Vodafone Smart II review

The Vodafone Smart II is a re-packaged Alcatel V860 smartphone and at £70 on pay-as-you-go, it really is priced to sell. Its specification isn’t that exciting in comparison to the likes of the Apple iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy S3, but it’s not at all bad in the context of a £70 smartphone. The Smart II has an 800MHz single-core processor, 512MB of RAM and a 3.2in display with a 480×320 resolution.

Understandably, its storage is limited, with the Smart II only having 150MB of internal storage space, of which around 129MB is available for apps. Fortunately, the Smart II comes with a 2GB microSD card, so you do have some room for your media and documents.

The Smart II’s display may not have a high resolution, but it certainly doesn’t look that bad, especially when compared to that of the LG Optimus L3. Similarly, the 3.2in screen size doesn’t sound large, but it’s good enough for basic Android use. Annoyingly, its display is slightly reflective and it has very poor viewing angles, which means you have to look at it face-on or else you might not be able to see text properly.

The Smart II’s 3.2in screen makes web browsing hard work, but not as much as its virtual keyboard, which gave us more trouble than any other phone’s keyboard, with the possible exception of the BlackBerry Curve 9320’s physical keyboard. We regularly mistyped URLs in portrait orientation, and although we had better luck typing in landscape, we still couldn’t type as accurately on the Smart II as we can on other smartphones. The Smart II rendered the BBC News home page in 16 seconds. That’s slow in comparison to faster phones such as the Galaxy Ace 2, which rendered it in 10 seconds, but not too dissimilar to phones such as the LG Optimus L7.

Sadly, we sometimes we’d have to wait for what seemed an eternity before the Smart II responded to our commands. Typically, it’d be an amalgam of the commands that resulted in something we didn’t want to happen. The animations are jerky, too.

We also had problems viewing videos. Initially, the Smart II couldn’t view any of our videos, so we installed MX Player and its latest collection of codecs. We could then play our WMV, MOV and Xvid files, but they were much too slow to watch. We did have luck with lower quality YouTube videos, though, so the Smart II’s perfect if you just want to watch basic online content. Perhaps more serious was our inability to install BBC iPlayer. It appeared in Google Play, but we couldn’t download it.

The Smart II comes with the usual navigation, media player and productivity viewer apps, and we were able to view our MS Office and PDF files. They were very slow to load, but at least the Smart II lets you view them on the move should you need to. It also comes with some games, such as Texas Hold ‘Em and Tetris, although these are actually just demos.

The Smart II’s a better phone than the similarly priced LG Optimus L3, but we still think you’d be better off spending an extra £30 and getting the Huawei Ascend G 300 . The G300 is smoother, more responsive and has a larger screen.