Hmmm...that is the opposite of what you wrote earlier.

Are you claiming that even plain/styled HTML is too slow on these kinds of devices?

Yes, pretty often. Like I said, Alcatel 1 can't even handle it's own native UI. Just opening the search/url input has like 2 second latency. On a fresh start, it's like 20s. Typing on a native keyboard is super laggy and slows down the whole phone.

Sites like Hacker News and textual blogs work pretty fine if you get lucky and nothing is running in the background, but you have to wait for a while for the phone to stop crunching stuff. The scrolling has noticable latency and random hiccups. If you scroll too fast, the content will show up delayed.

Once you add some images or a bit of javascript, you start to feel a lot more jank. You often get a perf hit when you recieve push notifications or when you re-connect to wifi, or open a native keyboard accidentaly, same with triggering browser UI or tapping the back button. Also, the browser sometimes just crashes (I guess out of memory?).

It certainly is usable, but the latency variance of various actions is wild. Sometimes it feels ok to use, but other times the whole session is like 1 fps for 5 minutes.