Introduction and features
The Vodafone Smart Platinum 7 is quite the smartphone pioneer, in its own understated way. It's the first own-branded phone from a UK mobile network that truly merits the term 'premium'.
Despite this, the Smart Platinum 7 can be picked up for just £300 on pay as you go, or from £28 per month on contract. This combination of low price and premium design pitches the phone against the likes of the OnePlus 3 and the Oppo F1 Plus – two strong flagship-killers from China – as well as the Nexus 5X, which actually looks a little pricey by comparison.
Vodafone's new hero handset certainly seems well equipped for the fight, with a metal and glass design, a 5.5-inch QHD display, a capable octa-core CPU and a well-appointed 16-megapixel camera, not to mention a near-stock version of Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
The Smart Platinum 7 also tempts with little flourishes such as a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor and a dedicated camera button. Has Vodafone struck gold with its first high-end effort?
Design
This is Vodafone's first luxury phone, and its marketing department is clearly having a ball with the attendant shift in vocabulary.
The press blurb for the Smart Platinum 7 throws around flowery expressions like "aircraft grade aluminium body" and "diamond cut detailing", along with my particular favourite: "sensually curved 2.5D gorilla glass".
We didn't get any of that with the Vodafone Smart Ultra 6, that's for sure.
The Smart Platinum 7, though, is largely deserving of such gushing introductions, with a few notable missteps. Its aluminium frame is well crafted, with matte-finish sides sandwiched between shiny chamfered corners.
The power, volume, and dedicated camera keys, meanwhile, have a heavily ridged texture and angled design that makes locating and pressing them very easy – although they're not what you'd call subtle or attractive to look at.
The rear of the device, meanwhile, is covered by flat glass. Combined with a protruding, centrally placed camera unit, there's a slight hint of the Samsung Galaxy S6 in here. That's no bad thing.
However, in place of the latter's attractive underlying sheen, the Platinum 7 has a slightly tacky lattice pattern that's most evident when held at an angle. It's not exactly ugly, but it doesn't quite feel up to Vodafone's premium aspirations.
The front of the phone is more functional than sleek, with the aforementioned 2.5D glass stopping short of the top and bottom edges to reveal dual stereo speakers, which offer clear, loud, well-separated if excessively trebly sound.
This isn't quite the cohesive design we see from the more established flagship manufacturers like HTC and Samsung – there's a slight mishmash of influences and approaches on display here – but it's still easily the best-looking phone Vodafone has ever made.
It's very nice to hold, too. Thanks to those subtly rounded metallic edges, the cool glass back, a 6.9mm-thin body and a just-right 155g weight, the phone sits pleasantly in the hand. You might need to carry a cloth around with you to take care of fingerprint marks, though – the phone is a bit of a grease magnet.
Key features
As we've discussed, the defining feature of the Smart Platinum 7 is that it's Vodafone's first 'premium-design' smartphone. And another, related element of this design is the phone's display.
This is Vodafone's first ever 2K or QHD screen, and it's a beauty – it's sharp, bright, and well balanced.
That latter point is important to emphasise, because Vodafone has also bucked its usual trend by going with AMOLED display technology. This can be a slightly precarious path to take if you're a manufacturer that's trying to work to a budget – or if your name isn't Samsung, for that matter.
Use an older, inferior AMOLED panel, or neglect the calibration process, and your colour-rich display can end up being an awful, garish, hyper-real mess. The Vodafone Smart Platinum 7 screen is nothing of the sort.
Don't get me wrong: it's no Samsung Galaxy S7 rival, and it's got that familiar AMOLED weakness of being a bit rubbish in bright sunlight. But it's a lovely, crisp, colourful screen in the main.
As someone coming directly from using an iPhone 6S, the IPS LCD screen on which is often described as being cooler and bluer than your average AMOLED, I didn't find the Smart Platinum 7's screen to be overly warm – and that's a major compliment coming from a fussy blighter who couldn't live with the second-generation Moto X for that very reason.
Another ostensibly premium feature of the Smart Platinum 7 is its fingerprint sensor. This is a rear-mounted example, in keeping with the Nexus 5X school of thinking rather than the front-mounted approach of the Samsung Galaxy S7 and the iPhone 6S.
I had a mixed experience with this phone's biometric sensor – which, for a component that's judged on its consistency as much as on its speed, isn't ideal.
