T-Mobile Vivacity deals & review

The T-Mobile Vivacity is a low-cost smartphone that apes the design of the Apple iPhone. It is available for less than £100 on pay as you go or on a £10 a month contract, and is aimed at customers who’d like all the usual smartphone trimmings but without breaking the bank.

Although branded as a T-Mobile phone, the handset is actually manufactured by Chinese telecoms specialist ZTE. Internally, it is identical to the Orange San Francisco, but the external design is quite different. The Vivacity - available in black or white - features a front panel that is dominated by a 3.5 inch TFT capacitive touchscreen with soft touch buttons below. The dimensions of this compact handset are 58mm wide, 115 high and just 11mm thick, while the corners have been elegantly rounded off. The shape of the Vivacity looks a lot like an iPhone, which is no bad thing. This is a smart, simple piece of design.

The Vivacity runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) OS and has most of the features you would expect on a modern smartphone: WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, music + video playback, FM radio, web browsing and access to the plethora of apps available in the Android Marketplace. The full colour display has a resolution of 400 x 800 pixels, making it great for displaying games or web pages. The phone features a 5MP LED Flash camera as well as a secondary, front-pointing camera. There is only 512MB of internal storage, although the phone has micro SD capacity so can be expanded to 32GB (there is a 2GB card included with the phone). While the Vivacity doesn’t offer much in the way of new features, it certainly covers all the bases for a modern smartphone.

With T-Mobile and Orange's shared network, this is a phone that should get reception in most areas. The Li-Ion battery boasts four hours of talk time or 200 hours on standby. The processor is an 800Hz ARMv6 compatible rev 5 which performs well for everyday use but can suffer from lag between screens or when running multiple apps. While not quite in the same league as the iPhone or Galaxy smartphones, this is still a handset that acquits itself well for within its price range.

As this is an Android phone, users are offered the full Google experience. Contacts, email and social networking functions are all easily synced. Access to Android's marketplace is very simple and offers a wide range of apps: while Android's range is not quite as large as Apple's, there is a lot more choice when it comes to media playing and web browsing apps.

It’s worth looking at the Orange San Francisco which is, after all, the same phone in a different shell. It features a two-tone design that is reminiscent of HTC's Desire range. Acer's Liquid Express is a little more expensive but is also more feature-rich. Finally, Samsung's Galaxy Mini has similar features but a smaller, swisher design although again, it’s more expensive than the Vivacity.