Vodafone Smart Prime 6 – Software

The Vodafone Smart Prime 6 uses the latest version of Google’s operating system, Android Lollipop. The handset we reviewed really benefits from running on the new Android 5.0 Lollipop; the best part is the ‘material design’ aesthetic. This puts Android on level footing with Apple’s iOS in terms of user experience, and adds huge value to an otherwise budget handset.

Vodafone also chose to stay mostly true to stock Android, which will please Google purists. The Smart Prime 6 has a smattering of branded apps, but it’s otherwise raw Lollipop. The bundled apps are quite basic: you can use them to check your Vodafone account, download Vodafone apps, or make contactless payments with SmartPass.

Unfortunately, you can’t actually uninstall any of the Vodafone apps. You have the option to disable them, but they’ll still be contained within the phone’s memory. That’s not great on a smartphone that only ships with 8GB of built-in storage.

Related: Android M features: What’s new?

Vodafone Smart Prime 6 – Performance

For £79, you’d half expect the Smart Prime 6 to pack the processing power of a Nintendo GameBoy. Fortunately, Vodafone squeezed every last penny of its budget into this phone. The handset runs on a quad-core Snapdragon 410 chip clocked at 1.21GHz, an Adreno 306 GPU for gaming,  and 1GB of RAM. There’s also 8GB of built-in storage, which you can expand by a further 64GB using a microSD card. You’ll want to do that as well, as there’s only around 4GB of storage free after the Android install.

We tested the Vodafone Smart Prime 6 using the Geekbench 3 benchmark. While it’s not a definitive metric for judging a smartphone’s power, it does give us a rough idea of how a smartphone fares against its rivals. Over five tests, the smartphone scored an average result of 1,445. That’s what we expect from a low-power processor.

How did that translate to real-world performance? We find that once apps are running, they tend to operate without too much complaint. Booting up heavy apps like Spotify, Facebook, or RunKeeper is a sluggish affair, however. Our set-up launch of Spotify was particularly stressful; the handset became inoperable for about three minutes.

Hence, the biggest problem with the Smart Prime 6 is how lethargic it is at times. It will be fine one minute, and then cripplingly slow the next. Using this smartphone everyday is a frustrating experience when you’re trying to get simple daily tasks done.