ZTE Kis review

Contacts

Continuing the lack of customisation throughout the device, the ZTE Kis has yet another basic Android phone book.

Don't take this the wrong way though; Google's offering has some nifty features up its sleeve.

The biggest of these is that it can aggregate all your social account contacts, pulling in from Facebook, Twitter, and all the contacts associated with all your Google accounts.

This begs a question, a very big question. Why doesn't the ZTE Kis do this?

ZTE have elected to allow you to have your Google account, multiple Google accounts even, but there is no pre-bundled Facebook or Twitter account.

Maybe it's a blessing, as no Facebook app means more internal storage space, but with no UI customisation, there is no option to bring in contacts like HTC Sense can.

Again, the ZTE Kis is feeling less of a "smart" phone.

Contacts are displayed in a list, with a tiny contact picture to the left, and a little green phone icon to the right.

It's a nice feature to have the image - even though it was far too small to actually show anything - as tapping it brings up contact options, calling or texting.

At the bottom of the screen are the 'Add Contact' and 'Contact Search' buttons.

Having the search soft key directly beneath left us very confused as to its inclusion.

Android's useful features still present on the ZTE Kis are the Favourites section and the Groups section, for those who have a well sorted list of contacts in their GMail accounts.

Here you can send group messages, or long-press to put that group onto your home page.

Calling

The dialer app is easy to use, and even with our large fingers we still hit all the right buttons.

The standard T9 layout also supports smart dialling.

This is a useful feature if you know a part of the contact's number, or the contact's name.

The call screen brings all the standard call features: Contact photo, Speaker, Bluetooth, Add Call and Dial pad.

Backing off EE signal, the Virgin-locked ZTE Kis doesn't suffer from unreliable connections, although we found it noticeably slower to find a signal than our other EE-based devices.