Vodafone Smart Prime 7 review

At the core of the Vodafone Smart Prime 7 is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 210, which is a quad-core chip with a processor speed of 1.1GHz and an Adreno 304 GPU.

There's also 1GB of RAM, which is a bit measly these days, although I didn't find it a massive issue; RAM does help keep a phone feeling fluid though, and the more of it you have the better as a rule.

One thing to note is that the Vodafone Smart Prime 7 does not support 5GHz Wi-Fi. This is a shame, because 2.4GHz Wi-Fi is often congested and slow, especially if you live in a busy town or city. It does, however, support Wireless N, which means you should see Wi-Fi speeds of up to 300Mbps in perfect conditions – although that's highly unlikely in the real world.

I did some of the usual tests – gaming with Real Racing 3, and general Google Play app downloads – and felt that apps were a little slower to install on this phone than some more premium models, but not so much so that it was a real concern.

Real Racing ran beautifully too, with loads of detail and none of the stuttering you might see on an underpowered phone.

I used Geekbench to get an idea of how the handset performed in a synthetic test, and it was pretty much as I expected. The Smart Prime 7 isn't going to set any speed records, and it came in slower than the Moto G in both single-core and multi-core tests.

Benchmarks are meaningless to most users, though, and the phone itself feels responsive all the times I've picked it up – so be guided by that, rather than by the Geekbench results.

Battery life

There are a few things that suggest the Vodafone Smart Prime 7 should be optimised for long battery life. Remember that slightly lower screen resolution? Well, that helps to keep the power flowing for longer.

There's also the fact that the Snapdragon 210 is designed to offer 4G while keeping the phone running efficiently. And finally, there's the fact that the battery is reasonably high-capacity for a small phone.

Sure enough, with light to moderate use you'll easily get up to 24 hours of battery life. Even after running our standard battery test for 90 minutes with the screen on maximum brightness, and some more typical use – taking a few snaps and general tweeting and emailing – the handset was showing well over half a charge. That's decent, actually, and will suit those who aren't constantly checking their phones.

Speaking of that battery test, it knocked 15% off the charge. That's a respectable figure, and compares well to some high-end phones, which suffer on account of their fancy screens and faster processors – the HTC 10, for example, lost 22% of its battery in the same test.