When looking for a budget phone like the Vodafone 845, you have to adjust your expectations a bit, yet on paper, its software sounds just as good as that powering top-end phones like the HTC Desire. Is it? Find out in our Vodafone 845 review.
Read the rest of our Vodafone 845 review
Vodafone 845 review
Vodafone 845 review: Screen and build
Vodafone 845 review: The rivals
The Vodafone 845 uses Android 2.1: it’s not technically the newest version of the Android OS, but it might as well be because Android 2.2 is only available for the Google Nexus one so far – and other Android users could be in for a fair old wait.
Android 2.1 features a handful of improvements over older versions of the OS, including a much slicker media player, support for for multiple email accounts in the built-in emailer app and live home screen wallpapers – which feature everything from animated leaves floating serenely across a pond to a visualisation of whatever music’s playing at the time. The Vodafone 845 starts chugging with the more visually-intensive live wallpapers though.
The lack of Android 2.2 means you’re stuck using the internal memory to install any additional apps from the Android Market. With under 200MB of internal memory to play with, you’ll have to watch your app habit with the Vodafone 845.
Thanks to its custom UI, the Vodafone 845 comes with a lot of features you’ll need off the bat though. There’s a natty FM radio widget, which lets you cycle through your preset stations from your home screen, a similarly snazzy music player widget and a lovely weather clock that’s looks dangerously similar to the clock seen on all of HTC’s Sense UI-equipped phones.
This is on top of the usual selection of calendar and mail widgets, photo frames, and home screen post-its. We found most of our needs, apart from social networking, met by the Vodafone 845 – and the rest can be filled-in by the Android Market’s wares.
The Vodafone 845 does much more with vanilla Android 2.1 than just adding widgets. It has a very flexible approach to home screen management, for one. You start off with five home screens, arranged in a line, but drag an icon to the edge of the screen and you can make another one – simple as pie.
It’s not just the left and right extremes of your home screen playfield that accept these refugee apps and widgets either. You can go up, down, left and right – wherever you like. And you can keep on going. Forever. Or at least that’s how it seems. We gave up after adding a few hundred, when our fingers went numb.
Having this amount of home screen flexibility is pointless in any Android phone, and bordering on the ridiculous in a budget Android aimed at first-time smartphone users, like the Vodafone 845. The phone’s heart is in the right place, and it lets you zoom out of the home screen view so you can see loads of home screens once, but like an over-eager puppy or Bruce Forsyth, it just doesn’t know when to stop.
In practice, it’s up to you to decide how many home screens you use, so if you end up with a mess of 100+ screens on your Vodafone 845, you only have yourself to blame.
The other main addition of the custom Vodafone 845′s UI is an icon dock that sticks at the bottom of the home screen view, giving you shortcuts to the apps menu, phone and messaging functions and the quirky home screen zoom out function.
We’ve criticised bigger, more expensive phones of copying the iPhone in doing this before, but here it makes perfect sense – the instant access to these core features gives the Vodafone 845 much-needed dollop of feature phone-style simplicity. Its slightly tricky resistive touchscreen means the Vodafone 845 can do with all the easy-access features it can get.
Thankfully, with lots of widget space to hand, and plenty of bundled widgets, the Vodafone 845 starts on the right path. We still think giving you the option to weigh the phone down with 300 home screens is a little south of sanity, but then no one’s making you go over the top…
Read the rest of our Vodafone 845 review
Vodafone 845 review
Vodafone 845 review: Screen and build
Vodafone 845 review: The rivals
