Vodafone Smart V8

The best sub-£200 smartphone?

Smart V8 sounds like a raw vegetable juice drink that claims to boost your IQ. But no, it’s a phone. You could get a lot of raw vegetable juice elsewhere for 159 quid, but not a lot of phone. Yet Vodafone has managed to squeeze a surprisingly large amount of good stuff into it.

The sturdy metal case feels classy, despite odd rubbery panels at the top and bottom of the rear, presumably to help you avoid dropping the Smart V8 and concussing a passing dog. Also here is a fingerprint sensor that supports Android Pay.

On the front, the Full HD resolution is sharp and an oleophobic coating helps prevent fingerprints. What impresses, though, is its high contrast and brightness, hitting 529 candelas per square metre. That’s 60 per cent more than the £200 Lenovo P2’s AMOLED screen, although the Smart V8 falls short of its colour reproduction, with an acceptable 86 per cent of the SRGB range.

Android 7.1.1 runs smoothly on the eight-core processor, falling a little behind the P2 but beating cheaper models such as Vodafone’s own Smart N8 (see Issue 507, page 29). The fanciest 3D games may grind to a halt, but if your tastes are more along the lines of Candy Crush you’ll be fine – at least until the battery runs out. At 11 hours and nine minutes in our video playback test, the Smart V8 is no better than average; by contrast, the P2 managed just short of 29 hours. The 16-megapixel rear camera has some useful features, including slow exposures and time lapse, but our test pictures looked slightly dark even in good light, although the HDR mode helped.

The Smart V8 comes locked to Vodafone, but after using it on pay-asyou-go for 30 days, at a minimum of £10, you can get it unlocked free of charge. Overall it’s an excellent buy.

Has a bright screen and good camera features – it’s an excellent buy