With Christmas just around the corner, plenty of you are currently on the lookout for a lovely Android tablet that'll bring a smile to the faces of your loved ones. This year has seen plenty of brilliant new models released, including the Tesco Hudl 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5, meaning that purchasing a good tablet is now cheaper and easier than ever. The power on offer in the top-end models has gone through the roof, while budget devices have improved massively. Unfortunately, this means that picking one has now become a very difficult task.

If you know that the iPad Air 2 or a device running Windows isn’t for you, then this is the place to be. Check out all of our top picks from the list below.

If, however, you'd like a little more guidance on what to look for when buying a new tablet, you should read our tablet buyer's guide, which explains the strengths and weaknesses of each type of tablet and anything else you may need to consider, technical or otherwise.

One of the golden rules you need to remember when looking at Android tablets is that you should steer clear of cheap, no-name models. There are a countless number of them available from various vendors and they're almost never worth purchasing, mainly because they don't tend to last very long.

As for the 'best' Android tablet, there isn't really one at the moment. What we do have is a number of great Android tablets that perform some tasks better than others, whether that's gaming, work or general entertainment. What's best for you may be very different from what the person next to you might need.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5

Best 10-inch Android tablet

Key features:
   

• 10.5-inch, 2,560 x 1,600 Super AMOLED screen
• Exynos 5 Octa 5420 CPU
• Over 14 hours video playback

This has one of the finest screens of any tablet of any type. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5's display is stunning, and a marvel for watching video. It's also among the slimmest and lightest tablets of its size and packs in a few extras like expandable storage and a fingerprint reader, though the latter isn't all that good.

Performance is also excellent, while battery life is fantastic, at over 14 hours. Elsewhere you've got all the usual extras such as front and rear cameras and stereo speakers, while a somewhat clunky but still useful case system seals the detail. It's simply the best 10-inch Android tablet around.

Price: £344 (£399 at time of review) / $374.99

Nexus 9

Best 8-inch or 9-inch Android tablet

Key features:

• 8.9-inch, 2,048 x 1,536 IPS LCD screen
• Powerful GPU
• Good battery life
• Android 5.0 Lollipop

The Nexus 9 looks starkly different to Google’s previous tablets. It is far broader and the 8.9-inch display, with an aspect ratio of 4:3, isn’t as good for viewing widescreen movies as previous Nexuses, but games and apps feel much nicer. Colours are excellent, viewing angles are good and the 281ppi screen is nice and clear. At 425g and 7.9mm thick, it’s also comfortable enough to hold for extended periods of time.

One of the standout features is that, unlike any of its rivals who will have to wait for the software, it ships with Android 5.0 Lollipop. The battery life, combined with the powerful GPU, allow for an excellent gaming experience. The 8- and 1.6-megapixel rear- and front-facing cameras aren't the best you'll ever come across, but it's a terrific piece of kit nonetheless.

Price: £299.99 (£319 at time of review) / $349.99

Asus MeMO Pad 7 ME572C

Best 7-inch Android tablet

Key features:

• Excellent screen
• Good battery life
• Attractive design

The Asus-manufactured Nexus 7 (2013) made the 7-inch Android tablet market its own, with its combination of solid specs, excellent performance and tiny price tag. However, it’s not as young as it used to be, and Asus has taken aim at it with the MeMO Pad 7 ME572C. It’s a unique-looking slate, with curved sides and sharp corners, but lacks a soft-touch plastic rear. At 8.3mm thick and 269g, it’s also thinner and lighter than the Nexus, without holding back on battery life and performance.

If you’re after something that’ll keep the family entertained, you might be best off looking elsewhere. The speakers offer solid but unremarkable sound quality and are easy to block with your fingers. While the 1,920 x 1,200 pixel resolution screen delivers excellent viewing angles and good contrast and colours, our review sample suffered from backlight bleed. It's not perfect by any means, and while it’s not as cheap as the Nexus, it’s definitely a better all-round device.

Price: £179 / $326

Asus Memo Pad 7

Best sub-£100 Android tablet

Key features:

• 7-inch 1,280 x 800 IPS screen
• Intel Atom Z2560 CPU
• Android 4.4

When we reviewed the Asus Memo Pad 7 ME176CX, it was selling for almost £150. But with all the competition from tablets like the Hudl 2, it has now been price-dropped to £99.99 by many retailers, making it a bonafide bargain.

Screen resolution is decidedly sub-Retina grade and the design isn’t too flashy, but in most other respects this is a top-notch tablet. The Intel Atom Z2560 provides loads of power, you get a very generous (at the price) 16GB of storage, and while the screen doesn’t offer oodles of pixels, its quality level is otherwise pretty solid. If you can afford to push the boat out a little further, we think the Hudl 2 is better. But if £100 is your strict cut-off point, the Asus Memo Pad 7 ME176CX should be at the top of your list.

Price: £99.99 (£119.99 at time of review) / $124.99

Tesco Hudl 2

Best sub-£200 tablet
 
Key features:

• 8.3-inch 1,920 x 1,200 IPS screen
• Intel Atom Z3735D CPU
• Android 4.4

Tesco is hardly well-known as a top tablet manufacturer, but it's hit the ball out of the park with the Hudl 2. At £129 this is probably the best-value Android tablet ever made, potentially even trumping the Nexus 7. It gets you a great 8.3-inch, 1,920 x 1,200 display, giving you a bit more screen space than the long-standing Nexus model. This size of screen is great for watching movies on, without being so large that it’s a pain to carry around with you.

The quad-core Intel Atom CPU gets you plenty of power for high-end 3D games too, meaning there are few roadblocks despite the low price. There is, predictably, a bit of Tesco app bloat to deal with and general performance isn’t quite at Nexus 7 level. But for pure hardware value, you'll struggle to beat the Hudl 2.

