Earlier last month (10 August), mobile service provider, Orange, started offering the ZTE Skate, rebranded as the Monte Carlo from Orange, a whole month before it was expected to hit the UK’s shelves. The phone comes with a 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen display, a five-megapixel camera, 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, and the Android Gingerbread (2.3) operating system.

Image courtesy of Expansys

The handset is available, free, on qualifying contracts of £20 per month or more, or for £150 on pay-as-you-go. No doubt we’ll see a whole host of other mobile phone deals over the coming months with this affordable handset, though.

To start off with, its 4.3-inch, 480×800-pixel display means that the Monte Carlo is a rather huge handset, verging on tablet territory. The screen size and resolution, in fact, is the same as that of HTC’s Desire HD. But while quite massive, the handset itself feels relatively weightless, tipping the scales at just 120g.

However, the phone doesn’t feel particularly sturdy in the hand, unlike its more expensive counterparts – something that we’ll have to forgive seeing as though the price tag is so reasonable in comparison. You get what you pay for, and hopefully it’s only the quality of the phone’s casing that’s suffered.

The bottom of the handset is home to a trio of buttons that control the Android operating system – home, menu and back – and the handset also boasts a rear-facing 5-megapixel camera, complete with flash.

Running on Android 2.3 Gingerbread, which comes with support for Flash player, users are able to watch Flash movies, while the access to the Android Market also enables users to download thousands of excellent apps.

The 800MHz processor, unfortunately, will have you experiencing some degree of lag – not drastic, but you will notice.