Vodacom has taken the wraps off a new, low-cost smartphone that it hopes will propel adoption of smart devices and Internet use among consumers who haven’t been able to afford a smart device until now.

The new Smart Kicka, which is the first Vodacom-branded device, has gone on sale at a prepaid retail price of R549. It’s billing the Smart Kicka as the first US$50 smartphone on its network.

For the price, it’s not a bad phone. It has a 3,5-inch, 320×480-pixel screen, a 2-megapixel camera (capable of shooting low-resolution video at 15fps), 4GB of storage and 512MB of RAM. It runs Android 4.4 KitKat, the latest version of the Google operating system, and offers access to the full Play store.

The phone accepts microSD cards up to 32GB in size. Its 3G aerial supports 21Mbit/s downloads and 5,7Mbit/s uploads and uses the 900MHz and 2,1GHz bands to do it.

The processor is a dual-core 1GHz Mediatek MTK6572M. Importantly for the South African market, there’s an FM radio with 3,5mm audio jack. Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n) are also standard. It has a 1 400mAh battery rated for 8,5h of 3G talktime and 3G standby time of 403h.

Vodacom is bundling data with the device in the form of three 50MB “power bundles”.

According to operator, about half of prepaid data usage comes from these bundles, which were launched in March. It sells about 40m of the bundles each month. The bundles include 10 minutes of airtime for R2, 60 minutes of airtime for R4 and 50MB of data for R3. — © 2014 NewsCentral Media