With an average start price of around $1,000 (sans contract), smartphones have been a fairly hard sell to mainstream New Zealand.

So far only around 11 percent of kiwis have made the leap to owning a smartphone - but market entries such as the Huawei IDEOS from 2degrees may quickly change that.

2degrees expects that more than half of handsets sold in New Zealand next year will be smartphones. Judging by my week trialling the IDEOS they may well be right.

The IDEOS is the first of several moderately priced Android smartphones that 2degrees is bringing to New Zealand over the next few months.

At $379 RRP it’s the cheapest smartphone in the market (excluding temporary discounts and incentives for contract sign ups).

While there are inevitable compromises to reach that price point, for many this may be the device that gets them to make the leap to smartphone ownership.

Key Features

Android 2.2 - The latest operating system from Google. It’s faster than its predecessors (which still feature on most Android handsets currently on sale in NZ), offers Microsoft Exchange support, the ability to use the device as a portable Wi-Fi hotspot and interface improvements.

The operating system - like most Google products - is a user experience dream. Easy to setup and intuitive to use.

There’s an excellent setup and tips wizard that comes with the handset, which the average user can probably safely skip. Everything on this phone is exactly where you’d expect it to be.

Touch screen (no physical keyboard) - It will take all of five minutes to cover the screen in paw prints, but for most that will be a small price to pay for the relatively compact form factor (104mm (L), 54.8mm (W), 13.5mm (H)) and the extra screen real estate available for surfing the web.

3G - The IDEOS is capable of 7.2Mbps download... though you’d struggle to get that in New Zealand. It is fast enough to browse websites with little irritation.

Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n) - Wi-Fi is something Android does really well. If you’re near a trusted Wi-Fi network the device will automatically prefer that over the available mobile options - a great money saver.

Phone

Call quality - In a word - good. Clear and crisp at both ends.

Interface - Being a Google fan boy is a real plus here. The phone offers two-way wireless sync with your Google contacts, so there’s no painful contact migration issues to deal with (just enter your Google Account user name and password during the device setup and you’re good to go).

The phone dialer is simple to use and the software touch keyboard did a good job of consistently recognising which digits I was poking at.

Internet

The device ships with the default Android web browser - which is excellent. Pages load fast (on WI-FI or 3G) and the browser does a good job of navigating both standard and mobile-optimised web pages.

The browser doesn’t support the iPhone-style multi-touch browsing (pinch in, pinch out), which I expected to be a major limitation. It wasn’t.

Performance

A 528Mhz processor from Qualcomm powers the IDEOS. At that speed, it packs roughly half the power of its big brother Android smartphones or the popular iPhone 4.

The relatively wimpy processor didn’t turn out to be the problem I expected. Core tasks like navigating between screens and using the web browser where consistently fast.

Trying to play video was, however, a waste of time - you’ll need a higher-end device to do that reliably.

Camera

The IDEOS ships with a 3.2 mega pixel camera for still pictures and video. That’s fairly low spec by the standard of the high-end smartphones (around 5mp standard). Nonetheless, the IDEOS camera did a capable job outside and produced a vaguely passable result indoors. Judge for yourself....

Battery

The official specs claim a standby time of 192 hours, a talking time of 240 minutes and a charge time of around 2.5 hours.

In my testing I found that the device needed to be put on charge after around 10 hours of moderate to heavy use (GPS, 3G, background data on). With light to moderate use (GPS, 3G off unless needed, background data off) the battery lasted around 60 hours.

Realistically, if you’re going to make the most out of having a smartphone, you’ll be charging this one daily.

Other Notable Points

• Built in GPS used in combination with Google Maps (bundled with the handset) is amazing. Not only is there little excuse for getting lost, but Google’s local database means you’ll never be at a loss for things to check out.
• You can access the Android Marketplace through the IDEOS. That gives you quick and easy access to more than 80,000 applications to download and run on your handset.
• The handset weighs around 100g making it much less cumbersome to carry around than the average smartphone.
• The IDEOS will run on either the 2degrees or Vodafone networks - but do yourself a favour, go with 2degrees. The increased value and better deals we’re seeing from our phone operators since the entry of 2degrees into the market is no co-incidence.

In Summary

If you’re interested in getting a smartphone but can’t quite justify forking out $1,000 - the IDEOS is well worth considering.

The smartphone market is defined first and foremost by software - and the IDEOS makes no compromises in that area. The hardware spec is less impressive - but for most people, will do the job commendably well.