Price right for no-frills Mini

Vodafone’s Smart Mini smartphone isn’t going to turn any heads with its looks.

Sit it on a desk and it isn’t going to attract a crowd wanting to pick it up and ask questions about it.

The Alcatel-made, Vodafone-branded Smart Mini is a no-frills piece of hardware that puts an affordable smartphone into the hands of those not wanting to spend many hundreds on a phone just to text their friends or check social media sites every once in a while. The Smart Mini is for them. Sure, it’s slow (it’s only packs a 1GB single core CPU and 512MB of memory), with webpages seemingly taking ages to load and there’s lag from when you open an app to it actually opening; there’s only 4GB of internal storage (expandable using a microSD card); the on-screen keyboard on the 3.5-inch (8.8 centimetres) screen is tiny – my son found it hard to type with – and it only sports a low-res 2MP rear-facing camera (640 x 480 resolution.

There’s no forward-facing camera) but it does come packed to the gunwales with apps (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Movie Studio, Google Maps Navigation).

So the Smart Mini won’t have the smartphone snobs proclaiming its prowess, but it has a silver lining: it’s priced well.

Anyway, for less than $100 you can’t expect HTC One or iPhone 5-like performance, and if you did, you’re dreaming.

But at $99, you’re not going to fly off the handle if little Johnny drops his smartphone on the cold, hard concrete of the changing rooms at the swimming pool. We’ve been there, got the postcard for that one. Different story if it were a $600 phone but $99? I’m not so sure.

Something to consider, though: the Smart Mini comes bundled with a Vodafone prepay SIM card and is network locked for the first nine months of ownership – unless you want to pay $30 and get it unlocked straight away. There’s an unlocked model available for $129.