Vodafone Smart Tab Prime 6 review

It’s not strictly necessary to have a tablet with built-in 4G if you want to get online away from a Wi-Fi hotspot, as depending on your mobile contract you can simply use your phone as a wireless hotspot. However, there’s little to beat the convenience of having wireless data built into your tablet, and the Vodafone Smart Tab Prime 6 is a pretty cheap way to get it.

At least it is if you buy one on Vodafone’s Pay As You Go service, where the tablet costs just £150 and you can top up with 30-day data allowances when you need them. Go for a Pay Monthly option and the cost quickly begins to rise, as prices start at £17 a month for 1GB of 4G data with an upfront cost of £19 for the tablet, and go all the way up to £31 a month for 8GB of data with no upfront cost. This can make the total cost of ownership as high as £744 over two years, which makes it considerably more expensive than your average Wi-Fi only Android tablet.

The Smart Tab Prime 6 is just 7.9mm thick and weighs 406g, and feels reasonably well made. We’re big fans of its soft-touch rear, as this makes it very easy to hold for long periods of time and its gently rounded corners are comfortable in the hand. The tablet also comes with Android 5.0 Lollipop straight out of the box, and its stock version of Google’s latest operating system looks cleaner and has a more modern appearance than the operating systems on many of its Android KitKat-based rivals.

Display

However, that’s more or less where the Smart Tab Prime 6’s appeal ends, as its 9.6in 1,280×800 screen is very disappointing. By modern standards, there simply aren’t enough pixels here to deliver a crisp, clean image, and its pixel density of just 157 pixels per inch means that icons and text were visibly blurry and pixellated. This combination probably wouldn’t have been that unusual a couple of years ago, but when 1,280×720 resolutions are now the norm for decent budget smartphones such as the £150 Motorola Moto G (whose 5in screen gives it a pixel density of 294ppi), stretching a similar resolution across a screen four times the size just doesn’t cut it.

It doesn’t help that the tablet’s IPS panel looks to be a pretty cheap one, as it not only has a grainy finish, making it even harder to see the screen clearly, but its colour accuracy is also one of the worst we’ve seen. The display can cover just 58.5% of the sRGB colour gamut, and looks very washed out; colours had little sense of depth or vibrancy. The graph produced by our colour calibrator showed that greens were perhaps its strongest area, but all the major primary colours fell short of the sRGB gamut boundaries, so photos and videos will never look their best.

It doesn’t help that the screen isn’t particularly bright; we measured a peak white level of just 275.18cd/m2. This is fine for indoor use, but you’ll struggle to see the screen clearly in sunlight, and dark scenes in particular proved almost impossible to see when we watched a film on the train. Contrast was also pretty average at 750:1, but at least the screen’s reasonable black levels of 0.37cd/m2 were more in line with what we’d expect from a £150 tablet.

Chipset and benchmarks

Another area where the Smart Tab Prime 6 falls down is in its day-to-day performance. Its quad-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor, for instance, is no faster than that in a typical budget smartphone such as the Motorola Moto E, and its score of 525 in BaseMark OS II is almost half what the Tesco Hudl 2 managed. Likewise, its score of 1,128 in BrowserMark is low, and web browsing could be noticeably juddery – image-heavy pages such as The Guardian often stuttered when scrolling and articles with embedded videos proved particularly troublesome.

This isn’t a tablet you’ll be rushing to play 3D games on, either, as it scored just 4,022 in our BaseMark X 1.1 graphics benchmarks, averaging a measly 6.8fps in the Dunes test on Medium quality settings and 10.6fps in the Hangar test. It also failed to complete either test in High quality, as it crashed repeatedly whenever we tried to run them. The tablet can still run simple 2D games perfectly well, and we were even able to play a game of Hearthstone on the tablet despite its somewhat jerky animations.

One redeeming feature is its decent battery life. With a 4,600mAh battery on board, the tablet managed a respectable 8h 44m in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to our standard 170cd/m2, which should be more than enough to keep even the most ardent film streamers satisfied during long journeys.

If you’d rather keep your media files on the tablet itself, the 16GB of onboard storage should be enough to get you started. It’s a shame the microSD card slot only supports cards up to 32GB, but this is fairly standard across most tablets at this price.

As a Vodafone tablet, it naturally comes pre-loaded with a couple of Vodafone apps, but thankfully most of them are hidden away in the app tray. We’d recommend getting rid of the Discover widget, but it’s worth installing the Vodafone Net Perform app, as this lets you monitor your data usage and test network speeds. My Vodafone is another key app for Vodafone mobile customers, as this 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 prepay.

Camera

On the rear of the tablet is a 5-megapixel camera. It’s a pretty token addition, and hardly the highlight of the tablet, but we don’t think you’ll be using it very often anyway. Colours and shadows were often a little green in places and several areas of detail only showed muddy clumps of blurred pixels. HDR mode was even worse, as instead of correcting each picture’s contrast level, it looked as though the camera had simply applied a grey filter to each picture, making images look even duller than before.

^ The level of detail was quite low and colours often looked a little green, even when the camera was set to Auto mode

Conclusion

If you buy it on prepay, Vodafone’s Smart Tab Prime 6 is one of the cheapest large-screen tablets there is, and is especially cheap for a model with built-in 4G. However, its low price shows in the tablet’s screen and performance. We’d rather use a phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot and buy a cheaper, smaller tablet like the Tesco Hudl2 or Asus MeMO Pad 7, or save up for a better, larger model like the Google Nexus 9.

If neither of those suit your needs, then check out our regularly-updated Best tablets 2015 and buying guide.