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Opening the latest smartphone offering from Vodafone was a little confusing.  I was expecting the product to be a Huawei P smart 2019 handset which Huawei was targeted at users who were looking for a reasonably price handset, with a price tag of sub-£200, but the box containing the handset was embellished with the letters “VX” along with the Huawei logo and the year 2019.  However further checking of the box revealed a label stating that this was the Midnight Black version of the Huawei P smart 2019.  Other colour scenes available include Aurora Blue and Turquoise Blue.

With dimensions of 155.2 x 73.4 x 8 mm (H x W x D) and weighing 168g, this Huawei mobile device should fit comfortable in the hand of most users.  Unlike a couple of other handsets I have looked at recently, this particular model does not tend to suffer from a soap bar syndrome by slipping and sliding at every opportunity when held or placed on a flat surface.

Rather than go for a Gorilla Glass encased body, Huawei has taken the economic option of fitting a plastic rear cover to the unit.  This has the advantage of reducing the cost and weight of the handset.  However it could increase the chances of scruff marks making an appearance unless you purchase a clear case that can fit over the back and provide extra protection against such damage.

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Dominating the front of the handset is a Dewdrop notch display measuring 6.21-inch.  Whoever had access to this handset before me had fitted a  clear plastic sheet over the screen but this had resulted with numerous air bubble defacing the handset’s screen and so I quickly removed it to get the full benefit of the screen’s resolution of 2340 x 1080 pixels.  During the handset's boot-up sequence, I felt the screen delivered a rather darken view and was not of the standard I have come to expect from other Huawei handsets.  Fortunately the screen tended to brighten up once boot-up was completed.  The screen is a LYPS IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen model with a screen-to-body ratio of ~83.1% and a PPI density of ~415.

Arranged around the outside edge of the handset are various options.  On the right side of the handset are a rocker unit for adjusting volume and zoom levels plus the power button which requires a three-second depress to instigate the booting-up process.  Arranged along the bottom edge of the handset are a speaker outlet, USB port and a 3.5 mm jack socket for attaching the supplied set of earbuds or another headset.  I was a little surprised to discover that Huawei had opted to go with a microbus port rather than the latest Type C port.  Positioned on the top left corner of the handset is a pop-out tray (tool included) that can contain dual nano SIMs or a nano SIM and Micro SD card to increase available storage capacity.  As a result the left edge of the handset is free from any options.

Front and rear-mounted cameras are available for capturing still images and video clips.  The front-mounted camera is an 8MP f/2.0 wide aperture for capturing Selfies using its fixed focus lens.  Taking on the role of the handset’s main camera is a combination of a 13MP f/1.8 4 camera featuring phase detection and autofocus plus a 2MP camera for depth sensing.  This combination has support for modes that include night, portrait, panorama and time lapse. 

With the twin camera lens facility tucked away in the top left corner of the rear of the handset, plenty of room is available for the fingerprint reader on the rear of the device.  Its central positioning gives the user easy access for this feature.

The Huawei P smart 2019 is built around the Hilisicon Kirin 719 chipset which is made up of an Octa-core (4 x 2.2GHz Cortex-A73 and 4 x 1.7 GHz Cortex-A53 ( CPU) backed up a Mali-G5` MP4 GPU.  As standard you get 3GB of RAM with either 32/64GB of internal storage with an option to increase this through the addition of a microSD card.

As this is a Huawei handset, it should come as no surprise to discover that the operating system is a combination of Android overlaid with EMUI.  In this case you get Android 9.0 (Pie) and EMUI 9.

Providing the power for this handset is a non-removable Li-ion, 3400 mAh battery  Running a series of video clips, via a USB-to-Go flash drive, I was able to get a disappointing (from a time point of view) 8 hours 5 minutes of viewing before the handset shut down, requiring a powering up session.

Some sample pricing information is listed in the table above.