"This is a stylish, desirable, and cheap full-featured Android tablet
that will satisfy the whole family. It completely outshines virtually
everything in the same price bracket. You'll be impressed at just how
much Tesco's Hudl 2 offers for your money."
For
Great value for money
Decent HD screen
Handy parental controls
Against
Poor battery life
Tesco launcher sluggish
Limited internal storage
It
doesn't take a huge wad of cash to secure an Android tablet nowadays,
but the experience at the budget end of the market can be frustratingly
bad. It was only a matter time before someone aside from Google managed
to produce a halfway decent, budget tablet, offering the full Android
experience, but who knew it would be Tesco? Step aside
Google, out of the way Amazon, it takes a British supermarket to show
you how to make a jaw-droppingly cheap tablet that's actually desirable.
If you're looking for a tablet for the kids, something cheap to use
around the house, or an affordable option for the tablet-virgin in your
life, the Tesco Hudl 2 is going be downright impossible to ignore. This is an accessible device with an HD display, solid build quality, and almost unadulterated Android 4.4 KitKat. You won't be shocked to find that the Hudl 2 costs less than half the price of the iPad mini 2, but it's also £70 cheaper than the Nexus 7 or the Kindle Fire HDX. Every little helps indeed. Building on the success of the original Hudl,
which now drops from £119 to £99, Tesco's Hudl 2 is bigger and better
in almost every way. There's a larger 8.3-inch HD screen, a quad-core
processor that Tesco claims is three times faster, double the RAM at
2GB, and a slightly improved 5MP camera. I did not expect
to be charmed by the Hudl 2. It only costs £129, it has a stupid name,
and it's part of Tesco's bizarre plan to make and do everything. It was
with some reluctance, reticence, and even regret that I put my Google
Nexus 7 (2013) aside and took up my new tablet. Hudl round and allow me
to explain how Tesco's tablet won me over. Google's
first Nexus 7 tablet made the smaller tablet form factor fashionable,
but just as smartphone displays are growing consistently larger, so are
tablets. When Apple decided to enter the smaller tablet
market it chose to make the first iPad mini's display 7.9 inches. Tesco
takes the trend slightly further with an 8.3-inch display in the Hudl 2. That
display is the first thing you're going to notice taking the Hudl 2 out
of the box and it makes a great first impression. The resolution has
been significantly boosted to 1920 x 1200 pixels. That's a full high
definition screen that matches the Nexus 7 (2013) resolution. Colours are rich and vibrant, text is sharp and easy to read, and you can happily watch movies, game, or read on it for hours. It
feels like quite a big tablet if you're coming from the older Hudl or a
Nexus 7. The Hudl 2 measures 224 x 128 x 9 mm (8.8 x 5 x 0.35 inches).
If you hold it in landscape then it's much wider and slightly slimmer
than its predecessor, but exactly the same height. It's also pretty
heavy at around 410g, compared to 370g for the original Hudl, and just
290g for the Nexus 7 (2013). I can hold the tablet
one-handed for short periods, but if you're reading or watching a movie
you'll want to prop it or your arm is going to get tired. Two hands are
obviously a necessity for navigation. It
does feel nicely balanced and it's satisfyingly slim. The soft touch
coating on the back wraps around the sides adding grip and making it
very comfortable to hold. It feels most natural to hold
it in landscape and the larger bezels at either end make this easy to do
without obscuring the screen. Flip around to the back
and you'll find a metallic embossed Hudl logo in the centre. Two fairly
large speaker grills dominate either end and the camera lens sits above
the right speaker grill at the top corner. Still
holding it in landscape, the left edge of the Hudl 2 plays host to a
standard 3.5mm headphone port. The right has the micro USB port for file
transfer and charging. Up top there's a volume rocker
with a power button just beneath it. The buttons are plastic and they
have a decent amount of travel. It's not hard to find and use them in
the dark. The bottom edge includes an open microSD card
slot for storage expansion with cards up to 32GB in size. It looks a
little odd that the port is open and you can expect a bit of dust
collection if you don't use it, but it's fairly unobtrusive. Further
along towards the middle of the bottom edge there's a surprise
micro-HDMI out connection so that you can plug your Hudl 2 directly into
your TV. This is a rarity on tablets nowadays and it's one that some
people will appreciate because it makes it very easy to play content
from your tablet on the big screen. The Hudl 2 feels
surprisingly premium and it looks good too. I had the black model for
review, but you can add some colour if you prefer as it's available in
blue, turquoise, orange, pink, purple, red, or white. Based on the design alone I would never have guessed that this tablet was so cheap.
