Vodafone Smart N8 is built for media and has a fingerprint scanner for under £100

Vodafone has just launched the Smart N8, a new affordable handset with dual front-facing speakers and a 5.0-inch 720 x 1280 screen, making it a promising option for music and video on a budget.

That screen comes in at 293 pixels per inch and you can unlock it quickly with the rear-facing fingerprint scanner.

You don’t always get dual speakers and fingerprint scanners on phones as cheap as this, so those definitely look to be the high points, but it sounds like the Vodafone Smart N8 has the basics covered too, with a 1.25GHz quad-core MediaTek chipset, 1.5GB of RAM, a 13MP rear camera with a flash and a 5MP front-facing camera.

Other specs include a 2,400mAh battery, 16GB of storage and a microSD card slot with support for cards limited up to only 32GB. It also has parental controls built in, which should make it a suitable phone to give to kids.

One of the cheapest around

The Vodafone Smart N8 has a plastic build, runs Android 7 and is available now for just £85 on pay as you go, or you can grab it on contract from £19 per month. 

With prices like that it undercuts almost everything, even coming in significantly cheaper than freshly launched entry-level Moto E4.

And Vodafone has a reasonable track record with affordable phones. We awarded last year’s £75 Vodafone Smart Prime 7 3.5 stars for example. Though we complained that you could only record video in 720p quality, and that hasn’t changed here, so if you’re a budding film maker you might want to spend a bit more.

• There are lots more affordable phones to choose from in our best cheap phones list