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EE’s affordable own brand smartphone, the Kestrel, is now available to buy through EE’s website, stores and telesales. The main selling point of the handset is that it’s the lowest standard priced 4G smartphone, coming in at just £99 on pay as you go or free on pay monthly plans from £13.99.
But you actually get a reasonable amount of phone for your money. The Kestrel has a 4.5 inch 960 x 540 screen, a 1.2 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 400 processor and 1GB of RAM. It also has a 5 megapixel main camera, can shoot 720p video and has a 1 megapixel front facing camera.
You only get 8GB of built in storage but the EE Kestrel also has a microSD card slot and at 131 x 65.3 x 7.85mm it’s got a slim design. It’s plastic clad of course but as plastic phones go it doesn’t look bad.
All of that puts it in line with lower mid-range handsets, except that this has the price tag of an entry level phone and it comes with 4G. Cat 4 4G to be precise, which means that it supports download speeds of up to 150Mbps where available.
Oh and in case you’re wondering, behind the EE branding this is a Huawei phone, running Android 4.3 Jellybean with the manufacturers Emotion UI on top. You will have to put up with a handful of EE’s own-brand apps out of the box, but for a well-equipped handset that only costs £99 that seems like a small sacrifice to make.
Better yet if you buy it on pay as you go and top up by £10 then EE will give you 10GB of data for free, which should be enough to keep you busy for a while.
Looking to check out more 4G phones?
