One advantage of the fast pace of mobile phone development is that the trickle-down effect doesn’t take long to reach the rest of the market. Innovations and features seen on premium phones one year will reach the mid-range the next and budget handsets soon after.

This all works in favour of the Vodafone Smart Prime 6, a budget phone designed to make 4G accessible to everyone. I honestly didn’t know what to expect when I received the review unit, but once I spent some time with it, I ended up liking it.

With budget handsets, design is usually the first casualty. Yet this is not the case of the Smart Prime 6. The handset is surprisingly nice to hold and to look at. On the back, the case is rounded and the material feels premium. There is a Vodafone logo front and centre with a camera lens at the top. On the front, silver trim around the screen adds a bit of interest while providing a nice frame for the screen. Weighing in at 155g, the Smart Prime 6 isn’t the lightest phone in the world – but then, you’re not paying for small or light.

The Smart Prime 6 uses a Qualcomm MSM8916 Snapdragon 410 chipset. This is comprised of a quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A53 processor and Adreno 306 GPU and has 1GB of RAM in support. It has 8GB of onboard memory which is expandable to 64GB with microSD. These specifications won’t let you play the absolute latest games but it will be fine for productivity apps and general use.

The phone has a five-inch IPS display capable of 16 million colours at 720x1280 pixels and 294ppi. It’s a nice screen, full of detail and rich enough in colour to make using it a breeze. Web pages are bright, office apps are nicely rendered and the viewing angle is enough for just about any use even outside.

The camera on the back is an 8Mp snapper with an LED flash, autofocus, a panoramic feature and HDR. Pictures are nicely detailed, colour reproduction is pretty good and as long as you get the light right, the images are more than decent. It can shoot 1080p video at 30fps too. There is also the obligatory 2Mp selfie camera on the front.

The Smart Prime 6 is an Android phone running Android Lollipop 5.0.2. Unlike many self-branded phones, the Vodafone UI overlay is relatively thin and there is no bloatware or pointless apps. Android Lollipop is a solid phone OS that delivers everything we need it to. It’s slick, easy to use and the best version to date.

The Smart Prime 6 is a budget phone but you wouldn’t necessarily think so when using it. Sure, it’s not as fast as many premium phones, but that’s not what you’re buying. This is a phone for those who just want to call people, text, surf the web a bit, and watch a video or two. In that it delivers perfectly.

The phone comes with a Li-ion battery that is more than up to the task. During testing, I regularly ended the day with between 40 to 60 per cent battery left. That’s after a day of light to medium use with some calls, a few texts, a YouTube video or two, some Facebook use and a bit of web surfing. As smartphones go, that is very good indeed.

I think the Vodafone Smart Prime 6 is an excellent option for a budget handset. Considering the low price, there is enough performance and features to satisfy everyone. The design is good, the screen credible and the hardware included is everything you would expect and then a bit more.

Jesmond Darmanin is a technology enthusiast who has his own blog at www.itnewsblog.com.

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