Interface and performance
The Tesco Hudl 2 runs Android 4.4.2 and it's basically stock
Android, just like Google's Nexus tablets. All Tesco has done is load
its own smattering of apps and the My Tesco launcher. The launcher has
some Tesco widgets pointing you at Tesco content and a basic app drawer.
You
can't uninstall the apps, but you can disable them. You can also
download a new launcher, such as the Nova Launcher and make it the
default instead of My Tesco launcher. The interface is
essentially stock Android. You have three home screens to begin with,
but you can add a couple of extras by dragging app icons or widgets to
the edge for a total of five home screens. The app
drawer is bottom centre in the permanent dock where you can configure
three app shortcuts either side. The app drawer is slightly different in
that it's just a big list of your apps, there's no widget tab in there. You
long press on the screen to add widgets, or to change your wallpaper.
Tesco includes a large selection of wallpapers featuring happy people
huddling together. Pull down from the top left of the
screen and you'll get your notifications. Pull down from the top right
and you can access settings. Stock Android is a breeze to use and it's
very easy to get to grips with. I found the My Tesco
launcher a little bit laggy. The animation when you swipe isn't always
very smooth and the widget can take a while to populate. When I switched
to the Nova launcher navigation felt that little bit snappier. Taking
a look inside the Hudl 2 you'll find an Intel Atom quad-core processor
clocked at 1.83GHz. It's backed up by 2GB of RAM. That's a major boost
over the original Tesco Hudl
and it does feel fast and responsive. For the most part apps and games
are quick to load and you can skip back to the home screen with a tap. Geekbench
3 gave the Hudl 2 a single-core score of 792, but we're really
interested in the 2147 multi-core score. I ran Geekbench 3 on my Nexus 7 (2013) and it scored 576 and 1896 respectively. When we tested the, much more expensive, Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1 earlier this summer it scored 2722. What we can conclude from all this is that the Hudl 2 is fast and performs well. I ran some high-end games like Asphalt 8
and there was nary a stutter. It gets pretty hot around the back near
the camera when you play graphically intensive games for any length of
time, but so does my Xperia Z2 and my Nexus 7. It
hasn't all been rosy, there were a couple of moments when the Hudl 2
seemed to freeze coming out of an app. I suspect that the My Tesco
launcher is the culprit there. It also completely refused
to turn on at one point. I was watching Netflix, using the Hudl 2 to
select content and streaming it to my Chromecast. I watched a couple of episodes of Suits and when I went to stop it, the Hudl 2 simply didn't respond to the power button. I
tried holding it down for ten seconds, nothing. I tried holding down
the power button and the volume down button for ten seconds, still
nothing. The battery hadn't been low, but I tried plugging the Hudl 2
into the charger for a while anyway and the screen seemed to come on,
but it was blank and dull. I read the booklet, but it has
no information and the current technical support on Tesco's website
still refers to the original Hudl. After
half an hour of charging I unplugged it and tried again, but it still
wouldn't turn on. Finally I just sat holding down the power button and
the volume down button and eventually the Hudl 2 vibrated and powered
completely off. When it started up again it went through
the boot cycle and worked as normal. I used the Hudl 2 with Netflix and
the Chromecast again several times, but it never happened again. For
the most part the Hudl 2 performed well during our time together.
