As it’s a touch-screen, it takes up pretty much most of the front of the device. The Vodafone 845 runs on Android 2.1, which offers those battery-draining yet beguiling animated wallpapers. What is really unusual is the number of home screens. You’ll be treated to a total of seven home screens – no, scratch that, there’s more. Grab an icon on any screen, drag it up and you’ll be greeted by a new row of seven screens. You can have any number of screens, which, while it’s something we haven’t seen before, does mean it might take you a while to find what you’re looking for.

The Vodafone 845 has five buttons; one each to Send and End Call, a menu button and a key that serves as both back and home key. Number five is a touchpad that efficiently navigates between home screens and menus.

Get in touch

There is no multi-touch facility, because this is one of the cheaper, pressure-sensitive kinds of resistive touch-screen. It doesn’t take long to realise it’s not high-resolution. Of course, resistive touch-screens keep down the price of handsets, and they do have advantages – you can use them if you’re wearing gloves, or you can use a stylus. But it’s also easier to do the wrong thing, as you have to press a bit harder and can easily launch an icon as you navigate past it.

Press the touchpad and you’ll find the home pages displayed as a grid of thumbnails, running off the screen. It’s an interesting touch, though not as appealing as the HTC Sense interface, which shows seven screens at a time. You’ll also find some other customisations, in the form of icons, all in Vodafone’s red livery, for contacts, email and so on. That Vodafone red also appears as a highlight every time a confirm/cancel button appears.

There are plenty more customisation options available, of course, as it’s an Android phone. You can configure the screen as you like, and Vodafone has also kindly put in some widgets for you – we like the weather one which, like the weather element in HTC’s phones, tells you what the elements are going to throw at you once you go outside. The analogue clock is also decent – an improvement on earlier versions. 

Text input can be a little difficult on a touch-screen, especially when it’s as diddy as this one. You can choose from a number of different keyboards – Android’s standard version or three versions of Touch Pal – but we prefer the Android one, which we found far easier to type on. To switch input methods, you need to long-press on an area of text. Somewhat surprisingly for Android, this is not particularly intuitive, but it is a process described in the phone’s manual.

Get the picture

You’ll find a 3.2 megapixel camera on the back of the handset. It’s not a high-resolution camera and there’s no flash, so don’t expect too much from it in low-light situations.

There’s also a built-in FM radio, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and GPS – a pretty impressive lineup for a budget phone. In fact if it weren’t for the resistive screen you’d be hard-pressed to notice that the 845 is a budget handset.

The verdict

Vodafone has made a decent effort with this Android phone, and brought it to market at a great price. It’s just a shame that the resistive touch-screen lets it down, unless you have the patience to make it work well. It’s an attractive handset, offers a neat customisation of Android 2.1 and has a decent set of specs.