Tesco Hudl review

HUDL CAMERA

There’s a 3-megapixel camera on the back of the tablet. It might include touch-to-focus, but it’s very slow. Tapping pauses the screen for at least a second, and the live view preview is never as sharp as the final image, forcing you to check that each shot was fully in focus before taking another. It also struggles to avoid over-exposing even the most basic scene. Detail is sorely lacking too, even in well-lit images. There’s also no flash, which means low-light shooting is pretty much out of the question.

Our standard test shots revealed a shocking lack of detail at times, with some surfaces lacking texture or definition. Colour accuracy was reasonable in daylight conditions and our brightly lit still life fared reasonably too. However, once the lights were dimmed it struggled to avoid introducing noise to our images. In the dark with only a few light sources, noise was much worse and there was practically no detail at all.

Cases are available in all the usual Tesco colours for £15

HUDLING THROUGH

Inside, an ARM Cortex A9-based quad-core processor running at 1.5GHz should, on paper, be more than fast enough to run the stock version of Android smoothly. However, we noticed a lot of jerky animations when scrolling through home screens or opening apps. This was reflected in fairly mediocre benchmark results, although web browser performance was at least fairly good with a SunSpider JavaScript score of 1308ms. Many games played smoothly on the Mali 400 GPU, but more taxing titles such as Real Racing 3 stuttered and struggled to maintain a smooth frame rate.

At least battery life fared well thanks to the low-power internals. In our video rundown test, the Hudl lasted for nine and a half hours, which is more than enough to view a few films or for a full day of web browsing.

SHOP OR DROP?

The best part about the Hudl is its price. At £119 it’s one of the least expensive Android tablets around, and in many ways outperforms the cheaper alternatives. It isn’t the perfect budget tablet, as performance is disappointing in places and the Hudl’s display quality is only average, but if your budget can’t stretch to a Google Nexus 7 (2013) then it’s a very good alternative.

If you have Tesco Clubcard points to spend, it becomes even more of a bargain, as they count for double when used to buy the Hudl – with the price dropping as low as £60 if you buy it entirely with points. At that price it’s an incredible bargain.