Vodafone Smart Prime 6

Vodafone has entered the world of budget 4G-enabled smartphones with the £79 Smart Prime 6. With such a small price tag our expectations were low, but we were pleasantly surprised.

Design and build

Although the Smart Prime 6 is aimed at the budget market this isn’t obvious from its looks. The phone is made from plastic but has a hint of premium design, not looking dissimilar to the Samsung Galaxy S4 (although more bulky). It’s available in two colours – silver and grey – though there’s little difference between them. Vodafone would have done better offering a completely different colour option.

Unsurprisingly, it’s bulkier than the likes of the iPhone 6 at 9mm thick and 155g, but is still thinner than its main rival, the £109 Moto E 4G, which is 12.3mm thick and costs around £109. It’s also worth mentioning that just because it’s bulky, it doesn’t make it any less comfortable to hold – in fact, the curved edges of the Smart Prime 6 allow it to fit snugly in your hand.

It measures 141.7x71.9mm and houses a 5in display, giving the it a 67.7 percent screen-tobody ratio, which isn’t a bad for a smartphone that costs well under £100. The display is one of the better features of the Smart Prime 6; it’s crisp and clear, has a full 720p HD resolution and IPS technology, which allows for better viewing angles at almost any angle. It’s also better than the Moto E 4G’s 4.5in screen in size and resolution, which has a 540x960-pixel display.

We feel that the screen size is just right too, providing adequate real estate to watch videos and play games without becoming uncomfortable to use one handed.

For those among you that look for a phone with a removable back cover, you’re in luck. This snaps off to reveal the battery, along with a SIM card tray and a microSD card slot that supports up to 64GB of extra storage, offering double the capacity of the Moto E 4G’s microSD card slot. If, however, you’re thinking about swapping out the battery, you’re out of luck – even though the back cover is removable, this is sealed off and removing the cover will void the warranty.

Hardware and performance

Under the covers, the Smart Prime 6 has a quad-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor. It uses the Adreno 306 GPU, a graphics processor that won’t play processor heavy mobile 3D games smoothly, but is more than enough for casual games. In our tests, it ran Temple Run and Sonic Dash without any issues or lag. In fact, there wasn’t much in terms of lag anywhere at all when we tested the phone.

The Smart Prime 6 has 1GB of RAM and 8GB internal memory, around 5GB of which is usable after Android Lollipop 5.0.2 has been installed. A microSD card slot is available for anyone who needs up to 64GB more storage.

When we ran our benchmarks, we were pleasantly surprised with the performance results we got from such a budget phone. In our Geekbench 3 tests, the Smart Prime 6 scored of 1401 in its multicore component, narrowly being beaten by the Motorola Moto E 4G’s score of 1463. It’s single core component scored highly too, achieving a score of 464, matching the score of the Moto E 4G.

In SunSpider, a JavaScript benchmark, the Smart Prime 6 achieved a laggy score of 1301ms, with similar results in terms of graphics performance. We ran GFXBench and the Smart Prime 6 only managed 9.4fps in T-Rex and 3.8fps in Manhattan, beaten by the Moto E 4G’s 13fps in T-Rex and 6fps in Manhattan, making the Moto E 4G the better option for gaming.

The AnTuTu score was 21,842, and marked the Smart Prime 6’s general performance as ‘high performance’, surpassing 60 percent of other devices, as well as average battery performance and a poor game experience. Though the game performance was marked as poor, it still surpasses the 40 percent of other budget devices, an impressive feat for a sub-£100 smartphone.

Connectivity

One of the biggest selling points of the Smart Prime 6 is its 4G connectivity, allowing people to access faster internet without having to fork out hundreds for a new phone. Along with 4G connectivity, it also offers Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, GPS and FM radio functionality. It can also be used as a mobile hotspot, giving you access to 4G speeds on a Wi-Fi only tablet.

Cameras

The Smart Prime 6 has an 8Mp rear-facing camera with a maximum resolution of 3264x2448 pixels. Standard features include auto focus and an LED flash. As you can see