Review: Orange Vegas

So, you are a Pay As You Go fan, you like the idea of a touchscreened phone, but you don’t want to spend a fortune for it. Orange reckons its Vegas fits the bill nicely. And they are right.

But let’s be very clear at the outset, that if you want a singing, dancing, shouting, multimedia rich, bells and whistles smartphone, you shouldn’t be looking here. This is a £50 phone Pay As You Go, and it shows in every direction.

Specs & info
Price: £49 (PAYG)
Operating system: proprietary
Processor: n/a
Memory: 64MB RAM, 2GB ROM
Dimensions: 93mm x 52mm x 16mm
Weight: 84g
Display size: 2.4 diagonal inches
Display resolution: n/a
Expansion slot: 1 x microSD

The Vegas comes in either black or pink. The pink is a pale and insipid shade that we don’t like a bit. Whichever main colour you choose there are silver highlights in the shape of a frame around the screen, the navigation button, a band around the edge of the device, and a frame around the camera on the back.

In design terms the Vegas looks a bit like various incarnations of the HTC Touch such as the Touch 3G thanks to its rounded corners and slightly narrower bottom than top. But it is not made by HTC and it is not a Windows Mobile device. Also, it looks like it has been put on a too hot wash and shrunk. It is really very small, measuring just 93mm tall, 52mm wide and 16mm thick. And it weighs a mere 84g.

Orange says it is the smallest, lightest and cheapest touchscreen mobile available in the UK.

There are several consequences to the small size of the Vegas, some good, some not so good. On the plus side, it is extremely comfortable for smaller hands to hold, and it fits neatly in relatively tiny pockets.

On the minus side, the screen is smaller than we are used to seeing in a touchscreened phone at just 2.4 inches across diagonal corners. Still, because the user interface has been specially designed icons are fairly large and tapping them is not a problem.

And another minus is that there isn’t much room for a battery. The 670mAh battery managed about half of what we’d expect from an average Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional PDA.

As we already noted, this is not a fully fledged smartphone. So, while it has a calendar there is no PC synchronising. Nor is there at To Do list manager. These two features are among the lynchpins of a smartphone or PDA, and their absence speaks volumes.

Nor does the Vegas sport Wi-Fi or GPS. It is a dual band device with GPRS but not 3G, and its camera is very much below average at just 1.3 megapixels.

There is 64MB of built in memory and a microSD card slot under the battery for adding more. The Vegas supports cards up to 4GB. Music playback and an FM radio are built in, and the supplied headset shares the mains power mini USB connector.

Web browsing is possible and Orange is keen to push the use of sites like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, but we’d recommend a larger screen and 3G if you are serious about the Web. Also we found the small screen and phone style touch numberpad fiddly for entering text. You do get a stylus if your fingers are too stubby to be accurate with the touchscreen.

Overall, the Vegas might look like a smartphone, and to some extent behave like one thanks to its touchscreen. But in reality it is not particularly smart.

Essential Verdict
Performance: 5/10
With a short battery life and few smartphone features performance is poor in smartphone terms

Design: 8/10
Small and neat for the hand and pocket

Features: 4/10
Evaluated against other smartphone the Vegas does not do well

Value for Money: 6/10
This feels like an entry level handset despite its touchscreen

Overall score: 5/10

Review written by Sandra Vogel. Originally published in Smartphone Essentials.

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