extra enticement, anyone who buys a Rook handset will also receive up to 20% off select EE accessories, including the EE Essentials Pack (which comprises of a car charger, case and screen protector), a selfie stick, a Toshiba memory card and a Divroom Airbeat speaker.