Wednesday 3 February 2016

Medion Lifetab

Medion Lifetab

Could this be the next Tesco Hudl?

You may come across this Android tablet in Aldi, which is selling them as a ‘Special Buy’. It’s certainly special all right - especially bad. It has a 1920x1200-pixel screen, giving you Full HD plus a bit extra for a more iPad like shape. Costing just £139, it was shaping up to be a potential successor to Tesco’s Hudl 2, which was an excellent bargain at a tenner less (until it was discontinued last autumn).

You wouldn’t immediately guess that this was a budget product. It doesn’t have the solid metal construction of an iPad, but then nor do many other devices. The back has a sparkly silver finish that Medion presumably hopes people might mistake for aluminium, and the white plastic edges are crisply styled, with a bit of a Star Wars feel to their diagonal grooves and insets. The 2-megapixel webcam and 5-megapixel rear camera won’t win any awards, but that’s tablet cameras for you.


Unlike the almost featureless iPad Air, the Lifetab has a relative glut of ports: besides micro-USB for charging and file transfer, there’s mini HDMI to connect an HDTV or monitor and a microSD slot for extra storage. With a reasonably practical 32GB built in. you might not need it for a while. Stereo speakers are where they should be, on opposite sides of the screen, and there’s even an infra-red transmitter hidden among the volume buttons, so you can control your TV from the tablet. You might never need to get off the sofa again.

When it comes to cheap tablets, the screen is usually the big disappointment, but this one looks fine. Although it’s nowhere near as sharp as Apple’s Retina displays and their closest rivals, it’s not particularly coarse either. It doesn’t go very bright, but contrast is quite good and colours look OK.

Here, though, the good news grinds to a halt, because a tablet’s touchscreen isn’t just there to show you things; it’s also your means of input. Tap an app icon on the Lifetab, and it opens as expected. So far, so good. Now try tapping a link on a web page, or scrolling, or pinching something to zoom in. or swiping... oh dear. Instead of that lovely iPad feel of everything responding instantly to your touch, it’s more a matter of waiting to see if anything is going to happen, realising it isn't, then trying again until it does. Attempting to use the on screen keyboard pushes this beyond a joke: its cmpltly impsibl to typ acurtely.

This is a terrible shame, because everything else about the Lifetab is so much better. It comes with Android 4.4 (KitKat), which is pretty old but works fine, and beyond adding some pointless utility apps, which you can delete, Medion hasn’t messed about with it unduly. The quad core Intel Atom processor is one we’ve seen in many other tablets and laptop-tablet hybrids, and with 2GB of memory installed it can keep up with most tasks and all but the most advanced games. The battery claims to last 13 hours, although when we worked it hard this fell to just over four.

It’s possible that a software update could improve the Lifetab’s responsiveness, but it seems more likely that the screen itself is the problem. Either way, as it stands we can't recommend it, because it’s no use having all the right features if the basic process of interacting with apps just doesn’t work properly. This might have seemed a remarkable device before the iPad was invented, especially for so little money, but in 2016 it's just not good enough.

VERDICT
It was so nearly a great budget device, but the Lifetab's unresponsiveness makes it downright unpleasant to use.

SPECIFICATIONS
10.1in 1920x1200-pixel screen • 5-megapixel rear camera • 2-megapixel front camera • 802.11n Wi-Fi • 174x263x8.5mm • 580g • One-year warranty