Friday, November 6, 2015
Review: EE Harrier Tab
Introduction and design
EE has gone big on hardware in 2015. As well as a phone line-up that offers more tech for your money than any of the big names, the EE Harrier Tab is a pretty compelling alternative to premium mid-sized tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 and budget stars like the Tesco Hudl 2.
What EE really wants you to do is to sign up for one of its data contracts. Spend £16 a month on a 2GB data deal and you only have to pay £30 for the tablet itself. This means that at the end of your 24-month contract you'll have spent £414 total.
Sounds a bit rich? You can also grab one with no commitment beyond an initial £10 2GB data top-up for £199.99. That makes it a cool £150 cheaper than the 4G Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4, and just £50 more than the weaker Vodafone Tab prime 6.
Is it a steal? If you want a 4G tablet, yes. However, if you'd be happy with a Wi-Fi-only one, Samsung's Tab 8.4 is absolutely worth spending an extra £40 on.
Unlike most low-cost gadget series, the EE Harrier Tab doesn't trade away all design distinctiveness in favour of saving some pennies. Looking just like a blown-up EE Harrier phone, it has a brushed aluminium rear and a 'check out my bling' gold ring around the camera lens.
It's all for show, though. This is a plastic tablet, aside from the glass that covers the screen. On the plus side, it does feel less flimsy than its Harrier phone brothers and doesn't seem like it's been made on a dangerously tight budget. Just a reasonably tight one.
While a fake metal style is sure to put some of you off, the EE Harrier Tab isn't ridiculously shiny unless it sits under bright sunlight, and otherwise has the sort of design we're after. The screen surround sits pretty tight to the actual display while leaving enough room for your thumb to rest. This gives it an up-to-date look without making it impractical.
At just 310g, it's light enough to use in one hand without getting arm ache halfway through reading an article. Being a widescreen tablet, the Harrier Tab can still feel a bit awkward when compared with, say, an iPad mini 3, but the simple solution is to hold it a bit higher. It's narrow enough for adult hands to grasp it from side-to-side, anyway.
The Harrier Tab is based on the basic tablet blueprint that offers pretty much the perfect balance between screen size and portability. And for all its relatively loud finishing touches, it doesn't add too much to that generic tablet schematic.
It's not waterproof, the back cover is non-removable, and the SIM and microSD slots sit under a plastic flap on the side. These last two are important parts of the Harrier Tab's arsenal. 4G tablets at £200 are very rare, but having an SD card slot gives the Harrier an advantage over the Nexus 7.
Key features and performance
The EE Harrier Tab's screen is, as with any tablet, one of its most important features. This isn't a display that's out to trash all competition with insane sharpness and super-rich colour. Instead, it does what the Moto G did for the phone market: it provides a good baseline level of quality that can be compared with much more expensive devices without looking like an embarrassment.
It has an 8-inch Full HD IPS LCD screen. That equates to 275ppi: not so sharp you have to kiss the screen with your eyeball to see the pixels, but not pixel-poor enough to make it an issue unless you're looking for reasons to complain.
Colour performance is at a similar level. Shades appear fairly subdued and relaxed next to top-end tablets like the Sony Xperia Z4 Tab, and I don't expect it fills out the entire sRGB colour gamut. However, it's also quite pleasant to look at. Try-hard over-saturated displays can look far more jarring than relaxed ones like the EE Harrier Tab's, and it has a natural-looking tone.
The white balance is on the warm side too, which only makes the display all the more easy-going.
It seems to be a quality panel too. The EE Harrier Tab doesn't lose all brightness as soon as you view it from an extreme angle, and being IPS, there's no severe contrast shift. From one angle the blacks go a bit blue, but it's an angle you'd never view it from unless you were trapped under a bookcase, and texting your nan became your only hope of survival.
It's a nice screen, roughly taking what Asus did with the Nexus 7 and blowing it up to eight inches instead of seven. The only elephant in the room is the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4, which has a larger, sharper display, better colour, and a squatter aspect ratio some will prefer.
The Wi-Fi-only version of that tablet is available for £249, just £40 extra when you factor-in the £10 top-up the Harrier Tab demands. Bear this in mind.
