Ok, folks – here are the criteria, what do you recommend (personal experience preferred):

– up to £100ish Sim-free
– a smaller and/or lower-res screen, and a slower CPU are both Good Things, because I have a Nexus 7 for doing fancy stuff and the phone mostly just needs to handle being a phone and a hotspot, so the less it bothers the battery the better
– a camera that puts out usable results (ie worth printing at 6″ or so)
– half decent build quality (including decent glass)

Pretty much anything else isn’t massively important. Bonus marks for a hardware camera button or vanilla Android, though.

Candidates look like the Desire C, Wildfire S, Xperia Mini, Xperia Tipo…?

Whatever the current Orange ZTE outing is, Monte Carlo perhaps?

TBH, I’d probably be popping into my nearest CEX and getting a second hand Desire or something for 40p if I were you.

Oddly enough I had a spare Desire and sold it just before Christmas – well done me 🙂

As an aside, I do wonder if with the rise of 7″ tablets we’re going to start seeing a decline in huge tablet phones.

Back in The Day, my EDC was a Psion and the smallest phone I could lay my hands on. Best of both worlds and I’d welcome a return to that philosophy.

Wildfire s is ok but battery life is a bit naff. Wife has the LG l3 and is as good if not better than the wildfire and is half the price

As an aside, I do wonder if with the rise of 7″ tablets we’re going to start seeing a decline in huge tablet phones.

I’m rather hoping for the rise (of cheaper versions), as they start to realise that 5.5-6 inch screen could be a phone and a mini tablet

waiting for galaxy notes to turn cheap just now

I’ve toying with getting the wife a Desire C to replace her pretty poor Orange San Fransisco, the best price I’ve found so far is around £107.

Kids have the Galaxy Y – cracking phone, days of battery and expandable memory.

Really like my Xperia Tipo.
it’s the size of a phone!! and battery lasts days while my mates huge fancy phones run out if they use strava for more than a few hours. GPS is more accurate than their fancy phones too. pretty robust, with me as their owner, phones have to be!
Daughter has a Galaxy Y, also the size of a phone with good battery life but out of the two I prefer mine.

There is one annoying bug with the Tipo, dunno if it’s because I have about 18GB of music on it but the music app sometimes won’t recognise the SD music tracks (like once every few months) easily fixed by clearing data/cache so not a huge deal breaker, just slightly annoying.
Camera seems decent enough but has no flash

My Wildfire was crap, unless the ‘S’ is significantly better then I’d avoid.

Very frustrating performance.

The Wildfire-S is a decent little phone, i bought one a stop gap when the other half’s Desire HD went away for a new screen when she dropped it.

Wildfire is really slow….

My son says painful even for texting

i just got me one of these

http://www.techradar.com/reviews/phones/mobile-phones/huawei-ascend-g300-1077239/review

http://www.sainsburys.co.uk/sol/shop/technology/mobile_phones/phones/123425383_vodafone_huawei_ascend_g300_black_mobile_phone.html?esrc=googlebase&med=cse&CAWELAID=1509608444
very happy so far and much nicer than my wildfire

120quid payg from vodafone

I think wildfires have some bug that can be fixed to speed them up – haven’t owned one so it’s just what I think I read somewhere

I’d heed duirdh, he sounds AWESOME.

Anyway, Orange San Diegos are great FVM @ £100 if still on sale, prob to fancy for you tho.

i just got me one of these

http://www.techradar.com/reviews/phones/mobile-phones/huawei-ascend-g300-1077239/review

http://www.sainsburys.co.uk/sol/shop/technology/mobile_phones/phones/123425383_vodafone_huawei_ascend_g300_black_mobile_phone.html?esrc=googlebase&med=cse&CAWELAID=1509608444
very happy so far and much nicer than my wildfire

120quid payg from vodafone

+1 great phone an if your not on vodaphone you can easily get it unlocked with a code for around a fiver

All handsets at Carphone Warehouse are unlocked if you want to be able to swap sims and / or sell on

For around £100 Galaxy Ace is worth considering in addition to those listed above

Galaxy note is brilliant. No need for a tab

Calm down with the flattery, Valentines day is still almost two weeks away

+1 Huawei G300 but quite a large handset

Samsung galaxy s gt i9000 can be had for about £100 sim free on EBay. Mine was anyway. Not a bad phone and way less frustrating than the HTC Desire I had before it.

Back in The Day, my EDC was a Psion and the smallest phone I could lay my hands on. Best of both worlds and I’d welcome a return to that philosophy.

Series 5 Psion and Ericsson phone here, back I the day. Wonderful set up. I could get on tinterweb before most folk knew what the Internet was.

I’ve just bought one of those G300s, so I’ve got a Wildfire going spare if you want it. It is absolutely awful though.

Hm. Assuming it’s unlocked, how much would you want for the Wildfire? (I do believe you about it being awful, BTW, but it might do as a stand-in while I send my Sony back for repair again.)

I dunno, 35 quid? I dont know whether its unlocked, I think its on vodafone. But it wasnt a contract phone, I bought it sim free from Asdas.

If it’s SIM free, I’d have thought it was unlocked pretty much by definition…?

Fair point. I honestly don’t know, it has a vodafone splash screen on start up though?