Hey guys,

 I've been dealing closely with this one for a while. Looking forward to seeing what people think once they've handled one, because it sure doesn't look or feel like a budget phone at all. In many ways, this is the successor to the Smart 4 power, which debuted at $349, and I personally consider it to be a Moto G killer at half the price (Bearing in mind that most people don't care about updates, and Lollipop is great already). It's awesome to see this much tech available for so few dollars, anyone who's been used to phones in this price range is going to be blown away.

Few fun notes:

 

• There's a full permissions manager onboard - yes, the best feature of M is available out of the box on a $149 Lollipop phone
• Snapdragon 410 is in devices up to $849, so we're not dealing with a dual core Mediatek chipset here
• Display is 5" 720p IPS and viewing angles are great
• Double tap to wake!
• 2500mAh battery goes a long way in a phone this size

Any questions, let me know - I can put up camera samples or benchmark results if requested.

ubernoob:

Does it work with Semble ?

Not yet - we're working on it. Hopefully in a future update.

paulmilbank: I know this is probably dumb for expecting this on such a cheap phone, but with band 28 4g coming, why does it not seem to be a priority for phone manufacturers? Surely Vodafone would want to showcase it on their own brand phones? Does it require modems that are really new, or is it more expensive to put it in a device?

It's just economies of scale - these phones are built for a primarily European market, so they support band 20/800MHz rather than band 28/700MHz. Band 28 will pop up in the range naturally once the entry-level baseband chipsets support more bands. :)


 - Nik