The EE Harrier Tab also packs in far fewer bonus features than its Samsung rival. There's no Wi-Fi ac, IR transmitter or fingerprint scanner. Would we expect them in a £200 tablet that has clearly invested in a good screen? Of course not, but a few do offer the odd bit extra. The cheaper LG G Pad 8.0 has IR, for example. It also has a pretty rubbish screen, though, so let's not big it up too much.
The Harrier Tab picks its battles, and only a few of them. One obvious, deliberate point is that the tablet has dual speakers, firing to each side of the screen to give you a stereo effect when watching films and playing games in landscape orientation.
Front speakers are very welcome when they sound good, but unfortunately the Harrier Tab's don't. Their front-facing position is a red herring as they sound as thin and tinny as lower-grade phone speakers, and offer fairly poor top volume. The Tesco Hudl 2 in particular offers far better speakers than these.
Storage in the Harrier Tab won't blow you away either, but asking for more than the supplied 16GB from a £200 4G tablet is like expecting someone in the lunch queue to buy your meal every time you visit the sandwich shop. You get just under 10GB to play with after the system has had its way with the memory, and we're pretty happy with that, given you can also plug in a microSD card to store a larger media library.
The software mirrors exactly what you get in EE's Harrier phones. The only EE app here is My EE, which is a basic account portal to let you find out what's up with your EE SIM, contract, and so on.
If the Harrier Tab only had this, it'd have the least offensive bloatware garb of any network-branded tablet. However, EE has also signed up with a bunch of third parties, preinstalling their apps as 'system' apps you can't get rid of. Damn.
These include Amazon (five apps), Deezer, and the security suite Lookout. I hope EE is getting something out of this, as I doubt many people would choose to have this exact array installed. It's hardly the motherload of bloat, though, and doesn't kill the internal storage by any means. Or compromise performance.
Android Lollipop has caused quite a few performance issues in lower-cost phones and tablets, but here it performs as well as any rival Android for day-to-day use. Apps are quick to load, and, unlike other Lollipop-enabled devices, the homescreen didn't take an age to pop in. On occasion, certain transition animations become slightly jagged, but I didn't stumble on any annoying issues: a relief.
If you currently use an Android 4.4 KitKat, you may find the Harrier Tab lacks that extra hit of zippiness, but this is really a characteristic of Android Lollipop. It looks and feels great, but just isn't as laser-fire fast.
Benchmarks and battery life
The EE Harrier has Qualcomm's 2015 mid-range mobile computer CPU, the Snapdragon 615. It's a bit like an upscale Snapdragon 410, used in loads of budget phones, but with double the number of cores to let it cope with the extra demands of a 1080p device.
More pixels means more power needed, in other words.
The Snapdragon 615 is an octa-core CPU, with Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.5GHz and 1GHz. There are four of each. These cores aren't as powerful as the Cortex-A57s you get in more expensive devices, but there are a lot of them. There's also 2GB RAM backing up the CPU. That's the usual amount for this processor, but it's still a good load for a cheaper tablet.
Don't get too excited about the 64-bit CPU, though. There are few benefits to having a 64-bit Android device at this point, even if the architecture has something to do with the generational speed improvements in Qualcomm's 2015 Snapdragon range.
In Geekbench 3, the EE Harrier Tab scores 2324 points, significantly outperforming the Vodafone Smart Tab Prime 6. It's very close in performance to the Tesco Hudl 2, which uses a quad-core Intel CPU to get roughly the same level result.
The quad-core Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 does significantly better, generally scoring around 2700-odd points. Of course, there's an argument it has greater need for that power as it has a much higher screen resolution.
In AnTuTu, the Harrier Tab scores 32338 points, which is a very solid score and close to the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4's results.
Where it falls down is the Java Sunspider benchmark, which is roughly a guide on how quickly a device can render web content. It completes the test in 1602ms, far slower than the Tesco Hudl 2 (> 800ms). This proves that sometimes it's better to use a device with a small amount of powerful cores than loads of fairly low-power ones.
The important question here is whether it affects the EE Harrier Tab's real-life performance. And it doesn't, not seriously anyway. There's actual more interface lag in the Tesco Hudl 2 than here. The Snapdragon 615 also has a reputation for getting quite hot, but I had no issues of that sort.
This isn't the most efficient, longest-lasting tablet in town, though. It has a 4650mAh battery, which is expected from a tablet of this size.
