A phone that many budget-conscious buyers have been waiting for several months, was finally quietly released by Aircel last week. At Rs. 8499/- the IDEOS is priced well within the budget of anybody looking to get into the Android smartphone segment. It has a 2.8 inch capacitive touchscreen, presumably at a resolution of 240x320 QVGA. We have said it before, and we’ll say it again – a touchscreen phone, especially an Android phone, with a 2.8 inch screen is just not good enough. However, this may be a decent enough purchase for budget-minded people – it runs Android 2.2 Froyo, and has a capacitive touchscreen, unlike the Micromax Andro which has that horrible resistive touchscreen. It has the usual array of functions found in Android phones – Wi-Fi, 3G, GPS, accelerometer, 3.5 mm headset port - apart from a 528 Mhz processor (with the Adreno 200 GPU), 512 MB ROM (200 MB user-available) and 256 MB of RAM. Aircel is also offering 2 GB of free data access per month for Aircel postpaid subscribers.

When the Spice Mi-300 is selling for Rs. 9990/- with a larger touchscreen and a faster processor, is this really a worthy buy? Only the depth of your wallet can tell.