The most immediately striking feature of the Smart V8 when you free it from its box is the build quality. It's almost entirely brushed metal aside from two pockets of textured plastic, with neatly chamfered edges and loudspeaker grilles. While it's not pushing the boundaries of design by any means, it certainly looks and feels like it's punching above the £159 pay-as-you-go price point.

The spec sheet isn't to be taken lightly either. You're looking at a 5.5-inch, 1080p LCD display, an octa-core 1.4GHz Snapdragon 435, 3 gigs of RAM, 32GB of expandable storage, a 16-megapixel primary camera and 8MP front-facer, all powered by a decent-sized 3,000mAh battery. You also get a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor and NFC chip -- hello Android Pay. Perhaps even more important, the Smart V8 is running Android 7.1.1, so it's basically as up-to-date as you can get on the software front.

It's more or less the stock Android experience, albeit with a few borderline-bloatware apps from Vodafone added in. One quirk I've discovered worth noting is I can't seem to resize widgets on the homescreen. Not a huge deal, but it does mean the digital clock widget is naturally off-centre, which is slightly irritating.

In sunny summer conditions, the 16MP camera can be pretty handy. Good colour saturation, clarity, and contrast thanks to the HDR mode. The app is pretty busy with filters and features and settings, from full manual control to long exposure and "active photo" modes (kinda like GIFs/Live Photos). You won't find much help in them in low-light conditions, though, where the camera begins to fall off fairly quickly.