February’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona saw a whole raft of new mobile devices that are soon to hit the marker and many interesting concepts found the light of day at the Congress. One new device, T-Mobile’s new collaborative effort in concert with France’s Sagem and China’s Huawei, is a new Android-powered smartphone at an extremely low price as it will retail on the UK market for a touch under £100 at £99.99 on pay-as-you-go plans. The Mini seems designed, and priced, to immediately take on the HTC Tattoo and on first impressions the Pulse Mini does a pretty decent job with its specifications.

For a start there is a pretty decent 3.2-megapixel integral camera bundled with the device which usefully includes an LED flash, thereby allowing good quality pictures to be snapped even in failing lighting conditions. This is a nice addition – especially given the Mini Pulse’s budget price – as many devices have good cameras but forget to include the flash which severely curtails the usefulness of the camera. The device also comes complete with a 2.8-inch resistive touchscreen and a 3.5 millimetre headphone jack input, a significant upgrade on the Pulse (the Pulse Mini’s predecessor) which only offered a 2.5 millimetre input jack.

It’s always good to see that new devices offer improvements on the old, though the Pulse Mini’s measurements of 106×57x14mm indicate that it is far from being the most elegant or slim device on the market today though an Android-powered phone at under £100 will, in all likelihood, not suffer overmuch as a result of this. The device comes with an internal memory capacity of 300MB as well as a microSD card slot through which, with a memory card, the device’s memory can be ramped up to as much as may be needed.

There is little question, however, that the star feature of the Pulse mini is its Android 2.1 operation system coming, as it does, on such a well-priced device. Unfortunately for the assembled media at the Mobile World Congress the software that had been loaded onto the demonstration device was somewhat unstable and seemed to keep crashing which took some sheen off of the proceedings, however Samsung assured all those attending that the released retail device will come fully equipped with the Android 2.1 operating system that would be stable and work comfortably with all items.

In terms of menu configuration the Mini Pulse’s home screen is somewhat unique, though some may say a bit unusual, as it features 15 panels in a 5×3 grid formation which the user can swipe through by going up, down, left or right in order to make their selection. The device also features a D-pad controller and by pressing the controller’s central button the user can zoom out of the main panel view and view all 15 home screen panels at once so that one can be selected. This is unique as the vast majority of home screens are generally arrange from left to right as demonstrated on many of the major HTC models.

Although the Android operating system looks great on paper as well the truth is that, due to the low-cost of the device, short-cuts have been taken on some of the other specs and this ultimately means that the capability doesn’t play out as well as you might want – especially not in a QVGA resolution screen. Also, the resistive display is disappointing for many users as it is not particularly user-friendly compared to many of the capacitive screens found today. The manufacturer must have realised this, though, as a stylus has been included to afford easy inputting of text

Connectivity wise although it features Bluetooth and Wi-Fi the Mini Pulse has no GPS capabilities, and it seems that this must affect the wider usefulness of the device as the lack of GPS capability will render all location-based applications for the Android system null and void. Still, overall it is a solid phone and one budget spenders looking to get in on the Android phone craze will likely appreciate.