Vodafone Smart N9 lite

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Introduction

My latest Rapid Review is of the Vodafone N9 Lite.  At only £55 on Vodafone Pay As You Go (with a £10 top-up), this is a budget phone.  However, for that little money, you do get quite a lot of phone.  I’ve been using it as a secondary device over the past fortnight.  Read on for my thoughts and opinions.

Design

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I quite like the look of this phone.  It feels nice in hand and is very light.  The back of the phone is covered in a sort of rubberised, textured material which gives the phone a good grip.  The buttons on the side look a little cheap and plastic, but then for the price, you’re not going to care too much about how the buttons look.

Display and sound

At first glance, I was quite impressed with the 5.3-inch display of this phone.  There isn’t much of a bezel, and the screen fills most of the device.  The colours are bright.  However, from an angle, the colours appear a little washed out.   The shape of the screen with its curved edges reminded me a lot of the Palm Pre screen.  The sound was quite tinny but more than passable.

Performance

This isn’t the fastest phone in the world.  But then again, it doesn’t pretend to be that.  I used the phone for everyday tasks like checking Twitter and Facebook, reading and writing emails, taking photos and playing games.  The phone did feel a little slow at times, and I did notice some lag when inputting text at times.  I also noticed some considerable lag when having multiple apps opened.

The N9 Lite features Android  8.1 go Edition, which is an easy to use, stripped back version of Android.

Storage

The phone comes with 16GB of internal memory, but an external microSD card can be added to upgrade your storage.

Camera

I took this phone out with me on several walks with my children.  I took some photos with the 8MP rear camera with autofocus and flash, as well as the 5MP fixed focus front camera.

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As you can see, the photos taken with the 8MP rear camera produced quite satisfying results.

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The front 5MP camera produces passable results.

Battery

The battery life on this phone is quite impressive.  If only used very sparingly, I was able to get a couple of days out of the phone without charging it.  I did spend a couple of days using the phone as my primary device.

I used Twitter, Facebook, sent emails, browsed the web, listened to podcasts and played a couple of games.  By the end of the day, I needed to charge the phone.  This is to be expected, though.  Even £1,000 phones need to be charged every day!  One thing that I did notice was that the phone does take quite a while to charge.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a phone, will all of the best and fastest features, this isn’t the phone for you.  However, if you’re looking to buy a teenager their first smartphone, or want a phone as a secondary device, then I would recommend it, certainly, at the price of £55.

Rapid Reviews Rating

You can find out more about the Vodafone Smart N9 Lite at the following link, https://shop.vodafone.co.uk/shop/pay-as-you-go/vodafone-smart-n9-lite-payg