Price: £129

Asus Transformer Pad TF701T

Best Android tablet for work

Key features:

• Great 10.1-inch, 2,560 x 1,600 pixel IGZO IPS screen
• Keyboard dock adds extra five hours of battery life
• 32/64GB versions available - expandable

The Transformer series convinced us that an Android tablet can work as a replacement for an ultra-portable laptop. Asus’ Transformer Pad TF701T has been around for a while now, but it’s still the best choice if Android is what you’re after and you're willing to spend enough cash for a real top-quality experience.

The 10.1-inch, 2,560 x 1,600 pixel resolution IGZO IPS screen produces super-sharp visuals and great viewing angles. It has an Nvidia Tegra 4 quad-core processor and apart from some minor jaggedy moments, it's a slick operator. One of the most impressive features of the Transformer is the battery life: the TF701T gives you a combined 17 hours, or around 12 hours with just the tablet alone. Now available for under £350 with the keyboard base, it’s a great pick.

Price: £328.99 (£430 at time of review)

Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 (2014)

Best Android tablet for entertainment

Key features:

• Brilliant speakers
• Excellent 8.9-inch, 2,560 x 1,600 resolution screen
• Attractive, lightweight design

If you’re in the market for an Android tablet built for entertainment, you won’t find anything better than Amazon's Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 (2014) right now. It boasts the same excellent design qualities as its predecessor, the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9, and at 374g, the Wi-Fi only model is significantly lighter than even the iPad Air 2 (437g).

The 8.9-inch, 2,560 x 1,600 pixel resolution display, with a sharpness level of 339ppi, is brilliant, delivering excellent colour accuracy and a higher level of brightness than the previous HDX model. It’s also great for reading, but can struggle with glare outdoors. The speakers are the best you’ll find on any tablet. With support for Dolby Atmos, they deliver a better, more immersive sense of directional sound than anything else on the market right now. The 2.5GHz Snapdragon 805 processor paired with 2GB of RAM and an Adreno 430 GPU make it excellent for both everyday use and gaming. Fire OS is still divisive, however.

Price: £329 / $379

Amazon Fire HD 6

Best Android tablet for kids
 
Key features:

• 6-inch, 1,280 x 800 pixel IPS screen
• Mediatek CPU
• 8/16GB storage
• Fire OS

The Amazon Fire HD 6 is one of the first sub-7-inch tablets we’ve seen. It uses a 6-inch screen, giving it proportions that kids are more likely to get on with. Just as important, it’s also cheap. At £80 for the 8GB version, you’re not going to have to cancel your kids' pocket money for a whole year if they accidentally drop it.

With tablets of this price, you generally have to deal with a great many hardware cuts, but there are remarkably few here. The Fire HD 6 has a good-quality IPS screen, a surprisingly powerful processor and very good battery life. It’s not as slim as we’d like and it uses Amazon’s more restrictive Fire OS rather than normal Android, but it’s still a corker for children or budget buyers.

Price: £79.99 / $99

Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2

Best tablet for drawing
 
Key features:

• 12.2-inch, 2,560 x 1,600 LCD screen
• Exynos 5 Octa 5420 CPU
• S Pen digitiser stylus

Artists out there who want to get creative with a tablet need to make sure they get something with an active digitiser stylus. This technology has been around for years, since before modern tablets existed, but only a few of today's best slates actually use the tech.

The Note series of Samsung tablets is where to head to first, and the biggest of the lot at present is the Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2. You don’t get the AMOLED screen of Samsung’s latest top-end tablets, but the large display makes a great virtual canvas when you team it up with the S Pen stylus and something like Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, which comes preinstalled.

With a 12.2-inch screen and 750g body, it’s not the smallest or lightest tablet around, but the extra scribble space is worth it for art enthusiasts. If you want something a bit smaller, check out the Note 10.1.

Price: £349 (£649 at time of review) / $599

Nvidia Shield Tablet

Best Android tablet for gaming

Key features:

• Brilliant gaming experience
• Impressive build quality
• Excellent display

For consumers who are seriously into gaming, look no further than the Nvidia Shield Tablet. It’s far and away the best tablet for gamers on the market right now, having been built to deliver the best experience possible. Under the hood, the custom-built Nvidia Tegra K1 processor clocked at 2.2GHz combined with a 192-core Kepler GPU and 2GB of RAM ensure smooth performance, even while simultaneously running high-end Android games and multiple apps.

In terms of design, it looks slightly like an enlarged HTC One M8, which is no bad thing. The front-facing speakers above and below the screen, along with a pair of speakers on the top and bottom edges, deliver sound that can easily fill a room. At 9.2mm thick, it isn’t the sleekest number we’ve ever seen, but the tapered edges make it comfortable to hold in one hand. The 8-inch, 1,920 x 1,200 display delivers rich colours but isn’t quite bright enough. Premium, Tegra-optimised games and the £49.99 Shield Controller cost extra, but they’re worth it if you're willing to splash the cash.

Price: £240 / $299

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Key Features: 4.7-inch 1,280 x 720 pixel IPS screen; Android 4.2; 13-megapixel camera with LED flash
Manufacturer: Alcatel

What is the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha?

The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is a bit of a departure from the phones from the Alcatel OneTouch stable. It’s higher-end, offering a more design-led approach than normal.

Some of its choices are rather odd, though, and its core hardware just isn’t quite good enough in one too many areas to justify the fairly elevated £300 SIM-free price. While Alcatel OneTouch is known best for its affordable phones, this one simply isn’t cheap enough. Even if you find it at a knockdown price, it suffers from a few serious issues.

Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha – Design

The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha wants to stand out from the crowd, at least a little. It’s a phone with clear plastic bits above and below the screen, where you find the LED lights for the phone’s notifications and soft keys.

