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The Smart Platinum 7 is another member of the Vodafone family of smartphones.  This particular model features stylish rounded corners.  Weighing 155g and with dimensions of 154 x 75.7 x 7 mm (H x W x D), this is a 5.5-inch unit.  It is black in colour with reflective front and rear faces that are less inclined to gather finger smears than many smartphones I have used over time. 

Positioned on the right side of the handset are slightly raised power button and volume rocker that both can be located and identified by touch alone.  The left side also house two functions.  Taking up a higher position is a small camera key that can be used to capture single or multiple still images and video clips.  Just below this button is a slot which can be opened using the supplied pin-hole tool for storing two nano SIMs or a single nano SIM and a microSD card to increase storage capacity up to 256GB.  A 3.5 mm jack socket, for headphone attachment, sits on the top of the handset while a micro USB port is found on the base of the unit for charging purposes.

Dominating the front of the smartphone is a 5.5-inch AMOLED capacitive touch screen.  This screen can display 16M colours at a resolution of 1440 x 2560 pixels at a density of ~534 ppi.  Protected by Corning Gorilla Glass, the screen can recognise up to 10 fingers with its multi-touch feature.  Mounted on top of the screen is the unit’s 8MP secondary camera rated at 1080p with an LED flash.

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As usual this headset’s main camera is positioned on the rear of the unit.  This camera is a 16MP model with an f/2.0 lens, phase detection, autofocus and an LED flash.  Included amongst this camera’s features are geo tagging, face detection, panorama and HDR video 2160p@30fps.  The rear of the handset also houses a fingerprint reader.

The Smart Platinum 7 is built around a Qualcomm MSM8976 Snapdragon 652 chipset.  The CPU is an Octa-core made up of four 1.8GHz Cortex-A72 and four 1.2GHz Cortex-A53.  You also get an Adreno 510 GPU plus 3GB of RAM.  Internal memory is set at 32GB and this can be increased to 256GB with a microSD card occupying the second SIM slot.

Along with the fingerprint feature, you get accelerometer, gyro, proximity and compass sensors.  Other supported features include Bluetooth v4.2, A2DP, GPS, OTG, NFC, WLAN, WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, WiFi Direct and Hotspot.

The smartphone’s operating system is Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow).  Following a fairly standard three second press of the power button, a boot-up process kicks into action.  A further 28 seconds of housekeeping takes place before you arrive at the handset’s lock screen.  Generally performance was fine although there was one aspect that I found disappointing.  This was to do with the non-removable Li-ion 3000 mAh battery.  Running a continuous video playing test, I was only able to get five hours of playing time before the battery was drained and the handset shut down.

In addition to the various built in features of the smartphone, Vodafone offers a number of special offers available as part of its Red Value Bundles that are available with this particular handset.  Depending upon your tastes you can select from offerings of Spotify Premium, Sky Sports Mobile TV or NOW TV Entertainment packages.  These offerings can be purchased on a monthly subscription basis.

If listening to music and enhancing your collection of albums and tracks is your scene then you could opt for Spotify Premium and its new Daily Mix feature.  Spotify can provide listening music with which you may not be familiar, access your Library section and even allow you to add tracks to your collection of stored tracks.

Armchair spectators might prefer the opportunity to delve into Sky Sports range of action.  While Champions League matches may no longer feature among its crown jewels, Sky does still offer a wide range of Premier League football plus overseas league matches.  You can also watch Test Match cricket involving England Sri Lanka, India, South Africa and West Indies. 

If neither of these offerings is of any appeal to you then you could go with NOW TV.  While not all its content is exclusive, it could give you the chance to view programmes such as The Last Dragonslayer, which I watched on Sky and was a little disappointed, and other content.  The choice, after all, is yours as you present your credit card details.

The Vodafone Smart Platinum 7 is available either as a PAYG product or on a monthly subscription basis.  The PAYG product is available for a one-off fee of £289.  A selection of Red Bundle plans are shown in the following table.

http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/shop/contracts-and-deals/vodafone-smart-platinum-7/sku90228