Essential review
quad-cor e, a fiv e-inch screen, android marshmallow and decent(ish) battery lif e. AND IT COSTS HOW MUCH ?
Vodafone’s £75 smartphone, and the shockingly expensive new Kindle Oasis
Smartphones under £100 are a very rare breed. Go up to £150 or thereabouts and you can get a great Chinese number, but a quality phone for half that price? That’s asking a lot... until now.
At £75 on pay-as-you-go, the Vodafone Smart Prime 7 is a handset you can purchase with pocket money. And as long as you’re OK with being on the Vodafone network (you get a 30-day guarantee so you can make sure you get signal in your favourite areas), it seems at first glance like a great deal. Before we get carried away, though, let’s talk specs...
First up, OS. The Smart Prime 7 runs the latest version of Android. Yes, this phone has Marshmallow. Even better, Vodafone hasn’t skinned the OS. With the exception of a few Vodafone apps (some of which you can delete, some of which you can’t – the dialler and messaging app, for example, can’t be thrown away), you’re pretty much getting a Nexus-esque experience here. And that’s absolutely grand by us.
The screen on the Smart Prime 7 is a five-inch, 720p affair – what we’d expect on a budget phone – and it’s pretty vibrant, too. Colours pop and it doesn’t feel as though you’re using a sub-par device.
In fact, to segway from specs for a moment, the design of this handset feels nigh-on premium. In fact, when using the Smart Prime 7, you have to keep reminding yourself that this is a £75 phone. Its screen curves nicely into the back, and the gun-metal plastic casing feels solid. From a distance, it looks similar to an iPhone 6s, right down to the front-facing camera and speaker placement (there’s no physical Home button). It also looks slim at 7.9mm thick.
So far, so good. At the heart of the device is a quad-core Qualcomm MSM8909 Snapdragon 210 running at 1.1GHz. This, while not up there in terms of modern mobile CPUs, is decent enough for everyday use. Although, when we had a lot of apps running, we did experience a little bit of lag. At this price, it’s easily forgiven.
Also, you only get a measly 8GB of on-board storage. Luckily, you can expand this by pulling off the back cover and popping in a nifty little microSD card.
Battery-wise, it’s 2540mAh. And considering it’s only powering a 720p screen, it works just fine. With notifications on but with no usage, we got a whole week out of the battery. In heavy usage, we easily got through a working day.
So, probably all that’s left to discuss is the camera. And it’s a good one, being eight-megapixel and all. Colour capture is excellent, and while it struggles on occasion with metering, at £75 you can’t whine. And the five-megapixel front-facing camera isn’t bad, either.
If you’re OK with being on the Vodafone network, the Smart Prime 7 is a bargain. It’s a neat phone that you can use every day without much compromise; for £75, well, you can make your own mind up.