I found that its subtle ridge and rear location combined to make it a little too tricky to find quickly – it required a fair amount of fumbling. When I did locate it, and positioned my finger correctly, it was generally fairly reliable, but I had enough failures to make it a bit of a chore to use.
Still, being able to jump straight into the home screen by touching and holding the sensor for half a second or so made me persist with it – if only because powering the screen on, then swiping to bring up the pattern unlock screen, then inputting the pattern feels like a laborious process after the fiftieth time.
One time-saving feature I have far fewer qualms with is the Smart Platinum 7's dedicated camera button. Yes, you can use it as a physical shutter control, but that proves a little awkward given its location immediately above the camera lens. I found it much more useful for its quick-launch function, which is achieved through a double tap.
You might wonder why a classic press-and-hold wasn't employed, but Vodafone's approach resulted in far fewer pocket activations during my time with the phone – none, actually. And the speed of that camera app start-up is exemplary – you can have your phone out and snapping within a second or two.
I should mention here that Vodafone is supplying a Smart VR headset for free with early units of the Smart Platinum 7, which is presumably where that sharp display will really pay off. However, this wasn't supplied with my test unit, so I can't comment on the quality of Vodafone's VR vision.
Performance and battery life
While the Vodafone Smart Platinum 7 is touted as a premium phone, it doesn't run on a cutting-edge processor. Current Android flagships tend to be powered by the Snapdragon 820 CPU, but Vodafone's latest runs on the lesser Snapdragon 652.
This is the same upper-mid-range chip that powers the likes of the Samsung Galaxy A9, the Asus ZenFone 3 and the Oppo R9 Plus – hardly world beaters any of them.
So, is this the first sign of a major weakness in the Smart Platinum 7? Not really.
The Snapdragon 652 certainly isn't the fastest chip on the market; however, recent advances in smartphone processor speeds seem to be outstripping advances in OS and app complexity.
In plain English, this means that a decent modern mid-range processor – which the 652 is – can do everything pretty much without compromise – particularly, as in the case of the Smart Platinum 7, when it's backed up by a healthy 3GB of RAM.
Sure enough, I couldn't fault the Vodafone Smart Platinum 7's practical performance one bit. Apps opened quickly, flicking between home screens was fluid, and, as I've mentioned, the camera app consistently booted up in a snap.
Even 3D gaming performance was solid. Traditional showcases like Asphalt 8 and Dead Trigger 2 ran well on the highest graphical settings, with only the occasional stutter, and the epic MOBA game Vainglory ran flawlessly.
Sure enough, the Geekbench 3 benchmarking tests I ran on the Smart Platinum 7 showed a very accomplished performer. An average multi-core score of 5,129 places it well above even a late 2015 flagship phone like the Nexus 6P (which scored 4,073).
Perhaps more surprisingly, it's not that far behind the OnePlus 3 (on 5,425), which has the benefits of a superior Snapdragon 820 CPU, double the RAM, and a lower-resolution display.
Besides its strong performance, the Smart Platinum 7 is a pleasure to use thanks to its near-stock Android 6.0 OS. Once again, and to its credit, Vodafone hasn't tinkered with Google's sharp operating system in the way more established manufacturers like Samsung and HTC do.
We could do without the extra Vodafone apps though. Some of these are optional installs at the outset, but you have no choice over the initial availability of the network's own Call+ and Message+ apps. Of course, in the case of the latter you can nominate Hangouts as your default messaging app from the off, or download another.
Swiping right from the main home screen, meanwhile, brings up Vodafone's tip screen, which will only be of use for the first day or two of ownership, if that, and will just annoy with its patronising presence thereafter.
You also get an ugly Start widget from the off, which pushes those extra apps as well as Vodafone promotions, but this is easily removed. All in all we've seen far worse levels of bloatware from network operators.
Battery
Vodafone claims the Smart Platinum 7's 3000mAh battery will last a full two days on a single charge. With heavy usage I doubt you'll find that to be the case, but it's certainly up to lasting through a full day with plenty of change to spare, like any respectable modern flagship.
And if you're a lighter user then you're in for a pleasant surprise – I managed to make it through a good three days of minimal usage before needing to recharge.
Some of this is doubtless down to the phone's power-sipping Snapdragon 652 CPU, but a large shout-out has to go to Android 6.0's Doze feature, which intelligently cranks the power usage right back when you're not actively using the phone.
