Vodacom recently announced a R249 smartphone, the Mobicel S4 Cloud to offer a smartphone lite experience. The reason for this offering is the reason for this was to “reduce the cost of smartphone access” and to “accelerate the migration of customers from legacy networks [2G and 3G] to modern 4G networks”.

Vodacom

Recharged managed to get hold of the phone and here’s a quick bullet point review.

  • The phone has 2x nano SIM slots and 1x microSD card slot
  • NB: There is no WiFi option (!) so I temporarily put my primary SIM into it
  • It has a micro USB charger, with cord attached to a 2-pin plug
  • There is an audio jack, with earphones supplied
  • As expected, it is not a touch screen, you navigate with buttons, like back in the day
  • Preloaded apps include call log, contacts, camera, messages, multimedia, music, calendar, tools, files, settings, games, profiles, internet and radio
  • You need to go into Cloud Apps to access Facebook, YouTube (+Music, Shorts), TikTok, BBC News, Wikipedia, Weather, Cricbuzz, Instagram + Instagram Reels, X, an a whole bunch of games.
  • I received a connection lost error loads of times despite having a 4G connection

  • Another NB thing is that there is no Whatsapp support
  • Accessing the cloud apps without the option of WiFi means you need to constantly buy Vodacom data. I have an eSIM with another network so cannot see, but I’m almost certain other networks won’t work on it. If anyone knows otherwise, please leave a comment.
  • While accessing the internet browser, I visited my website Recharged and it said ran out of memory, none of the images loaded, of course. I’d imagine a memory card may have fixed that.
  • You can’t log into a TikTok or YouTube account, from what I could tell, you can only browser

Vodacom R249 Phone: Final Thoughts

The offering from Vodacom to buy a 4G smartphone for R249 is much needed in South Africa. It means people can have the most basic level of connectivity, however, I think it’s a bit underhanded to not have WiFi support on the device, thereby locking you into purchasing data bundles to use the cloud apps.

That said, it could also be a phone useful for parents to buy their younger kids to keep them off the internet in a way.