Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
The music player on the Vodafone 845 is extremely basic and really lacks the processing power to be functional much beyond putting an album on listening to it.
Moving between tracks, albums and songs is a frustratingly slow and jumpy experience and the quality emitted from the internal speaker and the bundled in headphones is poor at best.
Again, it's all about managing your expectations of the handset. This is not an Apple iPhone with an iPod touch built right into the hub.
It's a free for £15 a month network-branded handset, which offers a decent enough music player that will store and play your music, enable you to move between artists, songs and albums and to create and store playlists.
Thanks to Android you can also continue listening to music while performing other tasks on the phone and relatively quickly summon the music player back using the omni-present notifications tab that is dragged down from the top of the screen.
However, that tab isn't always a blessing. Sometimes, screen items are so close to the top that you'll inadvertently summon the notifications when you're trying to just return to your Facebook profile page.
Music can be downloaded from the Vodafone Music Shop, which the network has conveniently placed as an icon front and centre on the Home screen. The interface allows you to subscribe to music or buy individual tracks as well as preview music, complete with album art.
However, you can only download over 3G, so you'll need to switch off the Wi-Fi and return to the shop. That's hopelessly backwards. Also as the interface moves between screens, you're almost constantly greeted by a hugely annoying, rotating cubes Vodafone animation.
We instantly deleted that icon from the Home screen and replaced it with the free Amazon MP3 app, which will enable tracks to be downloaded to the device easily and cheaply.
The music player can play MP3, WAV and AAC files, so in the main, dragging and dropping stuff onto the microSD card will mean you're good to go.
The video player is also pretty standard, and the high quality movie trailers we transferred onto the device actually looked pretty clear and crisp.
At just 2.8-inches though, it's hardly the ideal device for admiring the cinematic beauty of Citizen Kane. The player can handle a modest array of formats; MP4, H.263 and H.264.
There's also a decent FM radio on board, with the bundled-in headphones assisting as an antenna. Inputting your chosen frequencies is extremely simple and fine turning is easy from there. You can also save your favourite channels, but as expected, there's no means of recording radio.
When it comes to YouTube, the Android Home screen widget is also very handy too. It'll directly open the video camera, allow you to capture footage and then move directly to the upload screen.
It's a great little feature that's more of a reflection of having Android 2.1 on the phone, rather than the quality of the phone itself.
When it comes to YouTube, the Android Home screen widget is also very handy too. It'll directly open the video camera, allow you to capture footage and then move directly to the upload screen.
It's a great little feature that's more of a reflection of having Android 2.1 on the phone, rather than the quality of the phone itself.
