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A smartphone is nothing without good web access. The Vodafone Smart doesn't do too well on this count, to be perfectly frank. In fact it has multiple failings.
Firstly, there's the lack of Flash support. Pop along to the BBC News website, and these days you have the right to fully expect to be able to stream video from it. But sadly that's not possible.
Secondly, there's the problem of slow loading. Even given that the processor runs at just 528MHz, we expected the web to be a tad more speedy than it is. The pauses while new pages were found and loaded had us nearly tearing our hair out in frustration.
Next we're stung by the low screen size and resolution. 2.8 inches and 240 x 320 pixels just don't cut it for web browsing. You can't see enough of many pages at any one time on first load, although scrolling down does let you see more.
A double-tap gets you into a fullscreen view, but at this size text is often too small to read.
To add insult to injury, there's the lack of pinch to zoom. Why this is missing from the Vodafone, with its capacitive screen, we can't understand at all. Is this the start of a trend? We know that the capacitive Samsung Galaxy Pro doesn't have pinch to zoom either.
Zooming is achieved using a couple of icons on screen, and you move in and out in smallish increments. The saving grace is that text reflowing goes to a high zoom level, so at least you're saved a lot of horizontal scrolling.
Pinch to zoom, incidentally, is vital for a lot of games, and its absence will be a real annoyance if you're a gaming fan. Angry Birds is rendered pretty much unplayable without it, for example.
With these factors hampering web use, we have to say that we'd find it hard to recommend the Vodafone Smart to anyone interested in the mobile web.
