Vodafone banishes tethering for low-cost Android tablet fans
Occasionally, I travel down to London by train, and often I take my Nexus 10 tablet with me. Using it involves tethering it to my phone, reducing dramatically the battery life of that device.
The solution, as well presented by the Vodafone Smart Tab 4G, is to have a tablet with its own mobile communications and by definition its own mobile SIM.
But before we go there, I was curious to see what sort of tablet Vodafone would sell you for £125 and how it might compare with devices at a similar price.
My initially reaction was that the Vodafone Smart Tab 4G (aka Alcatel Pop 8S) is a nice enough Android tablet, even if it doesn't quite have the wow factor of Nexus or Samsung hardware.
Under the hood is a quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A53, Qualcomm MSM8916 Snapdragon 410 chipset and Adreno 306 GPU, wired to 1GB of RAM and 8GB of flash storage (4.7GB available). That sounds a good spec, and it works acceptably on Android 4.4 even if the amount of user available storage isn't great.
Thankfully, you can put a micro-SD card inside, adding up to 64GB of valuable extra space. There are two also cameras, a 2MP front facing and a 5MP rear, but no flash. Images can be geotagged by the system, as the device has A-GPS technology.
But these aren't the killer feature, that's the GSM, HSPA and LTE capable mobile phone electronics that allow you to get data while on the move.
It also allows you to receive text messages, if you hand out the number of the SIM you use in it. But (and this sort of blew my mind) it won't receive calls.
You can ring the number, and it rings, but it goes through to voicemail, and the tablet never mentions the call or the message. That seems remarkably unhelpful, given that most Samsung phablets will work as a phone too.
That was one disappointment, and the other was Vodafone's addiction to crapware, and this machine contains numerous examples, some of which are uninstallable.
Given a machine with such limited capacity, to clog it up with apps the user may never want is unforgivable really.
Despite those points, the Vodafone Smart Tab 4G is still a cheap means to get mobile internet without tethering, for which there are almost no competitors.
And, I've concluded, there is a good reason for that, because the combination of a cheap tablet and 4G LTE services makes as much sense as a Dacia that runs on plutonium. As it's possible to burn through Vodafone's minimum PAYG £15 2GB monthly data package in under five minutes with LTE.
If you can't afford a better tablet, then you probably can't afford the LTE mobile data costs that justify having this specific one.
Take that one feature out of the equation and this is a very average tablet that costs roughly what it should for the feature set. Mark Pickavance
An unusually cheap tablet with LTE.
Specification
OS: Android OS, v4.4.x (KitKat)
Chipset: Qualcomm MSM8916 Snapdragon 410
CPU: Quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A53
GPU: Adreno 306
RAM: 1GB
Storage: 8GB (4.7GB usable)
Display: IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen 720 x 1280
Cameras: 5MP rear and 2MP front
Battery: 4060mAh non-removable
Mobile: GSM / HSPA / LTE