We saw similar moves in some Sony phones of last year, including the Xperia SP. It gives the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha quite a striking look face-on – something that we don’t often see in Alcatel OneTouch phones.

In practical terms, this isn’t quite such a smash, though. While the lower plastic cut-out highlights the back, home and menu soft key icons, it’s only the non-illuminated area above that’s actually touch-sensitive. The soft keys aren't so much marked as mis-marked. You get used to this, of course, but it takes some shine off the design.

What’s less easy to get used to is quite how bright the notification LED is. We generally like our notification lights to be soft, simple glows that are easy to see yet not too distracting, but the Idol Alpha's triple LEDs are quite bright, with a large area of effect thanks to their light being fired through a diffuser before reaching the see-through area. You can thankfully tone down the notifications in the Settings menu, but there are only three options: off, mid and full.

A little like the Samsung Galaxy Alpha, the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is a mostly plastic phone with a band of aluminium running around the outside to give you a harder, more expensive feel.

The lightly bevelled edges are a little on the harsh side, but it’s a phone that looks and feels its money. It’s also nice to see a phone that isn't styled just like the competition. As detailed, though, any claims of originality are over-egged.

There’s one element of the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha hardware that we hate, though. And we think a lot of you will, too. It doesn’t have a 3.5mm headphone jack, instead forcing you to use an adapter that plugs into the microUSB slot. One comes bundled, but this strikes us as a terrible idea for a handful of reasons.

It means no listening while you’re charging, plus you need to remember to keep the bloody thing with you, and if you lose it you’re stuffed. As you have to use an adapter that sticks out a fair way, it also makes the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha hard to fit in some pockets with earphones attached. The final insult: the feature is flat-out broken in some respects, as the on-body speaker doesn't stop playing when used with certain headphones with inline remotes.

What were they thinking?

The headphone jack cull seems to be part of an attempt to make the OneTouch Idol Alpha as simple and streamlined as possible, but this is already scuppered by having so much screen bezel on show. The more futuristic-looking phones are almost all-screen. This one isn’t.

Another casualty of this hardware purification is the microSD slot. There’s a decent 16GB of internal storage, but that's not enough for the Idol Alpha to be used as a serious music or video player.

Aside from the microUSB port, the only slot on the Idol Alpha is for the pop-out micro-SIM tray. Like the iPhone 6, it needs a tool to open.

We understand what Alcatel OneTouch was going for with the phone’s design, but it doesn’t seem to have married up practical and aesthetic priorities at all well.

Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha – Screen

The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha has a 4.7-inch screen, a size that these days fits among lower mid-range phones rather than more expensive ones. It’s a decent size, and lets the phone stay relatively small and easy to handle. The thin-ness helps, too: it’s a very slender 7.5mm thick.

Resolution of the Alcatel OneTouch Alpha screen is a little disappointing, though. You get 720p, which is fair for the size, but not really for the price. With reams of 1080p phones available at £300, we find the display resolution a little hard to accept.

The effects in use are minor, though. There’s a little more blockiness around the edges of characters, but only a tiny amount. The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha's display is still very sharp.

Colours are fair but not fantastic, with slight over-saturation designed for ‘pop’ rather than accuracy. And, as with most LCDs, the flawed black levels become apparent in darker rooms. We’d have no issue with the display if it wasn’t for the price. Selling at the same price as the Nexus 5, and £50 more than the Honor 6, the Idol Alpha's limitations are actually quite serious. Just ‘fairly good’ doesn’t quite cut it at £300 SIM-free.

Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha – Software

One of the most glaringly out-of-date parts of the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is its software. It runs Android 4.2.2 where Android 5.0 Lollipop has already rolled out to a bunch of phones.

The phone is a full two years behind the pack in this respect. An update may come, but we’d advise not relying on the fact.

It's distressingly outdated if you think about it too much, but the custom UI on the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha does mask it to an extent. Lots of the changes people notice most between Android 4.2 and 5.0 are aesthetic, and would be wiped out or altered by a custom launcher anyway.

This is a fairly light interface, though. It alters the look of the home screens and apps menu, but retains the style of the dropdown notification bar. One of the more significant things you’ll miss out on that’s included in Android 5.0 Lollipop is lock screen notifications. Here you just get an unlock widget that lets you head straight to the camera, dialler or SMS app instead of the homescreens.

As we found in the Alcatel OneTouch Idol 2 Mini, the Idol Alpha has been packed with a few too many apps – particularly games. However, many can be uninstalled if you want to give the phone a spring clean. It seems even more of a shame here than in the Idol 2 Mini S, though, detracting a little from the classy vibe the hardware design tries to portray.

Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha – Performance and Games

Once again, the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is let down by its hardware when you look closely at the processor running the show. It has a quad-core MediaTek MT6589 chipset clocked at 1.2GHz, with 1GB of RAM. This is effectively very similar architecture-wise to the Snapdragon 400 CPU used by the Moto G and many others, but with a PowerVR GPU instead of an Adreno-series one.

Looking at benchmark results, the Idol Alpha is very disappointing for the price. In the Geekbench 3 test it scores 1114 points, roughly on par with what we’d expect from a Snapdragon 400 phone.

Day-to-day performance hits are relatively minor, but we did notice some keyboard lag and some slow-down in things appearing on the home screen at times – especially if, for example, the phone's downloading something in the background at the same time. App load speeds are often quite slow, too, with particular waits for the high-end 3D games we use to test gaming performance.

Getting this sort of hardware for £300 represents poor value for money. Even the LG G3 has been seen at this price, and it offers more than twice the power.

As we saw with the Moto G, gaming performance is acceptable in most titles, but switch them up to max graphical detail – available in some high-end 3D games such as Dead Trigger 2 – and you start to see a performance hit, with less-than-smooth frame rates. While the GPU is powerful enough to mostly cope at the screen’s 720p resolution, we should be getting more for our £300.

