Samsung’s latest offering is the Galaxy Portal i5700, which is a prelude to the last Android handset they made, the Galaxy i7500 – thankfully its ‘real’ name is the Galaxy Spica to avoid confusion – and seems like an entry-level handset for those entering the Android market. The i5700 Portal only runs on Android version 1.5 operating system but an updated version is said by Samsung to be available very shortly for all Galaxy handsets.

This is a step down from the Galaxy Portal i7500, most notably in its memory which is a very lowly 180Mb internal memory compared to the 8Gb’s on the original Portal – not even the 1Gb MicroSD card starts to compensate. The Spica still, unfortunately, retains that plastic look and feel that doesn’t scream style or high-end about the product but luckily you won’t see a lot of the design work as you have a great big 3.2″ AMOLED touchscreen which looks eye-catchingly vivid and beautiful.

Despite its cheap and cheerful design, the Galaxy Portal i5700 has some clever features – particularly, its Augmented reality browser Layar that allows you to point the phone at the physical world and find out associating information, particularly what pub is playing the football (which incidentally isn’t available for the iTunes app store yet – you can tell your iPhone mates that).

The Galaxy Portal i5700 is a small, compact handset that if you run down the quick-features below you will find is a reminder of what you can actually get for your money these days – you can get your hands on this Android phone from just £20 per month.

QUICK-FIRE FEATURES
Display: 3.2” AMOLED resistive touchscreen
Weight: 110g
Dimensions: 108.9 x 53.5 x 11.9 mm
Camera: 3.2 MP autofocus and face-recognition, LED flash, geo-tagging
Video: supported. Added bonus: plays DivX movies with no need for conversion
Music player: MP3, AAC
Operating system: Android 1.5
Memory: 2GB phone memory, up to 16GB available with SD card
Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.1, microUSB, TV-output, Google Sync, Microsoft Active Sync
Internet: GPRS, EDGE, wifi, 3G

SEE ALL DETAILS ON SAMSUNG GALAXY i5700 PORTAL ON T-MOBILE

SEE ALL DETAILS ON SAMSUNG i5700 PORTAL WHITE & BLACK ON 3 MOBILE – from £20pm