At Phones Review we like to keep you informed about new major products and sometimes we also have details of rather more niche items. Today’s news concerns a collaboration between Vodafone and the Tate Collective whereby a group of young people with aspirations were brought together to create a brand-new design for the Vodafone Smart II Tate Edition. The result is a cheap phone that’s available from Harrods, a limited edition of the Vodafone Smart II.

The winning design, inspired by Picasso, came from Gaby Sahhar and only 1,000 of this special edition will be made . Anyone purchasing the Vodafone Smart II Tate Edition will also receive a two-for-one entry ticket for a Tate Modern or Tate Britain exhibition up to January 31, 2013. You may well imagine that a limited edition phone such as this with decent camera and battery life and a powerful processor might well cost rather a lot of money so it will be a pleasant surprise to find out that the price will be only £70 on PAYG. Vodafone Freebees will also be available and these include free minutes, texts and web access or international calls.

The Smart II Tate Edition is now for sale at Harrods as an exclusive and will also be available online here or in some Vodafone retail stores from August 16. It’s powered by an 800MHZ processor, has a 32-inch HVGA touchscreen with resolution of 480 x 320 and ppi of 180, internal memory of 150MB, expandable up to 32GB with microSD card, and a 3.15-megapixel camera with flash. It all runs on Android 2.3 with 450,000 apps available to choose from Google Play, the dimensions are 109mm x 58mm x 12.35mm and it weighs 120g. Battery life lasts for around 7.5 hours of talk time and there’s also Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth v2.1.

To find out more about the Tate and Vodafone collaboration head here or check out the video below showing Gaby Sahhar describing how he came up with his design. A clever feature on the Vodafone Smart II Tate Edition phone is that if a call comes through and you don’t want to answer it at the time then you simply turn over the phone and it will stop ringing. Alternatively for those times you may miss a call, perhaps because you didn’t hear the phone ringing in your pocket, then the phone senses this and will ring louder.

All in all it’s a neat little package for an affordable cost and we’d like to hear your thoughts on this special edition Smart II Tate Edition phone. Send us your comments to let us know if you have been tempted by this limited edition?