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Trousers down for six of the best affordable Androids
Stylish Googlephones for not-so-deep pockets
Sony Xperia M2
If you want a Sony Xperia Z2 or Z3 but can’t take the financial hit, the Xperia M2 is worth a long, hard look. It shares the Z2’s OmniBalance design and build, so looks and feels a lot like the Sony flagship. It also has a larger than average screen for a mid-ranger, 4.8 inches, though the qHD rez lets it down a bit, as does the absence of an oleophobic coating or IPS technology. In the plus column, the screen is protected by genuine Gorilla Glass 3 and the Qualcomm MSM8926 (quad-core, 1.2GHz, 1GB of RAM) chipset makes the M2 every bit as fast as the Moto G.
Fixed inside the M2 is a 2,300mAh battery which is one of the bigger in the group and you get 8GB of storage with microSD expansion. The 8MP camera uses Sony’s usual Exmor RS sensor but turns out to be a mediocre performer even in good light. Still, uniquely for this handset selection, you do get a physical camera button with auto-snap on launch. Out of the box the M2 runs Android 4.3 Jelly Bean with Sony’s Xperia launcher but a KitKat update is apparently in the post.
Speaker performance was second only to the HTC Desire 610 and Moto G while sound quality through headphones was excellent, but that’s no real surprise for a Sony. Combine that with the cracking Sony media apps for music, photos and video and you have a device that should appeal to anyone who wants an affordable big screen smartphone that can double up as a tip-top media player.
Price £149
More info Sony
Vodafone Smart 4 Power
For a moment I thought Vodafone’s Smart 4 was the last hurrah of the carrier-branded mobe. How wrong I was. No sooner had my finger left the keyboard than Vodafone announced the 4G Smart Turbo and this device, the Smart 4 Power. That eponymous power comes from a 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek chip (the MT6582 to be precise), Mali-400 GPU and 1GB of RAM so performance is pretty brisk and it’s LTE-capable. Like the rest of the Smart range out-of-the-box you get 4.4.2 KitKat, which is a big plus.
The display only has a 540 x 960 resolution spread over a 5-inch IPS panel but the lowly 220dpi pixel density aside, the display shows good levels of contrast and is impressively lustrous. Moreover, the lack of pixels to shunt around means you get even more up time from the fixed 3,000mAh battery. And what a difference that huge battery makes. I managed to easily get three days from a charge, which is some recompense for the lack of pixels.
As you may expect for the price, there are a few downsides: the 5MP camera and VGA webcam are nothing to shout about and there’s only 4GB of built-in storage, albeit backed up by a memory card slot. It’s a pretty well made device though and has a decent enough loudspeaker and an NFC chip. For the current £99 asking price (at launch back in September it was £175, hence its inclusion here) you can’t really go far wrong though, unlike the Smart 4 I tested in the summer, the Smart 4 Power was network-locked. ®
Price £99
More info Vodafone
1 When the rest of the tech pubs nick the phrase Landfill Android, as they did the term fondleslab, remember you heard it here first...