Tablets

We’ll only recommend appliances you’ll love to own, that work well and keep working well for a long time.

Test performance

Our independent lab testing measures a tablet’s quality when it’s new. It still forms a core part of our lifetime scoring because a slow or poorly-designed device isn’t going to live a fruitful life.

Our performance test includes:

• Ease of use assesses the touchscreen, buttons, general use, physical and virtual keyboards and multitasking.
• Multimedia includes video calling, watching videos, listening to music, taking photos and recording video, browsing and email functionality and e-book reading.
• Screen assesses how good the display looks with different lighting, brightness options and viewing angles.
• General performance includes assessments of CPU, memory and graphics as well as the speed of file transfers and WiFi performance.
• Device capabilities assesses the construction quality, available connections (USB, NFC, Bluetooth etc), cellular connectivity and storage.

Battery life

A tablet’s battery life is even more important than it seems. Batteries have a finite number of recharges before they degrade, so a shorter cycle means less total usage before the battery needs replacing. Because manufacturers make that hard to do, some owners choose to throw out the whole device. Either way, a long battery cycle means you don’t have to make that decision as quickly.

We set each tablet to 200 nits of brightness and keep it running until it shuts off or puts the screen to sleep.

We measure battery life during video playback and browsing the web, both with and without a keyboard. We also measure how long it takes to charge from zero to 100%.

Predicted reliability

It’s reasonable to expect a new tablet to remain fault-free for five years. Our predicted reliability won’t tell you whether a device will stop working tomorrow, but it does show which brands make models that are less likely to fail.

Owner satisfaction

Satisfaction is important – no device should be a source of buyer regret. Tablets with very satisfied owners are more likely to get maintained well, and owners are more likely to keep hold of them rather than chop and change.

Why we test tablets with keyboards

The line between tablet and laptop is blurrier than ever now that most tablets come with detachable keyboard cases. To capture the crossover, we include devices with a removable keyboard in the tablets test and a few high end tablets in our laptops test. We always test a tablet with its official keyboard case.