Vodafone Smart 4 Power: unremarkable 4G device with long battery life

Cons

• Little storage space
• Mediocre screen compared to the competition

Phones with support for 4g are not new anymore; almost all high-end devices support it and quite a few midrange phones can also handle it. 4G has not yet really penetrated the cheaper segments and Vodafone wants to change that. The telecom giant has therefore had two relatively cheap 4G devices developed in China and is launching them on the Dutch market under its own flag. These are the Vodafone Smart 4 Turbo and the Smart 4 Power. We discuss the latter, which goes over the counter for 199 euros, in this review.

Casing and screen

The Smart 4 Power is a 5″ phone, about the same size as the top models of brands such as Samsung, HTC and Sony. The casing has rounded corners and a back that curves slightly towards the sides of the device, so that the phone is comfortable to hold, although it is on the heavy side.The power button and volume buttons are on the right, the headphone output is at the top and the micro-usb port for the charger is at the bottom.

The back is interchangeable and by removing it you gain access to the SIM card slot, a micro SD card reader and the battery, which it is not intended for users to remove. If we turn the phone over again, we find three touch-sensitive buttons on the front below the screen: back, home and menu. By long pressing the menu button you can switch between open apps. We would have preferred to see that functionality reversed, because almost no app uses the menu button these days.

The 5″ screen has a resolution of 960×540 pixels, which means it’s not very sharp. Photos and other types of images are easy to view, but especially with text you see jagged edges. We prefer resolutions of 1280×720 pixels with phones of this size or higher. Furthermore, the screen is on the blue side and the primary colors are not reproduced faithfully. In addition, you see considerable color shifts when you view the screen from a diagonal angle. What speaks for the screen, is that it is laminated, which helps to prevent reflections, and that both brightness and contrast are in order.

Hardware, performance and battery life

The Smart 4 Power is powered by a processor from MediaTek, the MTK6582M. This contains four fairly economical Cortex A7 cores at 1.3 GHz and a Mali GPU. There are also 1GB of RAM and 4GB of storage capacity. All of that leads to the Smart 4 Power performing about as much as you’d expect from a phone in this price range; the phone works well, but it doesn’t always go completely smoothly. The graphics chip is also not very powerful, so games will lower the image quality to keep everything playable.

In the wireless field, the Smart 4 Power has support for WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and of course 4G, the spearhead of this phone. The connection to the network is fine; the phone retains the signal well and we had no trouble reaching speeds of 30Mbit/s at our office, which puts the Smart 4 Power on a par with more expensive 4g devices.

In addition to 4G support, the large battery is a second spearhead of the Smart 4 Power. The capacity of 3000mAh is equal to that of much more expensive phones, but because the device has relatively simple hardware and a low screen resolution, the power consumption is lower. We could clearly observe the effect of that combination in our battery tests. With both web browsing and video watching, the phone lasts above average and with a bit of quiet use you should definitely be able to make it to two days.

Software

The Smart 4 Power runs on Android 4.4.2, one of the latest versions of the operating system, and Vodafone hasn’t changed an awful lot about the look. The telco does provide a lot of applications. A total of fourteen extra apps are included, ten of which bear the Vodafone label, but not all of which are equally useful.

If the Smart 4 Power was overflowing with storage capacity, that wouldn’t have been a big problem, but because the phone has hardly any free space, we don’t think it’s a good move from Vodafone. In practice, there is only 2GB of space available for apps and games, and you will soon reach that. That quickly turned out to be frustrating; if we wanted to install a new game or other big app, we had to uninstall old apps first. The phone has a micro SD slot, so you can store photos and videos on a micro SD card, but there are hardly any apps that can be installed on such a card.

Vodafone has equipped the device with a 5-megapixel camera on the back and a camera with a resolution of 0.3 megapixel on the front. The quality of both cameras is nothing to write home about. The camera on the back is not very sensitive to light and photos are therefore quickly out of focus, and the front cam has such a low resolution that almost everything looks blurry.

Conclusion

With the Smart 4 Power, Vodafone aims to deliver a decent 4G phone for less than two hundred euros. That was partly successful; the casing is fine, the performance for a device in this price range is also good and the battery life is nice and long. Still, we’re not crazy about the Smart 4 Power. The image quality is not special, the phone is quite heavy and the biggest stumbling block in practice is the small amount of storage space. Add to that the fact that there are other devices, such as the 4g variant of the Moto G or the LG G2 mini, that deliver more for the same money, and we have to conclude that the phone does not rise above ground level.