Continuing his budget smartphone review mini-series, which is looking at the £100 ZTE Racer (powered by Android) when compared to Nokia's similarly priced 5230 (Symbian powered), Ewan evaluates the respective device's email and web browsing functionality. He finds that there's balance with plus and minus points on both sides. In part one of the series Ewan compared the relative merits of base hardware specifications of each device. 

Battle of Budget Smartphone part 2:

After the hardware, getting online and doing some basic work with Email and the Web is likely to be the next thing anyone buying a budget smartphone will be doing, but first...

Let me stress one thing here – the Android device I'm looking at is specifically the ZTE Racer. There is fragmentation between Android devices, and not every option is on every device (e.g. see previous comments regarding the inability of the Racer to suspend a 3G data connection). Answering a point with “but my Desire / Galaxy S / Droid” does that, is not cutting it. I'm looking at the budget end of the market, the £100 devices in the pay as you go (contract free) environment.

I took a look at the hardware of the two respective devices in the last article, and the Nokia 5230 fractionally came out on top – the lack of Wifi compensated in the most part by the screen resolution and battery life. I'm now going to turn my eye to the software that comes bundled with the devices for E-mail and Web browsing.

Read on for more.