Huawei IDEOS X3 Pro Reviews

We like the X3. It's not the fastest phone, but its small size, decent screen and more than acceptable call quality is enough for the casual user. More advanced owners might find the touchscreen tedious, but you could certainly live with it. If you make huge numbers of calls, or end up using the Internet a lot, you might also find the low-capacity battery doesn't last very long. But overall we wouldn't really expect too much more from a cheap, entry-level phone.

The Blaze is occasionally laggy, but its slim design, bright screen and decent pre-installed apps make it a great budget phone

Initially, it's an impressive thing. Curved screen, slim case and plenty of weird little customisations from Huawei make the Blaze a fun smartphone to play with for the first few hours. But the slowness of it gradually wears you down. Widgets are clunky, web use has you waiting for things to happen, the capacitive touchscreen buttons often lag and fail to respond to your first touch. Compared to the budget Android phones of 2010 such as the ZTE Racer and the Galaxy Europa, the Huawei Blaze is quite a bit better in terms of style, but you're still not getting anything like the same slick Android experience as found on the high-end handsets. We were expecting a lot more from the budget-busting Huawei, but with a poor camera that lacks a flash and a slow processor inside, the Huawei Blaze is just a slightly prettier than usual, rock-bottom priced smartphone, with all the performance caveats this end of the scale tends to come with.

The Huawei Blaze gets you an awful lot for nor much money. Solid build, the full roster of smartphone features and a decent screen ensure the phone can hold its own against devices that cost £200 or more SIM-free. It's not perfect - slight lag and nigglesome soft keys demand some patience - but the big brands of Android just can't touch it at the price.