Yoga Tablet Extra Software

Although it goes oddly unmentioned in Lenovo’s marketing materials and reviewer’s guide, the Yoga 10 HD+ tablet offers split-screen functionality: you can run multiple apps on screen simultaneously. By dragging a running application up from the application list, you can position it on-screen to the left or right (in landscape mode) or top or bottom (portrait mode) of an existing app. In this image I’m running the Chrome browser on the left side of the screen and Google Earth on the right.

A movable divider lets you apportion screen space between the running apps. It’s functionally similar to the “tiled windows” of Microsoft Windows 1.0, if you’re old enough to remember that. Depending on the apps involved (not all apps work well in this mode), you can have up to 4 applications on-screen at once.

With the Yoga 10 HD+, Lenovo includes several Lenovo DOit applications. The first is SHAREit, a cross-platform file sharing tool that Lenovo brags is “up to 40 times faster” than other file transfer methods. Free versions of this application are available for both Android and iOS, so you can easily (for example) move photos and other files between the Yoga tablet and, say, an iPhone:

8 seconds to move a 1.2 megabyte file doesn’t actually strike me as particularly fast, but it was easy. The iOS app caught the photo and placed it in my iPhone’s photo library. However, it looks as if the translation of the app’s user interface wasn’t quite finished:

(As best I can tell, the Chinese characters at the bottom of this dialog mean “Done”.)

Next up is the SECUREit application, which according to Lenovo offers protection against malware and viruses. I couldn’t actually find anything that looked like virus or malware protection feature in the user interface, although the application does offer an interesting look into the power and memory use of running software, and allow you to set permissions for specific applications and monitor how applications are using your personal information. You can see another localization error in the misspelled “Vedio” at the bottom of this image.

Last is SYNCit, a tool that synchronizes your contacts, SMS messages, and call logs to the cloud, with “the cloud” being a free account you can open by creating a LenovoID. Although the idea is to keep this data synchronized to “any Android device”, I couldn’t find SYNCit in the Android Play store, although SHAREit and SECUREit were both available. Of course, SYNCit is still useful as a backup for your tablet data.

Join me in the next section as I give my final thoughts and conclusion on this tablet.