Vodafone Smart Tab 4G review

Keeping the brightness high will obviously have a negative impact on the tablet’s battery life, but the Smart Tab 4G’s 4,060mAh battery should keep you going for most of the day. It lasted 8h 52m in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to half brightness, which is pretty decent by 8in tablet standards.

The Smart Tab 4G only has 8GB of onboard storage for local files, though, so anyone who likes queuing up lots of BBC iPlayer downloads will probably want to make use of its microSD card slot, which can support cards up to 64GB.

As a Vodafone tablet, it naturally comes pre-loaded with a lot of Vodafone apps, but you can easily get rid of the screen-hogging widgets to reduce the amount of clutter onscreen. Some apps are worth keeping installed if you’re a Vodafone mobile customer, though, as the My Vodafone app lets you check the number of minutes, texts and data you’ve used if you’re on a pay monthly contract, or your remaining credit and Freebies if you’re on Pay as you go. The Vodafone Net Perform app lets you monitor your data usage and test network speeds, and the Smart Weather and Smart Flow wallpaper apps are also fairly innocuous, but we’d recommend ditching the My Web browser in favour of Chrome.

As with most tablet cameras, the 5-megapixel sensor on the back of the tablet is a bit of a token addition, but still takes perfectly good shots for uploading to social networks. Colours were fairly accurate and there was a good level of detail present, but we did notice some noise and speckled rainbow effects starting to creep in on large expanses of sky or block colours.

^ The camera isn’t particularly detailed, but at least colours were accurate with only a minimal amount of noise

The Vodafone Smart Tab 4G is a perfectly decent tablet, with plenty to like if you don’t want to pay through the roof for a cellular iPad Mini 2. However, there are plenty of cheaper, faster tablets out there, including the Tesco Hudl 2, if you’re not fussed about 4G.