Sagem my220x
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At first, we thought there had been a mistake. Instead of sending the latest budget handset, Sagem had somehow obtained Kanye West's phone and posted that instead. We opened the box and there it was: sleek, gold-rimmed, and menacingly precious.

Our first instinct was naturally to put it on eBay, but before listing our unusual windfall we thought we'd better do some research. It turns out that the handset we received (pictured) really is Sagem's latest, the my220x.

A glitzier version of the my150x, which retails for the almost token sum of £10, the my220x has a colour screen and aforementioned gold trim, for which luxury you'll pay the princely sum of £12.49.

It's impossible not to review this phone in light of the price. While it undeniably pales in comparison with the high-powered specimen you probably got free with your contract and will never fully understand, the my220x is so cheap that it invites low expectations, and then comfortably exceeds them.

Let's get the inevitable shortcomings out of the way first. There's no camera, and no facility for looking at pictures. The 1.5-square-inch screen is swallowed by the 47x107mm of black glass and plastic surrounding it, and at 128x128 pixels it's not the crispest display. Nevertheless, it's more than functional at 65k colour, and some of the digitised images in the wallpaper menu look fine if you squint.

There's no onboard memory, so space for messages is limited to what your SIM can contain, and of course this means there's no music playback or space to install fancy 1000KB Java games, which the phone would never run in any case, and which you'd have some difficulty obtaining because there's no WAP, Bluetooth, or any other means of transferring data onto the handset.

Nor is there a radio, so if you're looking for an all-singing entertainment device, you'll just have to look elsewhere.

The advantage of the my220x's lack of fancy components, on the other hand, is that it isn't stuffed with fancy components. At 10mm and 65 grams, it's both very slim and very light, and before you get around to pressing the 'on' switch it feels like a fairly elegant piece of kit.

While we're still talking first impressions, we'll take a moment to discuss its looks, and more specifically the gold band that girds it like a bracelet. This feature is both striking and insanely tacky. If you're buying this phone as a gift, it had better be for a ten-year-old girl.

And you probably are. Given the throwaway price, we suspect the my220x is going to do brisk business this Christmas as a training phone, and we can fully recommend it as such.

So what exactly do you get for your £12.49? You get a respectable handset that does what little it does well. The menu system is clean and easily navigable, and although it comes in a fairly sickly blue and orange theme, we've got nothing else against it.

The speaker quality during normal calls is good, and while the loudspeaker doesn't come close to matching that of most modern phones, it's perfectly possible to conduct a conversation using the speakerphone function.

It has solid predictive text and a smooth keypad, very similar to a Motorola RAZR's. It's comfortable to use, and only a nagging sense of flimsiness, upheld by the obvious crookedness of the grooved keypad when it catches the light, distinguishes the my220x's input from a Motorola's.

Which, given that the Motorola isn't the greatest manufacturer of gaming phones, would be bad news if the issue weren't rendered moot by the fact that you're simply not going to able to use the my220x for gaming.

This leaves you with the preloaded offering: mySudoku. Like the phone in which it's embedded, this version of the ubiquitous Japanese number game is both simplistic and perfectly respectable.

There are three difficulty levels – Easy, Medium, and Hard – and, because there's a decent range of boards, you can keep coming back without meeting the same one over and over. To play, you simply navigate to a square with the D-pad and press the number you want to put down, and when you exit your progress is automatically saved, which we liked. It's the little things, after all.

Naturally, this handset isn't for everyone, and if you want your phone to do anything other than make calls and look like a prop from a Kanye West video, it's not for you. However, this isn't just a review of a phone; it's a review of a £12.49 phone, and judged on those terms the my220x is definitely worth every penny.

Sagem my220x

The my220x is one of the cheapest handsets money can buy, and it shows. Nevertheless, it's solid, slim, and user-friendly, and if you're shopping in this price range you won't be disappointed
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Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.