Review: Vodafone Smart 2
Review: Vodafone Smart 2
Introduction
We weren't great fans of the original Vodafone Smart. The general specifications were just too poor to do Android justice. But undaunted, Vodafone has continued with the Smart line, and the new handset, the Vodafone Smart 2 (or Vodafone Smart II, if you prefer), has been launched.
The Vodafone Smart 2 costs £70 (about $108) and comes in either grey or white. Vodafone has upped the dreadful screen resolution of its predecessor and generally raised the specs.
So, with the original Smart having had a price drop to £40 (about $62), is it worth paying the extra for the Vodafone Smart 2? The decision has to be based not only on what the new Vodafone Smart 2 offers, but also on how it compares to other handsets of a similar price. And there are quite a few of them.
For example, the Huawei Ascend G300 is also sold for £100 (around $160) on Pay As You Go, the HTC Wildfire S costs £135/$180 on PAYG, and the Orange San Francisco 2 costs just £85 (around $130) on Pay As You Go. That's not the full spectrum in this crowded segment, either.
The Vodafone Smart 2 is a small handset - child sized, you might say. The chassis is a bit thick, at 12.35mm, but it is easy to reach across the 58mm of width for full screen usage one-handed, and at 109mm tall the handset is unlikely to poke out the top of a pocket. You probably won't notice the 120g weight either.
The build is really solid - we couldn't flex the phone at all in our hands. Its rounded edges look quite smart, though there's nothing particularly different or alluring about the general design.
Until you pull the backplate off. It is quite difficult to remove, but when it's off you'll see that the phone's backplate is made from two sections - an outer frame and an inner plate. Vodafone isn't touting a personalisation feature for the backplate as it did for the original Smart, and we can't quite see why there's a two-piece backplate system here.
Vodafone seems to have made all the right choices with regards to button placement on the phone. The headset connector is on the top alongside the main power switch, while the USB connector is on the bottom edge. The left edge is clear, while the right edge houses a volume rocker and camera button.
Vodafone has upped the general specifications on the original Smart, with a 3.2-inch 480 x 320 pixel screen replacing the old pretty dire 2.8-inch 240 x 320 display, and a 3 megapixel camera replacing the old 2 megapixel one.
There's also 802.11n support that wasn't there before, a slight raise on internal storage from 130MB to 150MB, and an 832MHz Broadcom processor in place of the old 528MHz model. It isn't a great set of general specs, but it is a step forward.
We say Vodafone has upped the specs, but really it's Alcatel who has done this, since it made the handset for Vodafone to sell.
Interface
With Android 2.3.5 running the show and this being a budget smartphone, you might expect the Vodafone Smart 2 to look quite familiar. But Vodafone has done a bit of skinning and provided a fair few widgets to help owners feel they've got something quite personal going on here.
The small screen can get a bit busy, though. Right out of the box the main screen - one of five - is peppered with widgets, and as you scroll left and right there are more to be found. We rather like the way Vodafone has made an effort to enhance Android in this way.
Vodafone hasn't got it all right, though. Pull down the notification bar and there's no quick access to wireless settings. For that you need to occupy part of another home screen with a widget. We prefer the ever-present notification bar option.
Beyond the ability to fill home screens with widgets, you are into pretty standard Android territory. At the bottom of each home screen there's the familiar icon bar with its shortcuts to the dialler, web browser and apps menu.
Hold down the apps icon and tiny thumbnails of each of the home screens pop up, and you can tap one to go directly to it. It isn't that much quicker than sweeping, and the icons are so small that you can barely identify what's on each screen. On a larger screened, higher resolution phone this might be a nice feature, but here it's a bit lost.
Tap the apps icon and of course you are into the familiar-looking apps menu.
Screen size and quality is a bit of an issue. The screen is fairly small at 3.2 inches, and its 480 x 320 pixels don't give it the highest resolution. It can be tricky to see detail, and outdoors the panel is quite hard to read.
But the touch responsiveness is good, with the handset happy to move swiftly between screens and respond to taps. You might find if your hands are larger than a child's that it can be difficult to hit smaller icons, though.
Beneath the screen the four Android buttons for Home, Menu, Back and Search functions are also responsive.
Contacts, calling and messaging
Contacts are drawn in from social networks and email accounts, although you are a bit limited on account support on the Vodafone Smart 2 - just Twitter, Facebook, Google and Exchange are supported. It's going to be enough for most of us though, and signing in to these is easy.
The standard Android user interface is used for contacts, so you've got the dialler, call log, contacts and favourites shortcuts sitting at the head of the screen.
Individuals are named and identified with thumbnail pictures if you have them. If you aren't on any social networks and have no Gmail contacts, then the handset will just pick up existing contacts from your SIM.
It is annoying that there's no smart dialling support. We expect this from even the least expensive handsets, but start to tap out numbers on the dial pad here and it's notably not present.
When you add a new contact to the handset you can either keep it just on the phone or have it sync with Google. That's a nice capability of course, because it means you can get all your new mates into the cloud at the earliest possible moment.
