You might not have heard of Chinese smartphone manufacturer ZTE before, but rest assured you soon will. It has already started to make inroads into the UK market — it’s the name behind the Orange San Francisco — and is set to unleash more handsets this year. Its latest launch is the Skate 4.3 and it’s set to offer a taste of the high-end to cost-conscious smartphone fans.

As you may have guessed from the name, the Skate has a 4.3in capacitive multitouch screen — the same size as the premium HTC Desire HD. The resolution is a decent 480 x 800, brightness levels are pretty good, and its other specifications pass muster too. It runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) on an unnamed 800MHz processor, has a 5-megapixel autofocus, LED flash-equipped camera on the rear, plus an FM tuner, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and AGPS.

It feels a little cheap and plasticky, and the buttons on the side and below the screen are hardly the last word in quality, but the flipside of this is that it’s very light; 120g is a trifling amount for a 4.3in smartphone. The HTC Desire HD, for comparison, tips the scales at a pocket-sagging 164g, and the iPhone 4 is 17g heavier.

And although the Skate exhibited the odd stutter when scrolling through menus and navigating Android’s multiple desktops, its CPU coped fine with a quick session of Angry Birds, as you can see from the video below, which bodes well for Android fans.

What this smartphone doesn’t have is a whole lot of luxury extras. There’s no HDMI port, no significant helping of built-in storage, HSDPA connectivity is 7.2Mbits/sec rather than 14.4Mits/sec, and there’s only 802.11g Wi-Fi.

As long as the price is right, though, none of this should matter. ZTE could well be onto a winner here.