iPad Air beaten in speed test by Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1

The iPad Air may be the slimmest - and most expensive - tablet available, but it cannot lay claim to being the fastest.

That honour lies with the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, according to Which? Magazine, whose testers conducted an analysis of eight current tablets. With apps becoming more and more demanding, processing speed is essential at the top end of the tablet market.

Other tablets tested included the Amazon Kindle Fire HD and HDX, the iPad mini with Retina display, the Google Nexus and the Tesco Hudl.

Which used an industry standard piece of 'benchmarking' software, called Geekbench, to put each tablet through its paces. It's designed to test multi-core processor performance by simulating everyday tasks. Multiple tests are given individual scores, which are then combined and weighted to give an overall score.

According to the testers, 'a higher score means a faster tablet, so if one device has doublethe score of another it should be twice as speedy'. But they add that it is debatable whether differences in power will always translate into noticeable differences between various apps.

Further down the table there were some other key findings. The iPad mini with Retina display, launched last year at the same time as the iPad Air, is slower than Google's Nexus 7 and the Advent Vega Tegra Note 7" - both of which are more than £100 cheaper.

At the lower end of the test, Tesco's budget tablet, the Hudl, performed well, beating the old iPad 2 (as did the Kindle Fire HD). Read our review of the Hudl here.

Here is the full list of scores from Which? - see how your tablet stacks up.

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 Edition): 2856
Apple iPad Air 16GB 2687
Google Nexus 7 (2): 2675
Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 8.9: 2667
Advent Vega Tegra Note 7": 2612
iPad mini with Retina display 16GB: 2512
Tesco Hudl: 1926
Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8GB: 807
Apple iPad 2 16GB: 502