The Orange Vegas is a touchscreen handset coming in at less than £50. Now, anyone with half an eye on the market will realise that you don't get a touchscreen for under £50 without a few corners being cut along the way. If you are happy with that idea, read on.

The Vegas comes in black and a rather nasty baby pink. It is small and light, weighing 84g and measuring merely 93mm tall, 52mm wide and 16mm thick. It looks rather like one of those fancy touchscreen devices from the likes of HTC, but it is far from being up to their standard.

This is a dual band GSM handset with GPRS. No 3G. While the screen is a reasonable size at 2.4 inches across diagonal corners and offering 320 x 240 pixels, we wouldn't suggest you consider web browsing. The phone simply lacks the speed.

Data entry, for SMSing or mobile email (if you can brook the phone's speed) is quite well catered for. There is a mobile phone-style touch-pad and a small QWERTY keyboard that is also touch sensitive. There is no screen rotation, so both have to be used with the handset in tall mode.

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You'll be lucky to get much success with either using a fingertip, but there is a stylus which will provide greater accuracy. Alternatively you could try the built-in handwriting recognition. This is actually quite good as far as accuracy is concerned, but it only recognises one letter at a time, so it is a bit slow to work with.

The small battery is pretty poor, giving minimal life. You'll probably need to charge this handset every day. Music fans might therefore want to give this phone a wide berth, though if you do choose it with music in mind, the FM radio will be an added plus.

While Orange says there is 64MB of memory built in, our review sample only had half a megabyte free. There is a microSD card slot under the battery making it a bit fiddly to get to, but you are going to need a card if you want to store much data.

The camera is disappointing, even for such a low cost handset. It shoots stills at just 1.3 megapixels and lacks both autofocus and flash. As you might expect from a low-ish cost handset, there's no Wi-Fi and no GPS.

The handset is easy to use, with four under-screen buttons offering Call, End and softmenu links. The large navigation button is comfy under the finger. Its four ordinal points are pre-set and we were not able to set them to applications of our choice.

Those who hanker for finger friendly sweeping around a touch screen may like the fact that you can sweep horizontally across the main screen's date and time display for eight shortcuts, but really what is on offer in this respect is pretty rudimentary.

As a low cost handset with few pretensions the Vegas is a reasonable effort. However, its poor battery life really lets it down.