Vodafone Smart Tab Prime 6 review

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.