The lacking performance isn't just seen in the processor. It also lacks 4G mobile Internet, something that's been expected at this sort of price for a while now. Much like the processor, 3G would be fine if the phone was a lot cheaper. But it isn’t. So it’s not.

Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha – Camera

The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha has a 13-megapixel camera with flash. At almost any price, that's a decent resolution. Sure, it’s topped by the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact and Samsung Galaxy S5, but a great 13-megapixel camera will more-than satisfy.

This is only an OK 13-megapixel camera, not a great one. In the right lighting, you can produce some great shots, but it doesn’t have the chops to maintain image quality in more challenging lighting.

In lower light, images become very noisy, and with mid-level indoors lighting we noticed pretty significant light blooming around light sources, which generally makes images look terrible. We were also disappointed with the Idol Alpha’s rather weak HDR mode.

The poor dynamic range of most phone cameras will introduce either highlight blow-outs to images or make these photos look desperately dull. HDR should be able to fix this, but we found the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha’s HDR just too weak to produce the effects we’re after.

However, this is not a flat-out bad camera. In daylight it can produce some images worth keeping, and while low-light shots are noisy, you can fix them up with a bit of post-processing on a computer. And, if we’re honest, it’s roughly what we expected from the Alcatel OneTouch, which most likely uses one of Sony’s fairly decent image sensors.

We’re pretty happy with the camera app, too, which values simplicity over packing in loads of extra modes and features.

Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha – Battery life

Last time we reviewed an Alcatel OneTouch phone, its battery life was abysmal. That was the Idol 2 Mini S. Thankfully, the Idol Alpha is much, much better, despite having exactly the same battery capacity of 2000mAh and significantly higher screen resolution.

In our usual looping MP4 video test, the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha lasted for 9hrs 10mins, which is the same sort of performance we saw from the original Moto G (superior to the 2014 Moto G).

In daily use you should easily be able to get a day’s use off a charge. As long as you’re not playing games for extended periods or watching lots of streamed video, you should be able to clock in at around a day and a half between trips to the power socket. Just check WhatsApp a few times and you won’t see the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha drain down by more than a few per cent each hour.

Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha – Sound and Call Quality

We’re back down to more of a normal performance with the call and speaker quality. Both are adequate, but nothing special. There’s a secondary microphone for noise cancellation during calls and the earpiece speaker is reasonably clear, but not remarkable.

The main speaker is a mono unit on the back, but it's about as thin and quiet as you'd expect from a phone only 7.5mm thick. It’s not great.

Should I buy the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha?

The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is an interesting handset with some eye-catching design motifs. However, start using the phone and begin to assess it within the wider market and it just doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

Most core elements are fine: the camera’s decent enough, the processor is a fair match for the 720p display and the resolution is just about sharp enough for the screen size. However, there are some design blunders that we find hard to accept when the specs are already a stretch given the SIM-free price.

The lack of a headphone jack is unforgivable, we don’t like the soft keys much, there’s no 4G and the software is very old. If you don’t want to use your phone for music at all, and can find the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha at a much lower cost than the standard SIM-free price, this is a perfectly respectable phone with rather good battery life. But we do mean a much lower cost.

Verdict

While solid in most respects, some annoying design decisions and a high price lose the Alpha a recommendation.

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Key Features: Octo-core Kirin 920 CPU; 5-inch Full HD screen; Android 4.4.2 with EmotionUI
Manufacturer: Huawei

What is the Honor 6?

The Honor 6 sees Huawei return to a place it used to thrive: affordable phones. But the definition of an affordable phone has changed in recent years.

Where Huawei’s budget classics were £100 phones, the Honor 6 is a budget 4G £250 alternative to top-end phones such as the Galaxy S5, Xperia Z3 – and even the iPhone 6. There are plenty of quirks to either fix or learn to live with, but the value on offer here is quite excellent.

Huawei Honor 6 – Design

The Huawei Honor 6 looks and feels quite different from the company’s other phones.

Its hardware offers simplicity and and higher-end feel that we don’t often associate with Huawei phones. It’s actually quite similar in looks to the Amazon Fire Phone, but without the nasty complement of cameras on the front.

For those who haven’t checked out Amazon’s disappointing handset in person, the Huawei Honor 6 has completely flat front and back panels that look like glass. Only the front is glass, though.

A layer of Gorilla Glass 3 sits on the screen while the back is shiny ‘faux glass’ plastic. We’ll admit we didn’t really notice that in use, though.

However, after using the phone for a couple of weeks, the Huawei Honor 6 back had earned a couple of light scratches. It will be susceptible to lots more scratches in the long term, so you may want to consider using the protector that comes in the box, or buying a case.

The sides are plastic, too. The Huawei Honor 6 is a deceptively simple mobile, but one that offers enough class to fit in completely among mid-range phones, and even more expensive ones. We’ll admit it: we were fooled, at least at first.

You can get the Huawei Honor 6 in black or white, and both versions appear pretty attractive, although we’ve only tried the black first-hand.

Other than appearing to be made of glass in the vein of the Xperia Z3, the Huawei Honor 6 has nice simple sides, with all its sockets bar the micro-USB charge plug hidden under a plastic flap. Under this you’ll find the Micro-SIM and microSD slots.

On occasion among mid-range phones a memory card slot is used as an excuse to scrimp on internal storage, but the Huawei Honor 6 has a decent 16GB memory.

There are even hardware features not fully exploited in the software at launch. For example, on the top edge of the phone is an IR transmitter, but there’s no remote control app installed to use it.

