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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.