There's no telling how often it will get updates. My Nexus 7 already has
Android 4.4.4, while the Hudl 2 is on 4.4.2 and I did check for updates
with no results
Battery life
Tesco prefers to state "up to 8 hours
battery life" rather than provide us with a capacity in mAh. I suspect
that the battery isn't all that big, and that's a shame, because the
Hudl 2 really needs a big battery. I
found that the battery drained very quickly out of the box, but it's
not unusual for batteries to take a while to bed in and you tend to use
new devices more than you realize in the first few days. There's also an
additional drain from downloading and installing all your regular apps. After fully charging the Hudl 2, I gave it a lazy Sunday test. I surfed the web for a couple of hours, played Clash of Clans for ten minutes, watched two movies, and then the kids watched an episode of Spongebob. By the end of that it was dropping down to the 10 percent mark. Not too impressive. In
an average week day with light usage you probably aren't going to have
any problems, and you might squeeze a couple of days of use out of it
between charges. Medium and heavy users are going to have to get used to
charging it daily at least.
Playing a relatively simple game like Duet for ten minutes drained the battery by 4%. Playing Asphalt 8 for ten minutes drained it by 6%. Running
our 90 minute battery test video at full brightness on a fully charged
Hudl 2 reduced the battery to just 63%. That's a worryingly large drain
of 37 percent. The original Hudl only lost 21%, the Nexus 7 dropped 20%, and even the relatively poor LG G Pad 8.3 only dropped 30% during the same test. If
you want a tablet to take out and about on your travels, then you had
better look elsewhere. The Hudl 2's weak battery shouldn't be such a big
issue when you're at home with a plug socket at hand, but I'm still
disappointed at its lack of stamina.
The essentials
Since
the Hudl 2 is essentially using stock Android the basic essentials are
solid. The keyboard is accurate and easy to type on. The stock Android
calendar, email, contacts, and camera apps are straightforward. You'll
find the same redundancy you get on many Android devices with Google's
Gmail app and an email app, as well as a Gallery app and Google's Photos
app. It's not an especially big deal, but it's going to confuse some
people. In
addition to Tesco's Blinkbox content offerings you'll find apps for
ordering food, banking, clothes, managing your Clubcard, and Tesco's
photo store. Some of them aren't apps at all; they're just shortcuts to
the website. All are useless and eminently ignorable if you don't use
Tesco. All of Google's content apps are there and you'll
also find Google Maps. I tested it a couple of times and the Hudl 2 GPS
was quick to get an accurate fix. You're not likely to use it for
navigating, especially with the limited battery, but you could if you
wanted to. You'll find Google's Chrome browser as the
default web browser on the Hudl 2, but there is a slight oddity related
to the parental controls for your children's profiles. If
you set up a child's profile and limit web access then they use a
special browser labelled Internet which keeps them from browsing
anywhere you don't want them to. It works, but it's not as slick or fast
as Chrome. Camera
Why do they put cameras on tablets? The Tesco Hudl 2 has no answer. Tesco has beefed up the main camera to 5MP, compared to the 3.2MP in the original Hudl,
but the front-facing camera has gone the other way from 2MP down to
1.2MP. Megapixels aren't everything, but it would be challenging to
argue that there's anything impressive about either camera in the Hudl
2. It's
a little strange that the front-facing camera has been hobbled when
it's probably the more likely to get used, whether for apps or for
making Internet calls on apps like Hangouts and Skype. The
app is the stock Android camera app and it's very basic. You can switch
on grid lines to help you line up shots, or you can swivel to the
front-facing camera. There's
also a timer option. If you swipe in from the left side of the screen
you'll reveal the menu where you can switch to video or try out the Lens
Blur, Panorama, or Photo Sphere effects. You
can tap on screen to tell the camera to focus on a specific area or
subject. It's pretty slow to actually take a shot and the quality is
generally poor. Google's camera effects are a bit gimmicky and can be
very frustrating to actually pull off, with repeated errors about moving
too fast when you try to pan. The photos I took with the
Hudl 2 were all bad. They lack detail, contrast is bad, and the camera
can't deal with low light at all. There's no flash, so this is strictly a
camera for well-lit situations. The video camera is
equally terrible, struggling to adjust to changing light, blurring if
you move it, and introducing loads of noise unless you're in a very well
lit area.
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