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Battery life
The Vodafone Tab Speed 6 is fairly respectable when it comes to battery life. Running our 90-minute video test with the screen at full brightness and Wi-Fi on drained it from 100% to 76% – a drop of 24%.
That's a little worse than top tablets like the iPad Air 2, which dropped just 21%, but beats many budget slates. The EE Harrier Tab, for example, dropped 32% and the Tesco Hudl 2 lost a massive 37% of its juice.
In general use the slate held up quite well. Playing Asphalt 8 for 30 minutes at mid brightness knocked just 10% off the battery for example.
The drop is even less when watching videos and using most apps, so with mixed use you should be able to get seven or eight hours out of it, especially if you don't max-out the brightness – although you might need to, as the screen on the Tab Speed 6 doesn't go all that bright in the first place.
The tablet's stamina is especially impressive given that it has just a 4050mAh juice pack. That's smaller than the 4650mAh battery in the EE Harrier Tab, and much smaller than the 6470mAh unit in the iPad mini 2. It's not one of the best we've tested, but it's comfortably above average.
Despite the small battery, though, the Vodafone Tab Speed 6 takes a considerable amount of time to charge – and the only way to conserve life once it runs low, other than to not use it, is to leverage Android Lollipop's fairly basic battery-saver mode, which limits the tablet's already undercooked performance.
Camera
You probably won't be surprised to hear that the Vodafone Tab Speed 6 doesn't have a good camera… at all.
That's not the end of the world. If you're using a camera on a tablet then you're probably doing life wrong, but some slates do at least have acceptable snappers – oversized, impractical and no match for most smartphones cameras, but acceptable. The camera on the Vodafone Tab Speed 6, however, is not acceptable in any way.
There's a 5MP snapper on the back and a 2MP one on the front, which is worse than you'll find on the EE Harrier Tab, but better on paper than the Amazon Fire HD 6's setup.
You also get quite a few settings to play with, from a handful of modes such as auto and night to a manual option which enables you to tweak the ISO, white balance and exposure.
None of this helps much when the results are so lacklustre, though.
The biggest problem is an almost complete lack of detail, especially in the background, but if the light is particularly strong or dim the camera can struggle even to bring out details in the foreground. Low light is especially problematic, especially given the lack of a flash.
The only time photos come out well is in close-up, but the caveat here is that the Tab Speed 6 really struggles to focus, so while you can wrestle your way to an okay-looking shot, it's hard work.
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