Hiya!

I'm currently on the search for a phone I want to send to my close friend in India.

The main thing I want the phone to have is Skype, Facebook and GTalk. Anything else is a bonus!

My price range is up to £150. Could anyone please suggest some phones to me!

Also if the phone comes locked and I get it unlocked will it work in India?

Hi,

Any smartphone should work with Skype, also it's best to make sure it has wifi as you can't always do Skype on mobile data and from experience in India a lot of networks don't do 3G, or mobile data can be a bit slow. I was in Tamil Nadu for a while a few months ago using Airtel. Gtalk which you mentioned is massive in India, they all use that.

Frequency wise you shouldn't have an issue as they use the same frequencies as us, any 2G or 3G phone from this country will work over there.

You will need to make sure it's unlocked, which makes it more expensive to buy. So you need to look for an unlocked phone, capable of wifi and Skye. Any basic android would be a good place to start, it ticks all your boxes, of Skype, Gtalk, etc and most have wifi.

If you buy a handset locked to a network and get it unlocked then yes it'll work in India just fine.

Something like this would be perfect if you could get it unlocked - http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/mobile-pho...view-50004648/

For the purposes of looking for an unlock the Orange Stockholm is really the Orange version of the Huawei u8180 I believe, that may help.

There may be other smartphones to consider for under £150 that others here could suggest.

Good reply from TW. Don't agree that the Stockholm is a good choice but that's just a personal view.... Maybe the Samsung Galaxy Y would be OK.
You could also try checking the prices on the indian mobile sites and just buy from there and have it delivered straight to him. Saving you the shipping. Somewhere like This

Check out symbian phones.

I mention symbian phones because I reckon the battery life on them is generally much better than on basic android phones and symbian phones are still widely available in India.

But the choice is between symbian and android for sure.

i bought my daughter a new phone last week from carphonewarehouse - they had samsung wave for £99 tho i do think it's extremely 'long' they also had other samsung phones that seemed really cheap compared to other shops.

Thanks guys. I went for the sony ericsson Xperia X10 mini pro at the end. Straight from an indian website to save any unlocking hassles and shippings. Got it for 9430 rupees which at the current rate worked out as £120

Sounds good