'Budget' tablets - are they worth the saving?

Nick Thawley (18/08/11)

With the market for tablets continuing to grow (not rapidly, but consistently), the arrival of a number of budget tablets is inevitable - click here to see our pick of the bunch. These devices are far cheaper, with most coming in at the £150 mark, compared to the £400-500 you'll have to shell out for a top-of-the-range tablet.

..but is there a market for these inevitably lower-specced tablets? Well by looking over Amazon.co.uk's best sellers, many of these budget tabs are better sellers at the retail giant than the more widely known iPads, Galaxy Tabs and Eee Pad Transformers of this world. We obviously can't infer that they are anywhere near better sellers overall, since many of these budget tablets likely are not selling anywhere else but Amazon, but this new strain of budget tablets are definitely worth investigating - especially if you haven't bitten the bullet and bought a tablet yet.

So when we pay £300 less for a tablet, what exactly are we giving up? To get a clear idea, let's go through these budget tablets spec-by-spec to determine how they've cut their costs, and what difference it'll make to the user experience.

Touchscreen

One easy way to cut costs as a budget tablet manufacturer is to issue your device with a resistive, rather than a capacitive, touchscreen.

Only capacitive screens allow multi-touch movements that you may be used to from iPhones or iPads - such as pinch zooming. They are also generally more responsive to the touch and don't reflect as much sunlight when used outdoors. It is these characteristics that have led to a capacitive screen becoming standard in medium to high end tablets.

Things aren't all bad for resisitve screens, however. They don't require direct contact with your fingers to function; styluses work perfectly well, as will a gloved hand. However, the lack of multi-touch capability may prove too much of a sacrifice for many users.

However, this isn't much of a problem for the bargain-seeker since you'll see from our chart of budget tablet specifications that when getting above the £100 mark, most tabs do in fact come with capacitive screens.

Processor

A quick browse of specs on our respective tablet comparison charts for large tablets and budget tablets will reveal that when it comes to processors, there is no substantial difference between the two price levels in terms of GHz.

However, most higher range tablets feature dual-core processors compared to the single-core ones found in the budget tablets, and as a result running multiple processes and switching between them/multitasking is likely to be a laggier experience.

RAM

Most budget tablets come with a memory of either 265 or 512MB. With the exception of the iPad + iPad 2 (which can get away with 256/512MB respectively since using Apple's own iOS, optimised from the ground-up for the devices in question, is far less demanding) higher end tablets come with at least 1GB of RAM. It is clear that this is one of the main cutbacks made by budget tablet manufacturers, which will lead to a slower user experience overall with these budget tablets.

Operating System/Version

One of the most stark differences between budget tablets and their higher-priced counterparts is the operating system that they run. Of the 11 tablets currently on our budget tablet chart, 8 run Android 2.2 (Froyo), with the rest running 2.3 (Gingerbread).

The issue with tablets running anything less than Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), which every tab on our main chart is running at the very least, is that this was the first version optimised for tablets - lower versions do not make good use of the fact that the screen is likely to be far bigger than that of a smartphone. Thus the user experience is less intuitive and many apps appear simply in their smartphone format.

Battery life

It is expected that budget tablets would save a bit of money with smaller batteries, a prediction that is confirmed by the specs of our featured budget tablets. While most top-end tablets feature batteries of over 6000 mAh (very roughly translating into around 8 hours of reasonable use - something that's very difficult to define), most budget tabs have batteries more similar to 3500-4000 mAh (~4 hours). This could or could not be a dealbreaker, depending on how much you are intending to use the device while out and about.

Camera

Anticipating that no one is really going to expect their < £200 tablet to take high quality snaps, these tabs typically come with only one ~1.3MP cameras, compared to front and back cameras on the higher-end tablets that can typically feature 5MP rear cameras, with 2MP on the front. Again, how much difference this makes to you depends on how you intend to use your camera - budget cameras will get the job done but don't expect to get the same high-resolution you'll get from superior models.

Conclusion

It may seem like a cop-out to answer the question with 'it depends': but as with any budget device, it truly does. For example, for those who have no real experience with using smartphones/Android, the differences outlined above may not even register. There is a significant demographic of people who simply want to browse the web, play Angry Birds and watch BBC iPlayer. If you are one, or know of one, these tablets could be sufficient.

For the rest of us, who are looking for a long-term future-proof investment, maybe it's better to stick with the big boys.