Android Tablet Overview Continued

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.