Vodafone Smart Speed 6
The Vodafone Smart Speed 6 is the little brother to the Smart Ultra 6 and Smart Prime 6, two of our favourite budget smartphones on the market at the moment – they are first and third in our best budget smartphone charts on page 130. With these two previous handsets surprising us in terms of value for money, we were expecting great things from the Smart Speed 6.
Design
The Vodafone Smart Speed 6 is a budget smartphone, so you can’t expect it to be as sleek as, for example, the Samsung Galaxy S6 or the LG G4, but it can still hold its own against other budget smartphones on the market. It has a plastic body that feels cheap in the hand, but when you consider it costs only £50, you can let it slide. It’s available in two colours – silver or ‘anthracite’ (dark grey).
It’s a bulky smartphone. However, even though it feels weighty at 146g, it’s 9g lighter than the Smart Prime 6, which weighs 155g. Even with its weight, the Smart Speed 6 is comfortable to hold for long periods of time due to its curved rear, which helps it fit snugly into your hand.
It measures 132.2x65.1x10mm and houses a 4.5in display, which gives the Smart Speed 6 a 64.8 percent screen-to-body ratio. The bezels are thick around the edges of the screen, but again, for only £50 you can’t expect an edge-to-edge display. The advantage to having a sub 5in display is that it’ll feel comfortable to use one-handed, as we were able to reach from one side of the display to the other with ease.
Hardware and performance
As we’ve touched on, the Smart Speed 6 has a 4.5in IPS display, although we can’t describe it as HD as it has a resolution of 480x854, which equates to around 218 pixels per inch. It’s not the brightest of screens either, and we had trouble using it in direct sunlight, particularly when trying to read text. That may have something to do with the low resolution, as text isn’t as sharp and easy to read as it is on other devices. Even the Smart Prime 6, which costs only £30 more, has a larger, 720p HD display.
Inside is a quad-core 1GHz Mediatek MT6735M CPU coupled with a Mali-T720 GPU and 1GB of RAM. By itself this isn’t impressive, but coupled with a low resolution 5.5fps compared to 3.8fps. When we ran Geekbench 3, it was a different story as it relies solely on the CPU and not graphical power. In singlecore mode, the Smart Speed 6 scored 457 and in multi-core mode, we recorded 1258. To put this into some perspective, the Smart Prime 6 managed 464 in single-core mode and 1401 in multi-core mode. It’s not much of a surprise though, as we experienced intermittent lag when using the device, even when swiping between the home screen menus. While the Smart Speed 6 will suffice for standard web browsing, calling and texting, we wouldn’t hold our breath with regards to gaming.
Storage wise, there’s only an 8GB option available, and discounting the Android OS and Vodafone apps,