An IR transmitter lets a phone function as a universal remote, but you need an app that offers the exact commands needed. There are plenty of third-party alternatives, but with current firmware the phone doesn’t seem to make the IR blaster available to other apps. We’ll be deeply disappointed if this isn’t fixed, but with any luck it will. We’re awaiting confirmation on this from Huawei.

The Huawei Honor 6 knows how to pack in the hardware, and initial impressions that the phone is great value never fade or stop. This phone truly is a bit of a bargain.

However, after comparing to some other phones of this size, it's a slight shame that it has such a boxy shape. While the sides of the Honor 6 are slightly rounded, the edges are still fairly severe, and using more of a curvature would have made it easier to handle. We have the same issue with Sony’s top Xperia phones.

Huawei Honor 6 – Screen

One of the clearest signs that the Huawei Honor 6 is a phone to be reckoned with is the spec of its screen. For £250 you get a 5-inch Full HD display. This is one of the first devices we’ve seen to launch at this price with such a high-res screen, and from a big brand, too.

Looking at the Huawei Honor 6 next to the 2014 Motorola Moto G, a cheaper 5-inch phone with a lower-res 720p display, the difference is obvious. At this size, you do need 1080p if you want the pristine sharpness we've come to associate with higher-end phones.

The Honor 6 gets you 440 pixels per inch, which is excellent pixel density that far outstrips the iPhone 6.

It’s an LTPS LCD screen, designed for low power consumption. There’s no mention of IPS architecture from Huawei’s specs, but we noticed zero contrast shift at any angle.

Viewing angles are reasonably good, but with greater loss of brightness than you get in some rival IPS LCD screens. Top brightness is very good and colours are vivid. Those with particularly picky eyes will note that the Honor 6's colours are marginally oversaturated, but not as distractingly as the recent Motorola Moto X. They’re larger than life, but not offensive to the eye.

The Huawei Honor 6 lets you tweak the colour temperature of the display, making it warmer or cooler. This doesn’t alter saturation, but warming up the display can make it appear more ‘relaxed’ if you find the colour a bit intense. The default setting is a little blueish, so we recommend having a tweak.

Aside from the slight oversaturation, the only other issue is the black level limitation that’s common to all LCDs, but a bit worse than the high-end average here. In lower lighting, the Honor 6’s black areas look quite blueish, which will become obvious if you like watching a bit of TV before bed. Some LCD phones offer better black levels, like the Sony Xperia Z3 and LG G3, but it’s not something you’ll notice in normal day-to-day use.

As long as you don’t mind the approach to colour, we can’t imagine many taking issue with the Huawei Honor 6's screen. It also has a pretty good auto-brightness feature.

Not only can you make the phone alter backlight intensity depending on ambient light conditions; you can also set the relative level using a simple slider in the drop-down notifications menu. Other phones often revert to manual brightness as soon as you touch the slider.

One obvious question, though, is how does the Honor 6 compare to the Nexus 5 and OnePlus One? Those are the two main lower-cost 1080p phone competition.

The Honor 6 has far more vibrant colour than the OnePlus One, and the Nexus 5 appears to be the best of the three for colour accuracy. However, crucially, the Huawei is in the same league as these big players.

Huawei Honor 6 – Software, Apps and Themes

The Huawei Honor 6 runs Android 4.4.2 with the new version of the custom EmotionUI that we saw in the Huawei Ascend Mate 7. We’ve had huge issues with Huawei’s custom interface in the past, and while the quirkiness is still there, the latest version is a lot better than the versions of old.

First, we’ll deal with why the EmotionUI is so unusual.

It tries to infuse a bit of iOS into Android by getting rid of the apps menu. Everything on your Honor 6 has to have a place on your homescreens, so if you like to keep your phone relatively organised you’ll have to find a place for every app and game you install.

Upon installation, they’ll just find a spot wherever they can, so you’ll need to take care to ensure it doesn’t become a mess. However it does at least support folders, giving you the tools you need to keep your phone in shape.

EmotionUI is also one of the last remaining interfaces to really embrace themes, which were much more popular in the days before Android.

In previous Huawei phones, themes were pretty poor. Most pre-installed ones were duds and you couldn’t easily download additional ones. The Huawei Honor 6 fixes both of these points.

You get three pretty attractive, simple themes pre-installed, and you can download dozens more directly from the phone. Some are a bit ridiculous – there’s even a US pop-art themed one – but we’re pretty confident most tastes will be catered for. Additional themes are free to download, too.

The Huawei Honor 6 is pretty quirk-overloaded, though. The odd layout and obsession with themes are one thing, but there are also things to fix in areas such as the ringtones and the use of images in the lock screen.

As standard, our Honor 6 played a 30-second-long piece of classical music whenever we got a WhatsApp message and displayed random images on the ‘magazine’ lock screen, including one particularly odd pic of a baby’s feet. There’s some de-weird-ification to do that we simply had to put down to differences between the Western and Chinese markets – the Honor brand has traditionally been trotted out over there.

Either that or someone high up at Huawei has strange tastes. All of these elements can be fixed, of course, but to start with the Honor 6 may feel a little alien.

There are a few things to change or get used to, but in other respects EmotionUI is a pretty feature-complete, inoffensive interface. It doesn’t bombard you with features, and offers favourites such as brightness and feature toggles in the drop-down notifications menu.  

Huawei Honor 6 – Apps

Aside from offering the Themes app and a few basic utilities like a file manager, a Huawei customer service app, FM radio and a torch, there aren’t all that many Huawei apps added to the phone as standard. That’s a very good thing given the way the Honor 6 arranges its apps.

However, there’s another dated element to the apps roster — the phone includes a bunch of preinstalled Gameloft games. We imagine this deal was put in place when Huawei was showing off its Kirin 920 processor for the first time, but this sort of move feels a little dated and unnecessary in 2014. Still, you can delete them so no major harm is done.

