Tesco Hudl 2 vs Fire HD 7 vs Fire HD 6 comparison review

Tesco has done amazingly well with its Hudl budget tablets but how does the Hudl 2 compare with Amazon’s cheap Fire HD 6 and HD 7 tablets? Find out in our Tesco Hudl 2 vs Fire HD 7 vs Fire HD 6 comparison review. See:  The best budget tablets.

Tesco Hudl 2 vs Fire HD 7 vs Fire HD 6: Price

How much you’re willing to spend on a tablet is going to have a big impact on which model you buy. If you’re reading this then you probably want a budget tablet as the most expensive here is £129. That’s the very affordable, in the grand scheme, Tesco Hudl 2 which is only £10 more expensive than its predecessor and can be purchased with double value vouchers using ClubCard Boost so if you spend £65 worth of vouchers on the Hudl 2 then it’s effectively free. Read: Tesco Hudl vs Hudl 2 comparison review.

If you’re trying to save as much as possible, then Amazon’s Fire HD 6 looks like a bargain and the HD 7 is cheaper if you opt for less storage. In fact, only the HD 7 with 32 GB of storage is more expensive.

There is one caveat though which is that the prices in the table below are for Amazon’s tablets with ‘special offers’ meaning you’ll be served advertising as a screensaver and on the lockscreen. You can have these removed if you pay an extra £10.

Price isn’t everything so see below to find out what you get for your money in each case.

	Tesco Hudl 2	Fire HD 6	Fire HD 7
8 GB	–	£79	£119
16 GB	£129	£99	£139

Tesco Hudl 2 vs Fire HD 7 vs Fire HD 6: Design and build

If you like colourful devices then you’re in luck here. The Fire HD tablets are available in five colours (black, yellow, blue, pink and white) and the Hudl 2 is available in a whopping eight (black, white, blue, orange, purple, pink, red and turquoise).

In terms of design, the Hudl 2 looks and feels a lot more premium with its stylish curves and soft matt rubber finish. The tablet is relatively thin at 9 mm but fairly heavy at just over 400 g. It’s understandably heavier than the Amazon tablets, which are 337 g and 290 g respectively, due to its size.

We’re not a big fan of the chunky bezels on the Fire HD tablets and the fact they are nearly 11 mm thick.

Tesco Hudl 2 vs Fire HD 7 vs Fire HD 6: Hardware specs and features

Although the Hudl 2 is more expensive than its rivals here (ignoring paying for it with vouchers), it comes with a decent set of specifications. You get an excellent 8.3in IPS screen with a Full HD resolution (1920 x 1200).

You also get an Intel Atom quad-core processor clocked at 1.8 GHz and 2 GB of RAM. There’s only a 16 GB storage option but the Hudl 2 does come with a microSD card slot so you can add up to 32 GB more.  

The main difference between the HD 6 and HD 7 is the screen size and you can guess from their names how big they are. At 6in, the HD 6 is very smaller for a tablet but since they use the same 1280 x 800 resolution, it is slightly higher in pixel density than its bigger brother.

Beyond the screen, both Fire HD tablets use a quad-core 1.5 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM. You do get the choice of storage amounts but pick carefully as neither offers expandable storage and the amount available is, as with any tablet, less than the headline value.

Here are the benchmark results:

	Tesco Hudl 2	Fire HD 6/7
GeekBench 3	2165	1366
GFXBench T-Rex	17fps	20fps
SunSpider	768ms	674ms

Since these are budget tablets, you’re not going to find fancy things like a fingerprint scanner or IR blaster. On the things that you would expect, the Hudl 2 wins with dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and a micro-HDMI port. The Fire HD tablets are limited to single-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and no GPS or HDMI port.

Both the Fire HD tablets have rear facing speakers but a small difference is that the larger model has stereo speakers as opposed to a single mono speaker. The Hudl 2 has rear facing stereo speakers.

Moving onto cameras and the Hudl 2 outperforms again with a 5 Mp rear camera and a 1.2 Mp front camera. Amazon has only fitted the Fire HD 6 and 7 with a 2 Mp main camera and VGA front camera.

Tesco Hudl 2 vs Fire HD 7 vs Fire HD 6: Software

There’s a huge difference in software as the Amazon Fire HD tablets runs the firm’s own Fire OS 4 which is based on Android but vastly different. Meanwhile, the Hudl 2 runs on an almost stock Android 4.4 KitKat with a few Tesco related bits and pieces.

Both have decent parental control features if children are going to be using the device but a key difference is that the Fire HD tablets don’t allow access to the Google Play store to download apps, games and other content – you must essentially get everything from Amazon.

It’s worth noting that the HD 6 and HD 7 don’t come with Amazon’s MayDay feature which is only found on HDX models.