Lenovo Yoga Android Tablet Review

By David Ramsey

Manufacturer: Lenovo
Product Name: Yoga Tablet 8 / Yoga Tablet 10
Model Number: 60043 (8″), 60046 (10″)
UPC: 887942751616 EAN: 0887942751616 (8″)
UPC: 887942754013 EAN: 0887942754013 (10″)
Price As Tested: $299.99 Yoga Tablet 10 (Newegg / Amazon)

Full Disclosure: Lenovo provided the product samples used in this article. But we had to send them back after the review process.

When you think of “yoga”, you probably envision people twisting themselves into different positions. Like the experienced yoga practitioner, Lenovo’s new Yoga tablets have the ability to assume different forms depending on what you’re doing with them.

The Android-based tablet market is exploding, with new entries almost every day. We’re even seeing what once were dedicated e-readers, like the Nook and Kindle, re-marketed as general purpose tablets. Lenovo’s been in this market for a while, and thus it’s no surprise to see them introduce another entry, the Lenovo Yoga tablet computers.

A tablet computer, by definition, must be a flat “slate” form factor. Or must it? Lenovo sent us both the 8″ and 10″ screen versions of their new Yoga tablets, so let’s see what they’ve got and how they compare to the rest of the tablet market.

	Yoga Tablet 8	Yoga Tablet 10
CPU	MTK Quad Core, 1.2GHz 8125 (WiFi)
Screen	8″ HD (1280×800) IPS	10″ HD (1280×800) IPS
Size & Weight	0.88 lbs, 213 x 144 x (3.0-7.3) mm	1.33 lbs, 261 x 180 x (3.0-8.1) mm
Cameras	5.0M Auto Focus rear camera, 1.6M front camera
Storage	16GB eMMC storage, expandable to 64GB with MicroSD
Memory	1GB LP DDR2
Battery	Li-io polymer, 6000mAh	Li-ion polymer, 9000mAh
Operating System	Jelly Bean Android 4.2
Ports	Micro USB (OTG), 3.5mm audio jack
Sensors	E-compass, Accelerometer (G-sensor), GPS, Brightness (Ambient Light), Vibration Function
Connectivity	802.11 b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0/4.0
Touch	10 point multi-touch
Power adapter	1.5V	2.0V
Case Materials	Polycarbonate back and aluminum kick stand
Audio	Dual Speakers , 3.5mm Audio & mic jack, Microphone with noise reduction, Dolby Digital Plus DS1

So, what makes the Lenovo Yoga tablets different? Let’s take a look in the next section.

Aside from the screen and battery sizes, both the 8″ and 10″ versions of the Yoga tablets are identical: they use the same quad-core MediaTek ARM-based processor running at 1.2GHz, the same 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage, so on and such forth. The tablets are so visually similar that it would be almost impossible to tell them apart just from pictures. For what it’s worth, most of the following images are of the 10″ version.

You’ll notice the difference right away: while other tablets are symmetrical slabs, the Lenovo Yogas have a very thin screen with a thick, rounded edge. This is where the battery lives. And it’s a big battery, too: Levovo says it’s good for up to 18 hours on the 10″ version. The battery hump also serves to prop the edge of the tablet up a little bit, making it more convenient to use laying flat on a table or other surface.

If you want more “angle”, you can fold down the aluminum foot built into the case. Now the rear is propped up about 1.5″.

The same foot also lets you use the tablet this way, handy for watching movies on your desk. While a friction-based latch holds the foot extended, you can tilt the tablet back a few degrees. Not too far, though, or it will simply tip over.

Under the stowage area of the aluminum foot are two card slots. The left slot, presumably intended for a SIM card (judging from hints in the documentation) is merely a depression in the case and can’t be used for anything. The right slot accommodates a microSD card of up to 64GB.

Once you insert the microSD card, it’s completely enclosed by the body of the computer. Don’t worry: using a fingernail to press on the visible edge of the card will engage a spring-loaded ejector mechanism.

The case foot is folded in in this image. While the battery holder and case foot are aluminum, the rest of the rear of the case is matching polycarbonate with a fine diamond texture that makes it easy to hold. The 5MP auto-focussing camera lens is visible at the bottom right of this image.

At either side of the front of the tablet, below the screen, are two speakers for the Dolby-certified audio system. The mere fact that the speakers face you, rather than putting sound to the rear or side as most other tablets do, makes a significant difference in the way you perceive the audio.

The unusual design of the Lenovo Yoga tablet has real advantages in day to day use. The battery bulge makes either tablet easy to hold in portrait orientation, like this:

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:

The tablet on top here is the new (and very expensive) iPad Air. Apple brags about how thin it 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.

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 (you can also use it to connect to your computer to transfer files, as long as you’ve figured out how to put Android into “developer mode”).

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

The Camera application includes a number of controls, and can be set to use either the 5MP rear camera or the 1.6MP front camera.

However, you’re probably not going to be doing any serious photography with this tablet. Even the images from the 5MP rear camera can be somewhat fuzzy and show a number of compression artifacts as you can see in the image above: note the blurred colors and blocky artifacts on the edge of the blue wood block in the center of the image.

Join me in the next section as I examine the software included with these tablets.

Fortunately, Lenovo resisted the urge– all too common among vendors of Android devices– to impose their own skin or user interface on top of the standard Android interface. Aside from a pre-configured home screen and some utility software, it’s pure standard Android 4.2 Jelly Bean:

The application screens are where one of the weak points of these tablets becomes evident: at only 1280 by 800 pixels, the screens are low-resolution when compared to many other tablets in the market. Granted, they’re IPS (In-Plane Switching) screens, so they have excellent color reproduction and very wide viewing angles, but the images can be a little “chunky”, especially on the larger pixels of the 10″ version. Lenovo apparently tried to minimize the visual impact of this by increasing the font size used for icon titles, but this resulted in longer titles being cut off, as shown in the “Amazon Kindle” and “News & Weather” icons in the image below.

