You’d be forgiven for thinking that 4G/LTE connections are a luxury reserved only for those able to afford a high end smartphone or Gauteng schoolkids, but Vodacom’s just made an interesting announcement about an addition to its budget “Smart” range of tablets and handsets. The Smart 4 Turbo will be available from 9th February and puts LTE speeds into a sub-R1 500 phone.

The Smart 4 Turbo looks a lot like a Qualcomm reference device (QRD), and comes with a pokey Snapdragon 400 processor and 4GB of onboard storage. There’s a generous 1GB of RAM, which will help with multitasking, and a 150Mbps LTE CAT 4 modem inside.

It’s a decent size too, with a 4.5inch screen and a resolution of 845×480 pixels. Best of all, it runs a fairly up-to-date version of Android (number 4.4).

You can buy it on prepay for R1 499, but the contract deals will be the ones to check out. They start at R159 on Smart S Light which includes 100MB of data. Or, as we prefer to say on LTE speeds, about five seconds of downloads at maximum speed.