Vodacom’s set the cat among the pigeons with its newest product, a Vodafone-branded smartphone called the Smart Mini. While every manufacturer is fighting for a share of the high-end market, the Smart Mini neatly wraps up the entry level market with its R799 price tag.
Headline specs: a 3.5-inch display, with a resolution of 480 x 320, 1GHz processor, and 4GB of storage. Crucially, it also has a microSD card slot, making the 4GB of internal storage a non-issue. There’s also a 2-megapixel camera, but we’ve got a feeling that won’t produce anything worth writing home about. The killer part, though, is that it’s running Android 4.1. Yes, not the latest, but pretty much what most entry-level users will need as far as an operating system that’ll support the latest apps.
While everybody else clamours for the latest, biggest Android devices, Vodacom has an opportunity to make Android fans of everybody else who can’t yet afford a flagship phone. Smart move.
