THE ALTERNATIVES

need for pesky black bars every time you fire up a film.

If you’re looking for a great tablet to watch movies on, you need proper sound. You can’t properly listen to the booming score with cheap Bluetooth cans, can you? The speakers here, with dual Dolby Atmos and AKG technology, are very satisfying to listen to and capable of reaching big volumes with comparatively little tinniness.

Mightier than the sword

One of our favourite parts of the design is the inclusion, and Samsung’s integration, of the S Pen. The stylus simply snaps to the side of the tablet when not in use. The S Pen never needs charging and doesn’t use batteries, so it can remain with the tablet constantly. It really feels like an integral part of the tablet rather than a simple add-on.

The S Pen works brilliantly with Samsung’s Notes app for digital note-taking and sketches alike, the tablet will fairly accurately convert your handwriting into text if you want, and you can easily export your documents from there, keeping each note with a combination of text, handwriting and sketches. For an artist on a budget, the S6 Lite is a brilliant choice.

However, we noticed a few issues while using it. Generally speaking, the S Pen tracked very well, although certain vertical strokes in words weren’t recorded, which then affects the writing-to-text functionality. Writing-to-text also records line breaks, so the text files you get end up in slender, newspaperstyle columns.

When it comes to cameras, the 5MP front one inevitably ends up getting used more than the 8MP rear. The front camera is light on detail and features some noise on static photos, but its main focus is video calls and on this it delivers. Calls made via Zoom are crystal-clear and better quality than some laptops costing double the price. The rear camera is fine: it’s nothing to write home about at mid-range but picks up plenty of colour in less-thanoptimal lighting situations.

The tablet is big on browsing, with its 4GB RAM, quad 2.3GHz and quad 1.7GHz chipsets providing a satisfying amount of speed. It’ll handle gaming