Look along the shelves of your average high street phone shop and you’ll see many a touchscreen phone, but it’s still likely that a good proportion of them are in the ‘contract’ section – where you’ll probably end up having to fork out least at least £25 a month for the privilege of calling yourself a touchscreen owner.

There are aberrations of course, like the good old LG Cookie and Samsung Tocco, now available for next to nothing on pre-pay. However, they are getting a little long in the tooth these days, so it’s good to see another contender like the Genio Touch step up to the plate.

Unlike most other budget touchscreen phones out there, the Samsung Genio Touch has the smaller form factor of a feature phone – it just doesn’t have the keypad where you’d normally expect it to be. Instead, there’s a 2.8-inch touchscreen.

We were surprised to find out that the Genio Touch actually uses a capacitive touchscreen too. If you’re not fully up-to-date with touchscreen technology, capacitive touchscreens rely on sensing the distortions created within the screen’s electrostatic field – caused by the mere presence of your finger. On the other side, resistive touchscreens works on a much more digestible pressure basis – you press, it feels that you’re pressing.

While the latter may sound simpler, it’s the former that leads to more responsive screens. However, capacitive touchscreens are normally only found on much more expensive phones, so we weren't expecting  to see one on the Genio Touch when it’s one of the cheapest phones out there.

Having this more sensitive screen in tow pays dividends. Although it’s nowhere near as sensitive as an iPhone screen or that of a similar high-end capacitive phone, light touches are still all that’s required, making typing on the Genio Touch pleasingly painless.

We should note however that there’s no virtual Qwerty in the Genio Touch. It’s probably a good idea to leave one out since the 2.8-inch screen is quite small in touchscren terms. Instead, you’re left with the sort of number-based keypad control you’d get on a phone with physical buttons.

While this firmly hammers a few nails into the coffin of the idea that the Genio Touch is anywhere near approaching real smartphone-like capabilities, it’s remarkably comfy for texting. There’s default haptic feedback at each key press too, which is a handy replacement for the sensation of pressing a button. Still, if you’re after a device to send long emails on, you should probably look elsewhere.

The home screen interface can pull off a much more convincing smartphone impersonation though. You’ve got three pages to play with, which you can scroll through with a swipe of the finger, and each can be filled with Widgets to your heart’s content. This is the basis of the TouchWiz interface, already used on a handful of Samsung devices. There’s even a Widget to let you download more Widgets.

Each page can hold at least two Widgets, but if you try to swipe to the next page over the top of a Widget, it’ll just move that Widget instead of scrolling. It’s the one part of this interface that lets the Genio Touch down, because otherwise it’s a half-decent impression of the Android operating system. That may sound like feint praise, but show us an Android device that’s available for under £80 on pre-pay.

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The Genio Touch is the first phone in Samsung’s new Corby range, the company’s bold step into the land of the lifestyle-oriented smartphone. We got a hands-on look at the device at its launch to see how it stacks up against the influx of smartphones we’ve already seen this year.

The Corby range’s gimmick, if we are to call apples, pretty as they may be, apples , is that a selection of interchangeable backplates is available, featuring either block colour or a pattern. Samsung urges you to ’choose your colour’ and let your Corby reflect your own personality.

Much as this is a rather reductive step - we’re people, not a square on a colour chart - and something that harks back to the days when third-party body shells were available for just about every major phone around, it’s something that could well prove essential to the Corby range's success.

You see, behind the colourful marketing, the Corby Genio is in many ways a rather pedestrian phone, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing when you consider Samsung is essentially trying to once-and-for-all bridge that final gap between feature phones and smartphones.

One thing they have got right in the basic design is the form factor. The Genio is simple, fairly slim and plain enough to let the colourful backplates do most of the talking. The device itself is something of a blank canvas.

It uses Samsung’s proprietary Touchwiz OS, which let you place a wide selection of widgets on three home screens. As you might expect from a lifestyle-focused device, these include social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It remains a competent system, but next to Android, especially tweaked versions like MotoBlur and HTC Sense, it doesn’t exactly look state of the art.

However, ‘state of the art’ status isn’t the Genio’s intention, as the rest of the spec list will attest to. The 2-mega pixel camera is below par these days and there was some clearly noticeable lag when navigating that makes the screen seem more like the less responsive resistive type than what is actually is - capacitive. It’s still perfectly finger-friendly though, and those who haven’t used a wide variety of smartphones may not be turned off at all by the Genio’s lack of processing brawn.

What will prove the real test for the Corby Genio is exactly how much it ends up costing in real terms. Next to phones like the HTC Hero and iPhone, it just doesn’t make sense, colour backplates or no. Make it available for free on lower-priced contracts and the Genio could well prove a popular choice. With a decent design and access to a similar range of services to those seen in top-end smartphones, the last few metres of that smartphone divide seem to be disappearing.

Latest Samsung Genio Touch Prices

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The Samung Genio is a budget touchscreen mobile phone that certainly isn't short of colour.

The Genio's screen measures 2.8-inches, with a resolution of 240x320 pixels.

There's 2-megapixel camera onboard too for those who like to snap away at every opportunity.

Check out our preview video below for more details.

Latest Samsung Genio Touch Prices