Huawei Honor 6 – Games and Performance

Previously we’ve complained about performance in Huawei phones, but the Honor 6 has no real issues. There’s barely any lag and we didn't experience a single crash during our fairly extended test period.

Our guess is that Huawei took on board complaints about the performance of some of its old phones, because it's packed a whopping 3GB of RAM into the Honor 6. That’s unheard of in a £250 phone and probably has a lot to do with the handset’s great performance.

The CPU is also unusual: the HiSilicon Kirin 920 CPU. This is a Huawei-made chipset, in case you’re wondering why it doesn’t use a more common processor from the Qualcomm Snapdragon range or MediaTek.

In previous high-end Huawei phones we’ve found that the Kirin chips don’t quite match up to the Qualcomm alternatives, but at £250 the Honor 6 even goes head to head with some Snapdragon 400 devices. And let’s be clear: the Kirin 920 decimates the Snapdragon 400.

The processor uses four 1.7GHz Cortex-A15 cores and four 1.3GHz Cortex-A7 cores. Even its ‘rubbish’ cores are theoretically faster than the Snapdragon 400’s ones.

This architecture uses the lesser cores for low-intensity tasks, with the others kicking in when needed.

In the Geekbench 3 benchmarking tool, the Honor 6 scores 3080 points. That is frankly an amazing score for a phone that's so cheap, and more than double the result of the LG G3 S, which sells at a similar price. It even outclasses Snapdragon 801 devices such as the Galaxy S5.

This kind of performance makes the Honor 6 among the best affordable gaming phones in the world. A 1080p screen with enough juice to avoid scrimping on textures and lighting effects for half the price of the competition? It’s an incredibly attractive combo.

The GPU used by the phone is the Mali-T628 MP4, whose performance is just a little less than the Adreno 330 seen in the most popular top-end phones of the moment.

Huawei Honor 6 – Camera

The Huawei Honor 6 offers a 13-megapixel camera on its back and a 5-megapixel one on the front. With a dual-LED flash alongside the main rear camera, it seems like this phone has it all.

However, it’s in the imaging department that actually find some of the Huawei Honor 6’s most serious issues. The hardware specs seem great for the price – for any price, really – but the results are disappointing in some conditions.

First, the autofocus is quite spotty and unreliable. We found it struggles very badly with night shooting, at times simply refusing to focus, even if there should really be enough light to work with. It also struggles with close-ups, taking quite a long time to lock on.

The result is a camera that can feel like a doddering old geriatric — not the sort of experience you may be expecting from a phone with as much high-end tech as this.

The speed issue isn't constant, though. When you’re shooting normal daylight photos, there’s very little shutter lag. And you can even take a photo from standby, just by double-tapping the volume-down button. It takes 1-1.5 seconds in total. Not bad.

If this inconsistency is down to software, Huawei should be able to fix these issues. But if it’s partly down to the image signal processor in the Kirin 920, we may have to make do.

The Honor 6's image quality varies a lot depending on the lighting conditions. In daylight, you’ll get very good detail, with the f/2.0 lens able to have a reasonable stab at making the most of the fairly high 13-megapixel resolution. For all the issues we have, the Honor 6 can reap noticeably more detail than an 8-megapixel camera in daylight.

Purple fringing around areas off high-contrast fine detail is only slight, too, and much less so than something like the HTC One M8. Really pixel-peeping, these fine details can look a little fizzy, but it’s not nothing to worry about unless you’re going to do significant cropping post-shoot.

When challenged with greater light variance in a scene, the Huawei Honor 6 seems to favour overexposing the sky rather than making the whole shot look dull. Blown highlights may make real photographers cringe, but it’s the right choice in the largely throwaway world of mobile phone shooting, and exposure was an occasional issue, not a constant companion. Could metering be more intelligent? Yes, and dynamic range isn't wonderful, but it’s not too bad in daylight.

Where the metering system really fails is in low lighting. It completely refuses to brighten up a scene when there’s not much light to work with. As well as resulting in very poor low-light or night detail in general, we found that autofocus performance was very bad indeed in darker settings. It’s as if the camera just isn’t geared up to work in these sorts of conditions at all.

Thankfully, the dual-LED flash is pretty powerful, meaning you can still get those late-night party group shots without ending up with a dark smudge. This low-light performance needs to be improved, though, as it’s a real downside for the phone.

The HDR mode could be improved, too. It’s reasonably effective, but in some conditions it doesn’t manage to weed out overexposure, which is one of the main goals of HDR, along with revealing more shadow detail.

The Honor 6’s camera app is very similar to that of the Huawei Ascend P7, its more expensive cousin. The layout is fairly simple, but you get plenty of extras in a separate modes menu.

As well as filters, panorama and HDR, you get a wrinkle-busting Beauty mode, a best photo burst-mode, watermark and All-focus. The latter takes shots at a bunch of different focus points, then lets you pick which part of the photo is in focus afterwards. It's mercifully quick, but we can’t imagine many people using it all that frequently.

The front camera has a very high-resolution 5-megapixel sensor, like several phones from Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers. Selfies have become important in the West, but doubly so elsewhere.

You can certainly take good selfies with the Honor 6, and it handily offers a little box you’re meant to look into to avoid looking like you’re staring into the middle-distance. However, as it uses a pretty tiny sensor, the extra resolution is only going to result in notably greater detail if you have decent lighting to work with.

Video capture tops out at 1080p rather than 4K. While the phone should in theory have the performance to capture in 4K, it's not a great loss given the Honor 6's price.

Huawei Honor 6 – Battery Life

The Huawei Honor 6 has a huge 3100mAh battery, the same size used by the Sony Xperia Z3, even though this phone has a smaller screen.

