ZTE Kis review

Usually we shy away from introductory paragraphs about how expensive things used to be and how cheap they are now, but the falling prices of Android smartphones justify just such a tired intro format. Two years ago the idea of a pay-as-you-go smartphone was pretty outlandish, with SIM-free devices costing at least £400. Even earlier this year, with prices tumbling, we wowed at £100 smartphones. Now just six months on that figure has been practically halved to just £60.

The earpiece makes the Kis a little reminiscent of an iPhone

In fact, the ZTE Kis is even cheaper than that price first suggests. Buy it today and you’ll get a £10 voucher thrown in for calls and texts, 300 free text messages (worth £30), 1GB of data a month for a year, plus 100 free minutes of calls if you port your number over. Add all that up and Virgin Media is practically giving away the handset to get your business.

Amazingly then, the handset itself is actually pretty decent. It’s tastefully finished in black, black and more black; with a lightly rubberised finish on the rear. It feels very sturdy, with no flex or creaking parts. There’s a volume rocker and power button, plus four touch sensitive buttons below the screen for Menu, Home, Back and Search. These proved consistently responsive, though the haptic feedback is a bit weedy.

It feels sturdy and well built

The 3.5in screen is surprisingly capable. We’ve seen more expensive handsets using 240×320 resolution displays, so were delighted to find a 320×480 resolution here. It’s hardly luxurious, but Android is perfectly usable at this resolution with regards to texting, emailing and watching videos on the little screen. The display quality isn’t great, being a little dull and with narrow viewing angles, but again it’s on a par with phones that cost twice as much.

On the back there’s a 3.2-megapixel camera. This produced slightly soft shots with a marked lack of contrast, see below. It’s also a little slow to react to the shutter, so you can easily miss the moment. Speaking of which it’ll take you around 10 seconds to get from the lock screen to the shutter firing, as there’s no Android 4 style lock-screen shortcut here

Shot in strong sunlight this resized picture is soft-looking with an retro-like colour cast – click to enlarge

And this pixel-to-pixel crop shows the lack of detail and contrast – click to enlarge

The 800MHz processor, with 256MB of RAM, feels distinctively sluggish. Our SunSpider Javascript benchmark came up with a score of 4,327ms, around three times longer than a top-end handset. You won’t be zipping between multiple apps and rendering webpages in an instant then; but a budget handset like this is for light use, and if you have to be online every minute of the day then you should be spending more. We had no problem running YouTube videos in high-quality, Gmail kept up with our typing and browsing online wasn’t a chore, even Angry Birds Space was perfectly playable.

A micro USB port on the side handles data transfer and charging, there’s no HDMI output but that’s fair enough at this price. Behind the backplate is a micro SD card slot, it comes with a 2GB card fitted, though this can be upgraded to a 32GB card for as little as £13 – there’s also a measly 512MB of built-in storage. A decent-sized 1,400mAh battery is fitted, which thanks to the smallish screen and modest processor managed an outstanding ten and-a-half hours in our continuous video playback test.

Android itself has been tweaked a little, with little boxes around the app icons that we suppose are meant to be reminiscent of iOS. This quirk aside it’s business as usual for Android 2.3.6, with a decent dialler and text message apps, plus all the usual Google favourites such as Gmail, Maps and of course the Play Store.

Virgin have resisted doing anything too horrific to the Android interface

What you have here is a perfect decent, but rather dull, Android smartphone. However, it’s incredible that such a device is on sale at this price, and without any serious flaws,. It makes numerous, more expensive, budget handsets instantly obsolete. If you still don’t own a smartphone, or your kids have been pestering you for one, then the Kis is a great buy.