There's nothing like owning a high-end smart phone with all the bells and whistles.

Ah, the sheer luxury of taking your phone swimming after charging it wirelessly in under 10 minutes.

In saying that, perhaps $1400 is too much to spend on something that can fall out of your pocket on a bus...

We’re at that point in history where technology has advanced faster than we have. Sure we can now buy a phone that slots into a VR headset so we can pretend we’re walking on Mars, but weirdly, not everybody wants to do that.

Even more weirdly, lots of people just use their phones for calling, texting, taking pictures and monitoring their social media feeds.

For these people, a $1400 fast-charging, underwater phone may be overkill.

By the same token, you still want your phone to do that talkie-texty-photo-emaily-social thing as well as you possibly can.

So Vodafone went straight to the Germans.

The German-designed 5” Smart N8 and 5.5” Smart V8 handsets are both very attractive phones as phones go. The V8 is slim, comfortable to hold and has a cool metal feel. As a matter of fact, it has a cool metal look too – it’s only available in a colour called “Cool Metal.” It also appears to be constructed of some kind of cool metal.

By contrast, the N8’s rear casing is plastic but is available in both graphite and gold. Just because the casing is plastic, doesn’t mean it feels cheap. It’s textured and the phone is still solid to the touch.

The other first-class feature you’ll find on both these phones is a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, situated in my favourite position, right in the centre, just below the rear camera lens. Other manufacturers keep changing their mind on where to put the fingerprint sensor, but the centre-back position makes most sense to me because that’s where your fingertip naturally goes when you’re holding your phone with one hand. I found the sensors worked very efficiently on both phones, unlocking them straight to the home screen.

Interestingly, both phones boast the latest version of Android straight out of the box, with virtually no bloatware. This is good news for people who’ve been frustrated by other phone-makers’ operating systems installed over the top of the one that works perfectly well already.

As for how well these two phones actually run that operating system, this is where the similarities start to end.

The Smart V8 is packed with a lot more processing power and storage space than the N8. In fact, with 3GB of ram and 32GB built-in storage, the V8 purrs along very reliably and smoothly, genuinely on a par with many other high-end phones from other brands. It will run multiple apps simultaneously and has excellent battery life.

When it came to multitasking, the less powerful Smart N8 came up pretty short. Streaming to other displays, screen mirroring, running multiple Bluetooth devices at once, all these activities tended to max out the N8’s processing power, sometimes even requiring a reboot to carry on.

Meanwhile, the appropriately named V8 just kept on trucking.

My other big concern around the N8 is limited storage. 16GB just isn’t enough these days. Yes, you can expand storage via a microSD slot on both handsets. Trouble is, while the V8 features the (now standard) pop-out sim/SD drawer on the side, on the N8 you have to remove the back entirely to access the separate sim and SD slots. Let’s be honest, that’s a major pain.

Camera quality may also be a deciding factor between these two phones. While both run the same camera app, the slightly more limited hardware on the N8 resulted in quite a few blurry snaps. Again, the V8’s pics were much more satisfactory.

None of this means you should write the Smart N8 off as an option and here’s why; $199. If you’re only doing one thing at a time with your phone, you’d struggle to find one this good-looking, with a fingerprint sensor, that works this well for this price.

One "but" though…

Can’t you find another $150? Because the Smart V8 isn’t just $150 better than the N8. I’d say it’s at least $500 better. If you’ve ever regretted buying a budget handset because you ran out of space after a month or it couldn’t run the games your friends were playing on their phones, the Smart V8 is incredible value at just $349.

You can’t use it in the pool, but it really doesn’t have too many other limitations.