With light use you can get two days out of the Huawei Honor 6, but if you want to do some browsing or video viewing, you’re looking rather at a solid day and a half before needing a charge. It’s a very strong performance, but ultimately one that might disappoint if you’re expecting the world on a stick after seeing the battery specs.

Our assumption is that, as we’ve found previously, the Honor 6’s Kirin 920 processor isn’t quite as efficient as the Snapdragon 800/801/805 we see more frequently. Our battery tests show that this phone tends to use a bit more power when left unused than some of those top performers, but it’s still certainly smart and efficient enough to last for days and days (and days) should you leave it on a table fully charged but unused.

In our video playback test, which involves playing a 720p MP4 file on loop from 100 per cent battery, with the screen on mid brightness, until the device dies, the Honor 6 lasted for 11 hours and 30 minutes. It’s a very strong result but, again, not quite as good as you might get from a 5-inch 3100mAh phone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU.

The Kirin 920 may be powerful, but it doesn’t seem to be quite as smart in the finer points of power management. For example, in the standard Smart power mode it’s very strict about apps getting access to CPU time when they’re not being used, but it doesn’t offer the sort of power savings you might get in Samsung or Sony phone doing the same.

There is another much more aggressive power-saving mode if you really do need to keep the Honor 6 lasting as long as possible, though. Ultra Power Saving mode changes the UI to only give you access to basic phone features such as the dialler, messaging and your contacts book. It takes the ‘smart’ out of your smartphone, basically.

It’ll make your Honor 6 last longer, but you wouldn’t want to use it apart from in an emergency.

Huawei Honor 6 – Call and Sound Quality

Little deficiencies in the technical attention to detail in the Honor 6 aren’t really down to the people who actually designed the phone – we imagine the HiSilicon team has virtually nothing to do with the folk behind the Honor 6. However, there are other little issues in the phone’s sound quality.

Both the internal speaker and the earpiece speaker suffer from audio clipping. This causes popping noises in the audio output, a form of distortion. It seems to be down to the audio levels in the phone simply being a bit off, and isn't driver distortion – it’s a lot less offensive-sounding than that, and only really becomes an annoyance in phone calls.

We hope this will be solved in a software update.

Aside from the audio pops, sound quality in both the call and internal speaker is reasonable, but not remarkable. The main speaker is a mono unit that sits on the back of the Honor 6.

The top volume is fair, but the tone is a little thin, like most mobile phone speakers. It’s also hard to ignore the several lower-cost phones that offer stereo speakers these days, like the 2014 Moto G (although its sound quality is no better).

Should I buy the Huawei Honor 6?

The Huawei Honor 6 is a high-value, aggressive phone of the kind we thought had disappeared from Huawei’s ranks. It beats all the big-name competition.

However, if you’re willing to shop around there are a few very good alternatives to consider. The LG G2 costs around £40 more and is a bit less quirky than the Honor 6, while the Nexus 5 is just £20 more and is entirely quirk-free.

The Honor 6 offers benefits other than just price, though. Battery life is significantly better than the Nexus 5's, and it has the microSD card support that the Nexus phone lacks. We think the LG G2 is perhaps a better choice, but the simple truth is that both are solid, great-value phones.

Verdict

The Huawei Honor 6 is a quirky phone, but one that also offers top value.

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Making a bargain tablet better

The Tesco Hudl 2 is one of the top tech bargains, a high-spec Android tablet that offers more gadget for your money than just about anything else.

However, there are plenty of ways to improve your Hudl 2, plenty of tweaks to apply. From getting rid of the Tesco bloatware on it to making the best use of its pre-loaded features, we’re going to expose some of our favourite Hudl 2 tips, tricks and secrets.

Get yourself a tea, a charger for your tablet and a freshly sharpened finger ready to work that touchscreen.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - De-Tesco your Hudl 2 with Google Now

The one thing many people want to do when they first get a Tesco Hudl 2 is to remove as much of the Tesco rubbish pre-installed on the thing as they can. We’ll give Tesco credit for making a high-end tablet like this so cheap that it can’t possibly be making much, if any, money from the hardware. However, that doesn’t stop us wanting to remove all the pre-installed bloatware on there.

You can’t uninstall the existing apps – not easily, at least – but you can get rid of the extra elements of Tesco-ness by installing the Google Now Launcher. This was the interface seen in the Nexus 5 before it got the update to Android 5.0. You’ll find the app in Google Play.

Once installed, a Home submenu will appear in Settings that lets you choose which launcher to use. Alternatively, you’ll be prompted the first time you press the Home button after installing. It’s a little software tweak with all the power of a hack, but without any of the risk.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Custom launchers that let you completely de-Tesco the tablet

Looks and feel-wise, Google Now is probably our favourite Android interface. However, there are plenty of other launchers available from Google Play, and some give you much more control over how Tesco-infused the Hudl 2 is.

To really clean up its act, you need to find a custom interface that lets you hide all the pre-installed Tesco apps, or put them in folders. For the purpose of this tip, we used Apex Launcher, one of our favourite picks from our best Android launcher apps feature.

With the Apex Launcher installed and running, just as we did with the Google Now one earlier, press the three-pip icon at the very top-right of the apps menu. Then select Drawer Settings and Hidden apps. You’ll see a big list of every app installed on your Tesco Hudl 2, and you can tap them to make them disappear from your apps screen.

You can make it as though it’s not a Tesco tablet at all with Apex, and the look isn’t too far off the Google Now style, either.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Cleaning up your home screens

Don’t fancy using a custom interface? Well, the standard My Tesco one doesn’t let you alter the apps menu at all. However, it’s still worth tweaking the home screens as much as you can.

Tesco packs the Hudl’s home screens with gumpf, but you don’t need to leave any of it there.

