Vodafone Smart Ultra 6 review
The super-sized Vodafone Smart Ultra 6 is something of a budget miracle. For just £125 on Vodafone's Pay-As-You-Go service or £17-per-month on contract, the Smart Ultra 6 gives you a big 5.5in 1,920x1,080 display, a 13-megapixel camera, 16GB of storage, a large 3,000mAh battery and the same Snapdragon 615 processor that powers the £200 EE Harrier and £225 Sony Xperia M4 Aqua. On paper, it almost sounds too good to be true, but Vodafone has really pulled out all the stops to make this one of the best value own-brand handsets we've seen in years.
Performance
The phone's performance, for instance, is truly astonishing for such a cheap handset. Powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 chipset and 2GB of RAM, the Smart Ultra 6 is leagues ahead of anything else in this price range, putting our current budget favourites, the £145 2nd Gen Moto G and £110 2nd Gen Moto E, to shame.
For instance, in Geekbench 3's single and multicore tests, the Smart Ultra 6 scored 636 and 2,148 respectively, which is miles in front of the Moto G's scores of 341 and 1,156. As a result, navigating through Android 5.0.2 feels much faster on the Smart Ultra 6 than it does on the Moto G, and web browsing is similarly nippy.
Web pages load quickly and it takes image-heavy sites in its stride. When browsing through news sites such as The Guardian, for instance, we only had to wait around two seconds before we could scroll up and down and pan round the home page smoothly without any hitches in performance whatsoever. Likewise, with a Peacekeeper browser test score of 741, the Smart Ultra 6 isn't that far behind the LG G4, which scored 841 overall and is five times as expensive.
Graphics performance was good, too. While its score of 346 in the offscreen Manhattan test in GFX Bench GL 3.0 only equates to around 5.6fps, it's still much better than what we managed with the Moto G, which only produced 110 frames, or 1.8fps. As a result, its GPU is much better equipped to deal with more demanding titles like Blizzard'sHearthstone card game, as battle animations were smooth and fluid and text bubbles didn't stutter at all.
Display
Of course, its large 5.5in display, with a 1,920x1,080 resolution, makes playing any sort of game an absolute delight, as a much smaller proportion of it is covered by your fingers. Admittedly, the screen's picture quality wasn't quite as good as we were hoping, as our colour calibrator showed it was only displaying a somewhat disappointing 84.7% of the sRGB colour gamut. This is pretty low even for a budget phone, but when we compared it side by side with the Moto G (which has 87.2% coverage), we were hard-pressed to tell the difference between them. Colours looked almost identical in terms of tone and saturation and both looked equally pleasing to the eye.
If anything, the Smart Ultra 6's higher peak brightness level of 498.44cd/m2 gives colours a little bit of extra punch compared to the Moto G, as Motorola's handset can only reach a maximum brightness of 350.70cd/m2. We were also pleased to see the Smart Ultra 6's high brightness levels didn't impact the screen's black levels too much either, as our reading of 0.42cd/m2 is still roughly around average. Meanwhile, its high contrast level of 1,179:1 means there's plenty of detail present and viewing angles are lovely and wide.