The Lenovo Yoga tablets come with Dolby-certified sound systems controlled with a special application. Using this app, you can define customized sound profiles, and even set the tablet to automatically select a profile based on its position and whether or not the aluminum foot is extended. For example, if the tablet is in landscape orientation with the foot out, you could set it to use the “Movie” sound profile. The sound produced by the Dolby-enhanced front-facing speakers is (to my ears) noticeably better than the sound produced by the iPad Air’s speakers, which fire to the side, but remember that these are still very small speakers that are limited by the physics of their size; a common, no-name brand of cheap unpowered desktop speakers will probably sound better overall.

Lenovo’s “Smart Slide Bar” can be invoked with a swipe from the right side of the screen when the tablet is in landscape mode…

Or the left side of the screen when the tablet is in portrait mode:

Note that when in landscape mode, the large upper icon will invoke your Movies, while when in portrait mode the large upper icon is for the Kindle application.

Swiping down from the top right portion of the screen opens this quick-access control panel. The “Sound & Visual” icon lets you invoke customized settings you’ve configured for each of the three given orientations.

You can make very fine adjustments to the tablet’s power usage with the Lenovo Power Control application. You can set timers (sleep, auto-power off and on), enable and disable various subsystems (WiFi, Bluetooth, audio…), and even display a chart showing the historical power usage of various applications and hardware bits, so you can see what’s using the most power. This is all cool, but in real life I found the power capacity of the tablets so large that I pretty much ignored this stuff.

In the next section I’ll present my final thoughts and conclusion.

The Lenovo Yoga tablets are budget tablets: they’re priced aggressively, and don’t have some of the features you’ll see on higher-end hardware. You’ll notice this most in the low-resolution screen and camera images, but there are other aspects as well: the MediaTek quad-core CPU and its associated GPU aren’t exactly the fastest of their kind. And it’s easy to prove this by running CPU or graphics benchmarks on whatever portion of the tablet you’re testing.

But although many people may be using tablets as their primary computing devices, nobody’s doing video transcoding or 3-D modeling on them (yet). And for what most people use them for– web browsing, email, social media, and content viewing– the Yoga tablets are more than good enough. In fact I find them preferable to the iPad Air for things like reading Kindle books (because of the ease of holding the tablet in portrait mode) and watching movies or YouTube videos (because of the better audio). Factor pricing in, and you’ve got a real pair of winners.

If you like high-resolution screens, you may be thinking that an Android-based Nook HD or Kindle Fire HD might be a better product for the same or less money. I’ve tried both of these, and while they’re excellent readers, they don’t do well as general purpose tablets. The Kindle Fire limits you to a tiny subset of the Android applications available, and while Barnes and Noble has opened up the Nook HD to full Android tablet status, I found it to be annoyingly slow and laggy to use in that mode, with enough delays in the UI responsiveness to make using it frustrating. The Yogas, despite their humble hardware, were always smooth and responsive. My only real complaint here was that shipping a tablet with Android 4.2.2 in November, 2013 seems a little lazy when other Android tablets were shipping with Android 4.3 in July.

Yes, the low-resolution screens can be hard to get used to if you’ve used a high-resolution display for a few years. But increasing the screen resolution means increasing the amount of RAM (larger screen buffer), as well as beefing up the CPU/GPU to handle more pixels (I think underpowered silicon is one of the main reasons my Nook HD is so slow when used as a general purpose tablet). That said, I do look forward to seeing a “Yoga HD” from Lenovo in the future.

It’s impressive and refreshing to see real innovation in the tablet computer market, especially when the innovation makes a noticeable, real-world improvement in the use of the product. Far from being a gimmick, the Yoga tablet design, with its battery location, folding support foot, and front-facing speakers, makes a dramatic difference in the usability of the product.

You’ll be happy with the performance unless you’re one of those people for whom benchmarks are the only reason to own computing equipment. That said, it’s objectively slow, if subjectively fast enough.

Tablets aren’t something most people will consider from an aesthetic point of view, but the appearance of the Yoga products is different enough to be striking.

Constructed of polycarbonate plastic for the main body and matte-finish aluminum for the battery casing and foot, the physical quality of the tablet was excellent. The feel of the hinge used for the aluminum foot is very solid and stable, without even a hit of slop.

Functionally, the Yoga tablets suffer only from their relatively low-resolution screens and mediocre cameras, and whatever irritating limitations the Android operating system imposes (should you really have to put the tablet in “developer mode” to connect it to your computer via USB?)

Value is the big win for these tablets. At an MSRP of $249.99 for the 8″ Yoga tablet and $299.99 for the 10″ version (Newegg / Amazon), Lenovo may have hit the perfect sweet spot for price/performance/features.

If the low-resolution screen isn’t a deal-breaker, these are the nicest Android tablets I’ve seen yet.

+ Unique design brings significant operational benefits
+ May have the best tablet audio yet
+ MicroSD card slot for storage expansion
+ Very long battery life
+ Excellent value

– Low resolution screen
– Doesn’t ship with the latest version of Android
– Mediocre image quality from 5MP camera

• Performance: 8.50
• Appearance: 9.25
• Construction: 9.75
• Functionality: 9.75
• Value: 9.75

Excellence Achievement: Benchmark Reviews Golden Tachometer Award.

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