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The Vodafone Smart Tab 2 comes with both the stock Android browser and Chrome. The Ice Cream Sandwich browser operates well, although it can be a touch slow.
Resisizing and features such as requesting a desktop site, tabbed browsing and downloading web-pages for offline viewing (particularly useful when you're on a 3G data plan) are available.
A slightly annoying, but not deal breaking, downside is that that the browser doesn't sync up with any other browser that you might have on another device. Chrome allows you to do this if you use Chrome on your desktop, phone and tablet. You can access boomarks, history and preferences from any device because it's all held on the cloud.
As with most tablets, flash is not supported. But this won't be much of an issue for the average user since websites that require flash (BBC iPlayer, YouTube) will have an app that can access its content.
The device does have an ace up its sleeve however - 3G connectivity -which is as speedy as your phone (so for many of us in the UK, not very speedy at all).
There isn't an offline one off price for the tablet, it has to be purchased with a tariff from Vodafone and the tariffs aren't cheap - £29 a month for a whopping 24 month contract and 2GB of data, which is reduced to £20 for new customers.
Both 3G and Wi-Fi options are make the tablet more of an attractive purchase, especially if you consider the fact that similar devices with the same connectivity will usually cost over £200.
To fully load the TechRadar desktop site via the stock browser over Wi-Fi took a reasonable 15 seconds, which might not sound like much, but if you compare it to a Nexus 7 which took 9 seconds you can see the gulf. Over 3G it took a shocking 83 seconds. Over Wi-Fi, the mobile site took a blink of an eye to load, about 3 seconds, and over 3G it took about 5 seconds.
Websites load to the correct size automatically, which is something that isn't always standard for all tablets – check out the StarPad 7 review in the buying guide and you'll see what we mean.
You can zoom in and out (by pinching) and the picture will adjust to the most readable clarity that's possible with this screen. Black and white text is passable but because the screen isn't the best, it lacks the crisp finish that other 1080p would offer.
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