Despite currently being inexpensive, nevertheless, the Vodafone Smart N8 is rather lovely made, from its textured rear cover to its attractively designed edges.However, at 8.6mm thick and weighing 151g,it is both chunkier and more heavy than the Smart Prime 7.
At the front side, there is a 5-megapixel camera,an uncommon front-facing flash, and a single forward-firing speaker, which sounds interestingly very good. You’ll find a textured power buton and volume rocker on the right, a 3.5mm headphone jack at the top and a
micro-USB port on the botom.
Turn the mobile phone over and you’ll find its headline characteristic: the circular fingerprint reader. This is a excellent addition for a £100 smartphone (we don’t know of
any other mobile phone this cheap that offers one),and it adds a fast, safe way of unlocking your smartphone.
Take off the removable rear plastic cover and you will see a single SIM card slot and a
microSD card expansion slot that will accept cards up to 32GB in capacity – good for
expanding its 16GB internal storage. Unfortunately, the battery has shrunk from 2,540mAh on the Smart Prime 7 to 2,400 mAh here, and it’s non-removable as well.
The Smart N8’s 5in HD (720×1,280) IPS display is fairly bright at 374cd/m2, but it
is not in the best echelon of smartphone screens, and you might have problems viewing it in bright daylight. It’s really boring, too, with colours without vibrancy, saturation and precision.Despite its 1,560:1 contrast ratio, the screen suffers from a blue tinge, which is specifically noticeable when you’re browsing websites with a white-colored background.
The Mali-T720MP2 graphics chip is not anything to get thrilled about, also.
Running the demanding GFXBench Manhatan 3 benchmark, the Vodafone Smart N8 was not capable to produce anything like a smooth frame rate,ending up with 2fps in the offscreen test.You will have to stick with very simple games – no effects-heavy 3D titles.
Battery life is very poor as well. In our video playback test, the N8 lasted a mere 8h 44m,
and that implies the smartphone will struggle to last a full day on a single charge. By comparison,the Alcatel Pop 4 reached 9h 32m in the same test, while the Vodafone Smart Prime 7 achieved a much more amazing 12h 55m.
One of the large upgrades for the Smart N8 is the rear camera, which has received a
resolution increase from 8 to 13 megapixels.Overall performance, especially in HDR mode, is impressive for a sub-£100 smartphone.We found colour reproduction in our test shots to be largely precise, and photographs were filled with detail.
PROCESSOR Quad-core 1.3GHz Cortex-A53 – SCREEN SIZE
5in – SCREEN RESOLUTION 1,280×720 • REAR CAMERA 13
megapixels – STORAGE 16GB – WIRELESS DATA 4G •
DIMENSIONS 145x72x8.6mm – WEIGHT 151g – OPERATING
SYSTEM Android 7.0 – WARRANTY Two years RTB- Price:£85
Vodafone hasn’t modified its front-facing camera,but has included flash, which is one more
good inclusion. With a 5-megapixel sensor,though, don’t count on a great deal of detail.
The innovations go a long way towards eclipsing the Smart N8’s foibles. If it’s higher-end functions and a quality camera you want, at £85 this smartphone is a steal; no other
handset offers everything the Vodafone Smart N8 delivers to the table for this sort of cash.However, its bad battery life and slow performance do let it down relatively.
photo:Vodafone