In TechRadar's full brightness video test, which involves playing a 90 minute 720p video, the EE Harrier Tab lost 32% charge. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 lost just 13%, although it was particularly good at lasting a long time during video playback.
This means you'll get through three films at max brightness before the Harrier Tab dies. However, you'll see substantially better results if you turn the brightness down.
At one point I used the Harrier Tab to stream a film off Netflix using 4G, and it only lost around 20% charge over the space of an hour. The display is clearly pretty hungry at max brightness.
The essentials and camera
The EE Harrier Tab has two cameras, an 8-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel up front. This is the sort of setup you get in a lot of budget phones. Some probably even use the same sensors.
Given a very simple scene, the Harrier Tab can produce a reasonable shot. But it craps out far more duds than hits. Its dynamic range and metering are very poor, resulting in dead-looking shots. And it has a tendency to get the white balance quite wrong, resulting in a purple/blue hue across images.
There's not too much shutter lag to the EE Harrier Tab camera, so using it doesn't become frustrating in that respect. However, it does struggle to focus on anything close up. To get anything approaching a macro-style photo, I had to use the digital zoom, which radically cuts down the detail in the final shot.
Colours are generally a little muted. Among mobile device cameras we're talking about an entry-level performance, and a fairly poor one at that.
There are also issues common to most tablets. Handling the EE Harrier Tab for anything but 'wide angle'-style landscape shots feels quite awkward, and is going to do nothing for your street cred.
Then there's the screen. While you might assume the big display will be great for previewing images, on a sunny day its reflectivity makes seeing what's on there a bit tricky. For a tablet, its visibility is fine, but let's not forget: only the iPad Air 2 offers a proper anti-reflective coating among tablets.
It doesn't have an oleophobic layer either. It loves fingerprints, in other words.
Tablets never excel as cameras in my opinion, but they are great at other things. The EE Harrier is a fantastic web browser, offering the stock Android browser and Chrome, plus the standard Android Lollipop keyboard.
The real winner is 4G support, of course. If you can afford the data allowance, for streaming Netflix or just reading the odd article, it's a smash. The EE Harrier Tab doesn't try to get too flash with multi-tasking like the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4, but it's no great loss when Lollipop makes switching between apps easy.
Camera samples
Verdict
The EE Harrier Tab is a tablet of greater taste than its shiny-as-you-like fake metal rear might suggest. It doesn't have an EE-heavy interface, performs very well, and has a practical design that is both light and practical.
If the idea of a 4G tablet appeals, this is one of the best budget options. It is much better than the Vodafone alternative, the Smart Tab prime 6, thanks to its higher-quality screen.
However, if mobile internet is something you can live without, the Tesco Hudl2 is an even better buy at a jaw-dropping £99. And if you can afford a bit more, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 offers a bunch of worthwhile benefits.
We like
General performance is good, with none of the app loading pauses and icon pop-up problems we've seen in cheaper Android Lollipop devices.
Having 4G at this price is great too. While EE's deals generally mean keeping a tight rein on your use, watching films and videos on a large screen like this is much more rewarding than on a 5-inch phone.
A lot of that is down to the screen. While the pixel density is not Retina-like, it's not far off, and the display has a relaxed, natural tone that doesn't try to overcook its colours.
We dislike
In bright sunlight, the fake metal glints in a way that looks a bit gaudy. We didn't expect real metal at the price, but pretend metal should do its best not to scream at you.
Battery life isn't anything like iPad-grade. You won't get close to 10 hours unless you use the EE Harrier Tab very lightly, with fairly low screen brightness.
Like a lot of lower-cost tablets, the cameras are poor too. But do you really want to use a tablet as your main camera?
While we're happy with the EE Harrier Tab prioritising the basics over fluffy extras, it's a shame there's no IR blaster, which can be used to control TVs and so on.
Verdict
Aside from a cod-metal back, there's little flashiness to the EE Harrier Tab. With this in mind it has all the elements needed to made a decent, modern tablet.
The screen is good quality and the right size, with enough power to make it perform well, and the design is both modern and practical.
The price isn't as insanely aggressive as the Tesco Hudl 2 and you can get a few more features from non-4G tablets at the price. But it's a good buy if you want something with mobile internet skills.
from TechRadar: Technology reviews http://ift.tt/1KSuhrl
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