Tesco Hudl tablet review

With tablet sales increasing rapidly, they'll soon become as ubiquitous as mobile phones. Key to making that a reality will be the success of budget tablets, and Tesco's seven-inch Hudl is making a serious pitch to be best of the bunch. 

It's on sale now for £119.

Design and features
The Hudl makes no claims to be a high-end device: it looks chunky and cheap, with its ten-inch thick plastic body and hefty 370g weight. But wait, there are some pretty good things going on. There's a micro HDMI connection that allows you to view content from your Hudl directly on your TV -- not quite so common on tablets these days -- though you'll have to shell out for the necessary cable, as one is not supplied. There's also a brace of 1W stereo speakers on the back, which make for a pretty decent sound if you're sharing and don't want to plug in your headphones (again, none supplied).

The seven-inch multitouch screen offers 1,440x900 pixels, which won't trouble the high-enders, but with 242ppi it's a perfectly good resolution for this price point. It's a little sharper than the similarly priced Asus MeMO Pad HD 7 (1,280x800) for instance, and well ahead of the slightly cheaper Argos MyTablet (1,024x600) and it's certainly more than sharp enough for good movie watching and web browsing.
Processor and Android
There's also a quad-core processor under the hood, clocked at 1.5GHz and backed by 1GB of RAM. It's not up there with the best and there are often brief delays when opening apps and browsing websites. In our usual AnTutu benchmark test it clocked up a perfectly respectable score of 18,960 (a little behind the recent Nexus 7's 20,491) but it was able to at least run any of the HD games we tried it with. Still, if you like speed from your tablet, this probably isn't the one for you.

It runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, which is nice and recent, and it's reassuring to not be fobbed off with an older version of Google's OS, as often happens with budget devices. It's mostly unadulterated Android too, though there is a dedicated Tesco button and associated widgets to access your supermarket services in a hurry.
There's a reasonably generous 16GB of memory on board but you can add another 32GB via microSD card.
Battery life isn't bad, though it's certainly not exceptional. We got a bit more than a day of regular use but if you only use it occasionally you should expect to be getting two or three days out of it.
Photography
There's a three-megapixel camera on the back and a two-megapixel one on the front for video calls. The better camera is pretty low quality, even for a budget tablet, and the picture quality is so-so at best. However, the two-megapixel front-facing camera is arguably the more important of the two on a tablet, since it's the one you'll be using for video calls via Skype and other apps, and it's considerably better than you'd expect at this price, where too many tablets all too often try to palm us off with a VGA or sub-megapixel model.

Conclusion
It's a wee bit more expensive than Argos's new MyTablet (£100) but for 19 quid more you do get more tablet, with a better screen, quad-core processor and superior cameras. It's not a world beater by any means, but at this price it's a bargain, and there's bound to be a lot of them flying off the shelves in the run-up to Xmas.