Huawei U8815

If you want the oomph of a high-end smartphone, the latest U8815 has the potential. It is a smart looking handset with a slim form factor, curved edges and a huge 4-inch multi-touch display. It has a plastic body, yet the metallic bezel lends a sturdy metallic feel. There are minimal physical buttons on the phone. All it has is two keys for volume, a power-on switch, a proprietary USB and a 3.5mm jack. However, we missed a dedicated camera button.

The device runs on Android 2.3, an older but still popular OS that is found in mid-range and budget smartphones such as Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus, Motorola Defy Plus, etc. The interface is easy to follow and work upon, thanks to a quick response and the big enough icons. The wide 4-inch multi-touch display, with a decent resolution of 800 x 480, has a glossy surface but that can be addressed with a simple screen guard that comes for just 150 rupees. The phone comes packed with plenty of interesting apps like Google Voice Search, Documents to Go, Maps, Latitude, YouTube, GTalk, Google Plus, FM Radio, Facebook, email and a voice dialler to keep you busy.

However, the app that beats them all is Huawei Cloud Plus, which is a cloud service exclusive to Huawei users. It is seamlessly integrated into the device platform and offers features like Cloud Plus drive; Message Plus; Stream that helps you integrate phonebook with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn; Phone finder, SNS and storage of up to 16GB for your photos, music, videos, apps, email, etc.

The smartphone has a 1350mAh battery that gives a glitch-free backup of 1-2 days on normal use. Video playback is decent and the speaker, intelligently placed at the front, is powerful. Video playback is decent and runs without any jitter. The device runs on 1GHz single core processor and 512MB memory, which is not much, but works just fine. Its internal storage capacity is 2GB and with a micro SD card you can expand it to 32GB. The 5 MP camera with flash and 5x optical zoom is an average performer with video recording.

In the same price range of 14k, one can check out smartphones with similar features, such as Motorola Defy Plus or Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus, but you won't get a cloud-based application with them.

Bottomline: A decent performer with all the relevant features and more that you could expect for such a price