Vodafone Smart review

Are personalised backplates enough to make this low-cost Android smartphone stand out?

Smart
TechRadar's definitive Vodafone Smart review

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You might have got the drift by now that the Vodafone Smart is a fairly mediocre handset, so you shouldn't be expecting anything really wowing about it in terms of media management and playback.

The Android music player is on hand to manage your tunes, and it has no trouble picking these up from a microSD card, though album art sitting beside our tracks in ID3 form wasn't always found.

Vodafone smart music player

You've got the usual shuffle and repeat options, as well as the ability to set up playlists. That's all fine and works smoothly without issue.

Sound output through the Vodafone Smart speaker was horribly tinny, and there's no equaliser on board for you to tailor your music playback at all.

Vodafone provides a very poor headset, which we immediately replaced with something better, but despite this we weren't able to fully compensate for the poor quality sound from the Smart itself.

Moving on, there's an FM radio that happily auto-filled 27 of the 40 available slots with stations in a minute or so. Again, output is tinny and not much improved by a reasonably good set of headphones.

There doesn't seem to be RDS, but you can rename stations by hand. There's a mute button on the radio, designed to look like a pause button, which you can tap if you need to stop the noise for a while.

Vodafone smart fm radio

You can get to the radio and the music player from the notifications bar, so you can easily control either from within another app.

Vodafone smart fm music player in notifications bar

Vodafone smart fm radio control in notifications bar

Moving on to video playback, the Vodafone Smart copes with MP4s and delivered movie trailers remarkably smoothly. But the widescreen viewing window is tiny, and colours very, very dark.

We don't think this latter problem was due to our samples, which we've played on a lot of handsets without the overabundance of blue tinge they received here.

The other way of getting video is via YouTube, and here we had mixed results. Again, the screen was really too dull and dark for full enjoyment, and videos were occasionally jerky to begin with. But, over Wi-Fi in particular, the Smart did well once it hit its stride.