That includes free broadband for Tesco Homephone customers, 75 percent off your first five movie purchases and £15 off your first grocery shop of £60, among other offers. We're not suggesting that the Hudl is a clone, but given the look, feel and placement of the speakers, there are plenty of commonalities between the two.ĭelve further into the packaging and you'll find a 5-volt wall socket and a micro-USB cable, a few short instructional pamphlets and a voucher booklet offering you discounts when you use the Hudl to buy stuff. Walk past it in a hurry, and you'd be forgiven for mistaking this for last year's Kindle Fire HD. Though our review unit came in royal blue, you can also snap it up in red, purple or classic black. The protective sticker that covers the display offers up helpful labels that direct you toward the various ports and buttons as if this was "my first tablet." Peel that back, and you're left with a rectangle of glass with rounded-off corners, and a lid fashioned out of brightly hued plastic. If you had any remaining illusions as to the Hudl's target market, opening the box should dispel them immediately. So, is it better than the Kindle Fire that it seeks to emulate? And when all is said and done, is this the device for which we'll be stuck doing technical support when the in-laws inevitably purchase it? Priced at £119 ($191), but available for £60 ($91) if you redeem Clubcard vouchers, it's not a surprise that the company sold 35,000 units after launch.
That's the group of people that Tesco is going after with the Hudl, an Android slate that tech snobs, obsessed with blistering benchmarks, would turn their noses up at. In the UK, there are around 50 million people who don't own a tablet or any other mobile computing device. Finally, both sell dirt-cheap Android tablets in the hopes of maintaining a foothold in our living rooms, hearts, minds and, most importantly, wallets.
Both understand the value of consumer data and exploit that information mercilessly. For starters, both Amazon and Tesco succeeded far beyond their original missions (bookseller and greengrocer, respectively) to become retail giants. One may seem like a paragon of modernity compared to its 94-year-old rival, but the UK's two biggest retailers have a lot in common.