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The latest such device to arrive, forming part of the Vodafone Smart range, is the company’s N9 handset.  Adopting the standard Candy bar style of appearance, my review sample of this Smartphone combines an aluminium silver back plate with an Apple White bezel surrounding the handset’s screen.  There is also a model with a black Titanium back plate.

Supplied with the Vodafone N9 are a USB lead and a 2-pin charging plug plus a set of earphones for private listening sessions. You also get a Quick Start Guide.  This document consists of little more than a series of illustrations.

Dominating the front of this handset is its screen.  This screen is of the IPS LCD capacitive, multi touch variety and measures 5.5 inches.  Capable of displaying 16M colours, this screen has a resolution of 720 x 1440 pixels and gives a screen-to-body ratio of 77.1%.

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The handset was a comfortable fit in my small hands, with enough freedom of movement for my thumb to reach and activate any of the controls and screen furniture.  The Smart N9 handset has dimensions of 147.1 x 68.8 x 8.7 mm (H x W x D) and weighs 145g (non-removable Li-ion 2900 mAh battery included). Particularly convenient for right-handed users, and is often the case, situated on the right side of the unit, are the volume rocker feature positioned just above the power button.

A pop-out tray sits on the left side of the unit.  This can hold a nano SIM and a micro SD card to increase storage space up to 32 GB.  There are  speaker outlets along the base of the unit sandwiching a  micro USB port used for charging the internal battery.  Situated in the top right corner of the handset edge is a socket for attaching headphone for private listening sessions.

Mounted on the front of the handset is the unit’s secondary or Selfie camera which is an 8MP model.  This camera has its own LED flash unit plus a Face Beauty effect that did not appear to have any effect when presented with my visage.  The Smart N9 main camera is a 13MP model and is mounted on the rear. 

As with the front camera, this rear mounted unit has its own LED flash and supports features such as video capture at 1080@30fps plus support for HDR and 360 panoramic scenes.  Both cameras have a zoom feature, taking a couple of seconds to refocus.  It is activated by a sideways swipe.  Also on the rear of the smartphone is the fingerprint scanner.

Running the current latest version of the Android operating system (Oreo 8.2), the Vodafone Smart N9 handset is built around a Mediatek MT6739 WA (28 mm) chipset with Quad-core 1.3 GHz Cortex-A53 CPU and Mali-T720MP 2 GPU.  Internal memory is set at 16GB with 2GB of RAM.  Sensors for the fingerprint reader, accelerometer, gyro, proximity and compass are building into the handset.  There is also support for NFC, Bluetooth 4,0, A20P, GPS and a range of messaging facilities.

Firing up the Smart N9 handset is not the quickest action, generally taking almost a minute from the press of the power button until the initial swipe screen is reached.  Most of this delayed opening is taken up by the several redrawing of the Vodafone logo.  Fortunately, while not the fastest responding smartphone available on the market, the Smart N9 performs reasonably.

Offering support for USB To Go feature, I was able to check out the battery’s performance using a continuous video playing test with the aid of USB To Go playing videos stored on a flash drive.  This test proved to be shorter than when carried out on other handsets.  A complete shut down of the Smart N9 occurred after just 4 hours and 15 minutes of viewing time.  I was, to say the least, disappointed with this performance.

Currently Vodafone are offering the Smart N9 on a contract priced at £20 per month with no upfront charge.  The Smart N9 handset is a reasonable offering but hardly exceptional.

https://www.vodafone.com/content/index/devices/smartn9.html

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