To remove elements from the home screen, just hold a finger down on an icon or widget until a cross appears at the top of the screen. Drag the icon or widget onto this cross to remove it.

To add an app icon to the homescreen, just hold a finger down on the one you want in the apps menu until the screen changes to display the home screen’s contents, then drop it in. Alternatively, to add widgets hold a finger down on an empty part of a home screen until the wallpapers and widgets menu appears. Then just tap Widgets to be taken to the roster of installed widgets.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - How to output your Hudl screen to a TV

The Tesco Hudl is one of the few budget tablets to offer a video output. Plenty offer wireless video streaming, but the Tesco Hudl 2 has a good old-fashioned hardware socket.

The only problem: you don’t get a cable in the box, so you need to buy one yourself.

It’s a Micro HDMI socket, so to plug one into your tablet you’ll need a Micro HDMI-to-HDMI cable. You’ll find one online for a few pounds, or most likely for about £25 on the high street. Tesco offers its own £15 ‘official’ Hudl video output cable, but it’s not readily available at the time of writing. There’ll be no real difference between this and one from somewhere else. On this occasion, you can buy cheap.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Unlocking Hudl 2 with your face

Like most Andorid devices, the Tesco Hudl 2 offers plenty of little security measures. The one worth showing off is Face Unlock.

What this does is to scan and memorise the geometry of your face so that it knows when you’re in front of the tablet, using the front camera to check when you use the device.

You’ll find it in Settings > Security > Screen Lock. Follow the on-screen prompts and the Tesco Hudl 2 will scan your face, then ask you for a PIN or password if the scan doesn't work for whatever reason.

We should say, though, that Face Unlock isn't a very good security measure. A picture of your face could be used, as could the face of someone with a similar facial structure. If you don’t need ‘proper’ security, it’s neat, though.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Get extra free apps for your Hudl 2

If you want to get as many free apps and games as you can get your hands on, you shouldn’t just rely on Google Play. It offers frequent freebies, but you can get some great extras from Amazon’s Appstore, too.

This is the alternative app store you’ll find on Kindle tablet devices. While we’d rather use Google Play out of the two, Amazon doesn’t half get you some good ‘free app of the day’ deals.

You can’t get the Amazon Appstore from Google Play, though. Instead, download it from the Amazon website.

You’ll need to enable third-party app installation – an option in Settings > Security – but when using it apps will install very similarly to Google Play downloads. Amazon Appstore has a reasonably rigorous submissions procedure, so you needn’t worry about malware when downloading from it.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Encrypt your tablet for ultra security

If you’re going to keep highly sensitive data on your Tesco Hudl 2, it’s worth considering encrypting the device. This is actually something that Google is doing as standard with phones and tablets shipping with Android 5.0, like the Nexus 6, so it’s not just a measure for super-paranoid people.

What it means is that, without having the right passcode or password to unlock the tablet, no one will be able to access your data, even if it’s pulled directly out of the tablet’s memory banks. It’s secure.

Of course, this also means you have to use a passcode or PIN every time you put the tablet into standby, which can get annoying. You may also want to consider a special password-secured app that keeps certain secure data itself. There are plenty on Google Play.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Creating profiles for the whole family

As one of the ultimate ‘family’ tablets, it’s predictable that the Tesco Hudl 2 supports multiple user profiles. You can make one for each member of the family.

There are two main types: those with access to whatever content they like, and restricted profiles with limited access. Profiles for kids, in other words.

You’ll find the option to create a new profile in Settings > Users. The process will ask you to choose whether the profile is limited or a full ‘adult’ one. You'll need a Google account to set up a full profile, though.

Once set up, you’ll see the profiles you can pick from the lock screen, each of which can be password protected to keep each person’s content secure.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Use the Auto Brightness setting

When we first got our Hudl 2 out of the box, it was set to use a standard screen brightness. However, one of the neat hardware extras of the tablet is an ambient brightness sensor that can judge outside light conditions and change the backlight intensity accordingly. It’ll generally help you save battery, too, by dimming the screen when it’s darker.

To turn Auto Brightness on, pull down from the right-hand side of the screen to bring down the features menu. One of the entries will be Brightness.

Tap on it and the Brightness slider will appear. To the left of it will be an Auto button that turns the setting on and off.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Uninstalling apps and troubleshooting problems

We have bad news for those of you who want to clean up your Tesco Hudl 2. You can’t simply uninstall the apps that come bundled on the tablet. They’re there for good unless you root the device – it’s a form of hacking.

If you want to uninstall the apps you’ve installed yourself, though, just hold a finger down on their entry in the apps menu. After a second or so the screen will change to show the layout of your home screens. It’s here you can put app shortcuts on your home screens, but it's also how you uninstall apps. Just drag the app up to the uninstall entry at the top of the screen.

Uninstalling apps is a good way to solve any problems you might have. Battery issues in particular are often caused by apps not doing what they should.

However, if you’re having real trouble with the Hudl 2, before sending it back to Tesco we recommend giving it a factory reset. After having backed-up any data or pics you don’t want to lose, go to Settings > Backup & Reset and select Factory Data Reset. In here is a Reset Tablet option that’ll get rid of everything on the device and make it the same as brand new.

If that doesn’t fix your woes, there’s a deeper hardware problem at the root.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Check out the Android Easter egg

Every version of Android features an Easter egg, a little hidden treat for the enthusiasts out there. At the time of writing the Tesco Hudl 2 runs Android 4.4.2. This means you get the KitKat Easter egg, which features a strange interactive landscape of tiles with icons from the former versions of the system — Cupcake, Jelly Bean and so on.

To access the Easter egg, go to Settings and scroll down to the About Tablet entry.

Head into it, then repeatedly tap on Android Version. After just a few taps, the Easter egg will start. Enjoy.

Read the full Tesco Huld 2 review

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