The Vodafone 340 - A £12 wonder.

My Nokia C6-00 was in repair for a while, leaving me to use my (really) old faithful. Sony Ericsson while the Gurus tried to fix it.

The Sony Ericsson's microphone popped one day, leaving me phoneless, not a good position to be in at all. So I seeked a replacement, and Adsa Came up trumps with the Vodafone 340 handset.

It's pricing point is in the extreme budget side of the market, £12 with £1 credit on the sim card, so even if used for an emergency device it's ready to go from the first charge.

The 340 is a perfectly slim 2g Device, basic but capable in many ways, and in some ways it outshines many more expensive devices.

Features are:

• VGA Camera (640*480) 
• Opera mini browser (cheaper access to web, although this is an basic OEM variant)
• Bluetooth
• FM Radio (without the need of headphones as antenna, but are included)
• MicroUSB charging port (Does not have a PC Suite)
• Dedicated camera button. Sorry , Bluetooth transfer only.

The device is lightweight and very robust. In terms of battery life, the handset rocks. I charged it up on Friday evening.(24/June) and put it to use at Cybermummy going through between 20-100 tweets from the afternoon, my son hammering it before and after school and still has 2 bars left this morning.  Upon checking it now it has died, Would modern smartphones last that long? Doubtful.....

Camera is basic but works well, *sample images coming soon* Vodafone and Foxlink chose well to add  dedicated camera button, which is very quick to react, even in lower light..

Then comes the downers of being a budget device. No Connectivity, you are left with sharing via MMS, Email or Bluetooth. and no PC Suite is available, on connecting to the PC you get unknown device errors in Windows XP and Vista.. Also Java applications like Snaptu cannot be loaded, this is an immense disappointment, as services like Snaptu gives featured facebook and twitter services for free, the device can cope, if only they could add a Java stack to it. 

Internet is powered by Opera Mini and looks like an older version, it's basic but compressed bandwidth for saving data. 

For £12 in Asda it's a perfect emergency or starter device for anyone.  With a clear enough screen and half decent camera, it's a perfect budget device. I recommend it. 

Paul! 

Gallery: Click For larger images