Putting the phone through the usual TechRadar battery test, which involves playing a 90-minute video with the screen brightness at maximum and accounts syncing over Wi-Fi in the background, it used up only 15% on average. Compared to similarly priced rivals like the Nexus 5X and the OnePlus 3, both of which ate up 23% in the same test, that's a strong result.
Another premium feature you get with the Smart Platinum 7 is Quick Charge 3.0, which will restore half the phone's charge in just 30 minutes.
Camera
The final telltale spec that tends to give away a mid-range phone with delusions of 'premium' grandeur is the camera. You simply can't cut corners with camera tech like you can elsewhere.
On paper, the Vodafone Smart Platinum 7 seems to have its photographic house in order. We're looking at a 16-megapixel rear shooter with HDR, phase detection autofocus, and a claimed 'zero second shutter lag'.
In practice, this camera isn't going to be giving the Samsung Galaxy S7 or iPhone 6S any sleepless nights, but it is a reasonably accomplished unit.
Shooting in decent natural light, I found the experience to be quick and consistent, with reasonably accurate results. Landscape shots were generally well balanced, with bright but not overblown skies and adequately exposed foregrounds.
As is often the case, using the phone inside or in less-than-ideal lighting exposes the camera's limitations. I found shots taken in such conditions to be quite noisy and washed out, and the phone also seemed to struggle with focus at times. Still, this is far from unique, even among some so-called high-end phones.
You might be able to tell from my tone that I wasn't blown away by the results from the main camera, but that's not to say they were bad, or even especially disappointing. Like I said, it's much tougher for a phone to punch above its weight when it comes to the camera, and while the Smart Platinum 7 camera won't let you down in general usage, nor will it wow you.
Arguably more impressive than the main camera is the Smart Platinum 7's 8-megapixel front-facing shooter, which comes with its own flash. You should find that you're able to capture relatively decent selfies in any lighting conditions.
The camera UI appears to take a number of cues from Apple's iOS camera app, which means it's pleasant and intuitive to use. It has the familiar delineated black area dedicated to the shutter controls, and a similar swipe-to-select system for the various modes (Pano, Slow-Mo etc).
You also get a Manual mode, which overlays controls for ISO, shutter speed, white balance and manual focus onto the viewfinder. It's all very tidy, and there are none of the garish or gimmicky 'beauty' settings that you get with some mid-rangers from overseas.
Add in the sheer speed of the thing – both in terms of accessing the camera app via that dedicated button, and actually reeling off shots – and it becomes evident that the camera doesn't really let this high-value phone package down.
Click here for the full-resolution image
Click here for the full-resolution image
Click here for the full-resolution image
Click here for the full-resolution image
Click here for the full-resolution image
Verdict
Vodafone's first attempt at a premium smartphone is an unqualified success. The Smart Platinum 7 offers decent build quality, strong performance, near-stock Android 6.0 and a great screen – all for just £300.
We liked
Vodafone has boldly labelled its latest phone 'premium', and it's largely worthy of the description. The Smart Platinum 7's design is all metal and glass, representing a big leap forward in quality from previous efforts.
But the phone's stand-out feature has to be its 5.5-inch QHD Super AMOLED display. Large, crisp and vibrant, it's one of the better screens at this price point.
That display is the perfect canvas for a virtually stock Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS. There might be plenty of Chinese phones with similar specs and prices, but few offer such a pure user experience.
We disliked
A few small niggles betray the Vodafone Smart Platinum 7's low price, and the network's lack of experience at this end of the market.
Its fingerprint sensor, for example, is somewhat hit and miss – it's both difficult to locate in a pinch and not quite consistent enough to slip seamlessly into your regular routine, and it's occasionally annoying.
Also, while Vodafone has avoided tinkering too much with the Android OS, it has still included some substandard apps and irritating widgets that need to be dealt with early on.
Verdict
Vodafone has delivered on its promise of a premium smartphone experience for a less-than-premium price. The Vodafone Smart Platinum 7 might not be up there with the top performers in any one area, but it's far closer to the top flagships than it is to the mid-range also-rans in the areas where it really matters.
The design is solid, if somewhat unremarkable, it's fast and responsive, and the Smart Platinum 7's screen is one of the best you'll get for the money. Meanwhile, small touches like front-facing stereo speakers and a dedicated camera button help it stand out from the crowd.
The only downsides, really, are related to the usual misgivings we have about any network-restricted phone. That said, Vodafone has kept its tinkering to a minimum in this well-judged package.
First reviewed: July 2016
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