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In most cases, you can choose whether to use the touchscreen or physical buttons. For example, softkey options are tappable as well as accessed with the physical buttons and menu items and options can be got at with the navigation button or by tapping the screen. Having the choice between touch and button input methods never felt like overkill.

The screen itself is quite small at just 2.4in. Orange doesn't quote the pixel count but it looks like a 320 x 240 job to me. It is pretty responsive to the finger, but rather small, and in some cases this lets the phone down.

There are three options for entering text. You can use a touchable number pad style keyboard, which is a little small for pinpoint accuracy or an absolutely tiny QWERTY keypad that's impossible to use without the stylus (the stylus sits in a slot on the right back edge of the casing). The third option is using the stylus for the phone's handwriting recognition system. This worked surprisingly well, though the software has to recognise one letter at a time so entering text is a little on the slow side. Whichever method you opt for, texting at speed may be a challenge.

There is a bit of haptic feedback and some finger sweeping support. On the main screen you can sweep horizontally across the date and time info for access to eight shortcuts, and the menu screen is divided into three sub-sections between which you can finger-sweep. You can also sweep vertically through your contacts. It works well enough but you shouldn't expect the levels of sophistication you'd get from a more expensive handset.

Features are decidedly minimal, too, but then this handset does cost under £50 on Pay As You Go so you shouldn't be expecting a vast array of them.

The Vegas is a dual-band GSM phone with GPRS. Web use is a bit of a struggle and if you are fan of mobile Facebook, Twitter and the like, you may want a phone with better data credentials.

There is an FM radio to augment the music player, and though its mere nine presets seems rather measly it worked well enough. The music player isn't all that advanced but at least it has an equaliser. The proprietary headset is a bit of a let down in quality terms and its mini-USB connector makes it difficult to use an alternative.

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