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Lenovo Yoga 10 HD+ Android Tablet Review

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Android Tablet Overview Continued

The unusual design of the Lenovo Yoga 10 HD+ tablet has real advantages in day to day use. The battery bulge makes the tablet easy to hold in portrait orientation, as shown below (this image is actually of the smaller Yoga 8 tablet, but the Yoga 10 HD+ is the same…just larger):

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This works really well. The reason: weight distribution. The fact that the mass of the batteries has been moved from behind the screen to the side has two advantages: one, the screen portion of the tablet can be very thin:

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Apple brags about how thin the iPad Air is. And it is thin, at a mere 7.5 millimeters. But as you can see, the screen section of the Yoga Tablet 10 it’s on top of is even thinner at 3.0mm at the thin edge and thickening only to 8mm right next to the battery bulge.

Two, most of the weight of the tablet is in your hand. When you hold a “regular” tablet, most of the weight is beyond your hand, and the force exerted by gravity tries to “lever” the tablet down. The Yoga tablets concentrate the weight in the part you’re holding, and you don’t have to exert any effort to support the featherweight screen portion.

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One one side of the tablet it the large, easy to press power button, which I find a relief after dealing with the tiny, barely protruding micro-switches of other tablets. The power icon in the button will pulse with white light when you have notifications. Also on this side of the tablet is the micro USB port used for charging as well as transferring data to a desktop computer.

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On the other side of the tablet is the 3.5mm audio jack, volume control, and a hole for the microphone.

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As with the earlier Yoga tablets, the Yoga 10 HD+ has a pair of front-facing speakers on either side of the hinge for the stand. Although they’re tiny, they’re Dolby™-certified, and if their performance is limited by their size (and it is), they still are probably the best-sounding speakers available on any tablet today.

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The rear camera has been upgraded from a 5MP to an 8MP unit (the front camera remains at 1.6MP). The camera on the previous Yoga tablet produced mediocre photos: color and saturation were good, but the images suffered from readily visible compression artifacts. The new camera produces noticeably higher-quality images, although they’re still short of the images you can get from higher-end Android phones and iPhones. The image below is an enlarged crop representing about 20% of the original image area.

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Join me in the next section as I examine the software included with this tablet.


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