Calling
Call quality was good, and Vodafone has implemented a couple of features we first saw only on the highest quality handsets, which have now filtered down to the sub-£100 smartphone level.
First there's the 'flip to silence' trick: when the phone is ringing and you don't want to take a call, turn it face down and it'll go to voicemail. Second there's the 'louder ringtone' trick. When the Vodafone Smart 2 is in a pocket it rings more loudly than when it is out in the open.
Messaging
Fortunately the messaging system on the Vodafone Smart 2 does include smart dialling support. Start to tap out a contact name or number and the selection narrows down until only the one you want is listed (unless you somehow know more than one Dan Smith).
We can have screen responsiveness issues with lower cost, small-screened handsets, but that wasn't an issue on the Vodafone Smart 2. When we hit the right keys we were able to tap out messages quite quickly, thanks to good responsiveness.
But the keyboard is just a bit small for us and we found tapping out messages on the screen with complete accuracy a bit of a challenge.
You may be helped by the presence of Swype if you find the system works for you, but we found we were much more comfortable switching from portrait to landscape orientation.
But in doing so we encountered a separate issue. In portrait screen mode you can see some of the message trail, while in landscape screen mode you can't.
When you're in Swype keyboard mode, there are second characters on the main keys, with a long press bringing up a bank of even more characters for you to choose from. And often the choices are quite expansive.
There's a nice numeric keyboard and an edit keyboard too, which helps particularly with working in longer texts, such as when you are writing an email.
Switch out of Swype mode to the standard Android keyboard and the second functions and edit keyboards are no longer available. Fortunately switching is easily done using a settings key on the keyboard itself.
Internet, maps and apps
The internet access on the Vodafone Smart 2 is assisted by 802.11n Wi-Fi support when you are near a network and 3G - the original Vodafone Smart only runs to b and g internet connections, which means things can be a little slower.
We found that pages resolved quite quickly when they were mobile formatted, but slower when we went over to the full site. Mobile sites were also easier to read on the smartphone's small screen - remember it measures just 3.2 inches and delivers 480 x 320 pixels.
Taking the TechRadar site as an example, it was just a few seconds before we were in to the mobile formatted site, and this looks fine on the handset.
But it took 50 seconds to resolve the full site over Wi-Fi, and of course it wasn't possible to read anything much until we zoomed in.
Zooming is a little tricky in full page views, because it can be hard not to accidentally tap on a link you didn't mean to. Text reflow is also a bit iffy - it doesn't always work and we often found we needed to do a little pinching to tweak text to make it readable.
What we saw here in terms of speed and readability was far better than on the original Smart, but still not a patch on a handset with a better resolution screen. We know that people looking at the Vodafone Smart 2 are going to be on a budget, but it's still hard to recommend this handset for web fans.
Maps and apps
Vodafone has decided that Google Play on its own isn't good enough for the discerning customer, so it adds its own AppSelect application. The idea is that via this, Vodafone cherry picks the best apps so you don't have to trawl through Google's app store.
We've already noted Vodafone's apps. Among these there's a notifications widget that brings together email, Gmail and SMS notifications and links you into your contacts. We also like the little weather widget that, when tapped, gives you forecast information from AccuWeather. It's not as fancy as some, but it does an efficient job.
MobiSystem Office Suite is here too, and this can be used to read Microsoft Office-compatible files. Vodafone also includes its own clock, which has a stopwatch and alarms.
It isn't a particularly expansive range of pre-loaded apps, but Google Play has plenty on offer to download.
As for maps, the ubiquitous Google Maps makes its presence felt, and of course there is GPS to help it to get a lock when you are out and about. It performed well for us, and the GPS managed to get a lock on our location fairly quickly, even when we were sitting indoors by a window.
However, the small screen size and poor outdoors visibility made using Google Maps for our usual guidance on walking trips rather difficult.
Camera
We were distinctly unimpressed with the original Vodafone Smart's 2MP camera. With the capability lifted to 3 megapixels, we had slightly higher hopes for the Vodafone Smart 2, but even so the camera is not particularly hot.
It is always nice to see an LED flash make an appearance, and we're appreciative of the side button too, which gives you quick launch access to the camera.
It also has a 4x zoom, but there are few shooting modes to speak of, although you do get a couple of effects that the original Smart lacked. Mono and Sepia modes make an appearance this time around, along with Negative, Sketch and Embossed Mono shooting modes. There are also white balance settings for Incandescent, Daylight, Fluorescent and Cloudy conditions, as well as an Auto setting.
Accessing the settings is via a side bar that pops out when you tap an icon on the left side of the screen, but in the case of the shooting modes you have to scroll down past exposure, image size and picture quality settings to get to them, which is a bit tedious.
We sometimes found it challenging to frame outdoor shots, because of the difficulty in seeing the screen outside, particularly on brighter days.
Click here to see the full resolution image
Despite lacking a macro mode, this shot is surprisingly good. The colours are a bit washed out, but close-up focus and depth within the image isn't too bad.
