Forget the £100 Nokia Lumia 710, the £150 Acer Liquid Gallant and the £100 Huawei Ascend G300. The best value-for-money smartphone on the market at the moment is the Sony Xperia U, which was launched earlier this year at MWC and can now be bought for only £100 plus an extra £10 top-up from Carphone Warehouse.

As is the case for most Carphone Warehouse handsets, we expect this one to be unlocked, although the deal is available on Orange and T-Mobile, and Three for an extra £5. The latter appears to be the most enticing of the lot, since you get 300 minutes, 3000 texts and all you can eat data for one month.

As for the phone itself, it is a very capable mid-range smartphone that uses an ST-Ericsson Novathor U8500 system-on-chip. This dual-core version is based on the Cortex-A9 and is clocked at 1GHz. There’s also 8GB onboard storage, 512GB of RAM, a 3.5in 854 x 480 resolution (which incidentally means that the Xperia U has a higher pixel density than the Samsung Galaxy Note 2).

Other features include a 5-megapixel camera with HD video recording, a front facing camera, Android 2.3 Gingerbread, GPS, Wi-Fi, NFC and a planned upgrade to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Note that Virgin Media offers an Addict Tariff (for £20 extra) which offers 12 months free data when purchased with a smartphone and doubles up the first top-up bonus (pay £30 to get £60 extra).

Source: Carphone Warehouse