Tesco announced plans to release its own brand smartphone under the Hudl name. Those plans have now been set aside as the supermarket giant announced it will shelve the Hudl smartphone to focus on the Hudl 2 tablet instead.
The Hudl 2 tablet was expected to launch before the end of this year along with the phone. Now it seems the tablet alone will be here in time for Christmas.
From the statement released by Tesco it sounds like it wanted to make the Hudl phone as an affordable 4G smartphone. But now that gap has been filled with the likes of the Moto G 4G, it seems to have backed off.
Robin Terrell, Tesco's multichannel director said: "We were confident that we could offer customers something we saw was lacking in the mobile market: an affordable, quality 4G smartphone handset. As we developed the idea in the first few months of the year, we could see a gap we could fill with our customers. The technology sector is fast changing and constantly evolving."
The Tesco Hudl offers an affordable tablet where there aren't as many on offer. As reported in The Guardian, Tesco sold more than 35,000 Hudl tablets in just a few days after launch.
The current Tesco Hudl tablet costs £119 and sports a 7-inch screen with a 1440 x 900 resolution (242ppi). It runs on a 1.5GHz A9 quad-core processor, has 1GB of RAM and uses a Mali 400 quad-core graphics processing unit.
The Tesco Hudl 2 will be an "enhanced" version of the original. It should be out in time for Christmas.