Click here to see the full resolution image
Photographs of views tended to lack definition, and the sky was definitely not that white in real life.
Click here to see the full resolution image
The Sketch Mode filter was often quite productive, delivering interesting photos with some neat-looking effects.
Click here to see the full resolution image
Applying the Mono Emboss filter was pretty much a waste of time on most occasions. Images were always dark and difficult to decipher.
Video
The original Vodafone Smart was limited to a video resolution of 352 x 288. On the Vodafone Smart 2 the VGA camera's filming resolution rises, but not much, to 640 x 480 pixels, and it records at 15fps.
The same range of colour effects are here as with stills shooting - Mono, Sepia, Negative, Sketch and Embossed - and you've got the white balance settings of Incandescent, Daylight, Fluorescent, Cloudy and Auto replicated from the stills camera too.
It's not the greatest range of settings we've seen, and in general we found video quality to be average, with some jerkiness creeping in at times.
Media
Music playback on the Vodafone Smart 2 is via the Android player, with the player resolutely refusing to pick up our album art from a microSD card. The microSD card slot is under the battery - which is the worst place it can possibly be. A maximum card size of 32GB boosts the 150MB of internal storage.
The handset speaker is really quite tinny and treble-rich. Maximum volume is loud enough to deliver gentle background music to whatever you are doing, but the volume doesn't go very high, which will probably make commuters happy.
The provided headphones have those flat, in-ear buds that never stay in our ears. They deliver treble-heavy music that isn't greatly improved on by better quality headphones.
A basic music widget gives you playback control from a home screen, and there's also a link to the music player in the notifications area when tunes are playing.
Vodafone's music shop app is pre-installed, should you want to buy from it.
There's an FM radio onboard too, and while this has been designed differently to that found on the original Vodafone Smart, it works in a very similar way. Auto search populates slots automatically, and it found 25 channels for us really quickly.
The screen display is pretty informative, and sound quality perfectly acceptable for voice-based programmes through both earphones and loudspeaker. Music radio programmes suffer from the same treble-rich quality as our own tunes, though.
Video playback is not too bad on the Vodafone Smart 2, with the handset's screen delivering surprisingly bright and vivid video. The screen is too small for making video watching an everyday activity, but it should be OK for a bit of YouTube clips or some emergency TV catch-up from time to time.
And as an added little bonus there's a YouTube app, which streamed well for us over Wi-Fi and HSDPA internet connections, although video was a bit on the dull and gloomy side and, as we've noted elsewhere, almost unwatchable outdoors due to screen visibility issues.
Battery life and connectivity
Battery life is an area where Vodafone seems to have dropped the ball as far as upgrading the original Smart is concerned. With a 1200mAh battery, the new Vodafone Smart 2 has the same spec as its predecessor.
Vodafone says you can get 7.5 hours of 3G talktime and 300 hours on standby - a massive rise from the 4.5 hours it suggested you'd get for the original Smart (which offered 380 hours of standby). That's despite the Vodafone Smart 2's battery having to push a bigger screen and drive a faster processor.
After an average morning we depleted the battery to half way. By the middle of the average afternoon we were starting to feel the need for mains power.
When we wanted to listen to music on a daily commute, or use the GPS to get us from A to B, we could run out of battery by lunchtime. We don't think any user should expect a full 24 hours between charges.
Our experience was actually worse than it was on the original Smart, so our advice is always carry a charge cable.
Connectivity bases are well covered for a low-cost handset. There's 802.11n internet, Bluetooth 2.1, GPS and HSDPA, but no DLNA.
Hands on and official gallery
Verdict
We weren't fans of the original Vodafone Smart, and we can't say the Vodafone Smart 2 does a lot to bring us on side. Yes it is small, yes it isn't all that expensive, but we don't think it is really a very good value smartphone.
Certainly if we compare it to the slightly more expensive Orange San Francisco 2, which we thought wasn't quite such a giant leap forward as its predecessor, the Vodafone Smart 2 falls down as being a less giant leap forward than its own predecessor.
If we were recommending a budget handset, we'd probably advise spending a little more if you possibly can and buying something like the HTC Wildfire S.
We liked
The build quality is good. This is a solid handset that should take the knocks well.
The screen responsiveness is great, too. We can find that budget handsets don't respond well to taps, sweeps and swipes, but that criticism can't be levelled here.
We disliked
Video shooting is limited to a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, and we found videos could be jerky and generally poor quality.
There's no smart dialling, which seems to us to be a tragic oversight.
The battery life is one of the poorer we've seen from a smartphone, and oddly it seems to be worse than that of the original Vodafone Smart.
Final verdict
Vodafone is clearly keen on its Smart line, and wants to build it. The starting point of the original Smart certainly gave plenty of scope, but Vodafone hasn't grasped the nettle very forcefully here. Any updated phone whose battery life is worse than its predecessor is asking for trouble in a review.
The Vodafone Smart 2 doesn't deliver enough bang for your buck, in our view - and there are better handsets out there for the budget level.
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