Lenovo Yoga Tablet 10 review

We loved the first version of this tablet we saw, the 8in Lenovo Yoga Tablet 8, and this larger 10in version is largely identical, which bodes well. It’s also keenly priced at just £249 and we’ve been crying out for such aggressive pricing from Android tablets for some time, so that’s another point in its favour.

There’s no other 10in tablet that looks this good for this little

Despite being relatively cheap, the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 10 certainly doesn’t look cut-price, in fact it’s one of classiest-looking Android tablets to date. We have seen a decent but cheaper Android tablet, the Versus TouchTab 10.1, but the Yoga Tablet makes that device look positively lumpen and backward in comparison.

That’s not hard though as the Yoga Tablet is pretty svelte by any standard, measuring just 8.1mm in depth for the most part – which isn’t far off the much-vaunted new iPad Air. It looks great for it, though Lenovo isn’t in direct competition as there’s a large cylindrical section at the bottom that bulges out to 21.5mm.

It may be chunky, but it’s certainly not unattractive and it gives the Yoga Tablet 10 numerous advantages over typical slate-style devices. It makes it more comfortable to hold in portrait mode for starters, providing both more grip and offsetting its 605g weight into your palm, making it feel lighter still. Smaller tablets are usually a better choice for one-handed use, but the Yoga Tablet is again up their with the best, in this case the super-lightweight (469g) Apple iPad Air.

The bottom bulge allows for a range of useful extras to be included

One simple thing we really like about the Yoga Tablet is its power button. This big round button at one end of the cylinder has plenty of travel and is easy to find, unlike some of the tiny little excuses for buttons you see on most tablets. The extra space afforded by the bulging design has also allowed for front-facing stereo speakers. These produce much clearer, louder audio than anything we can think of with rear-mounted speakers.

The speakers alone make this a great choice for those who like to, for example, watch catch-up TV while cooking. But add in the built-in kick-stand and the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 10 stands (literally) above the competition for this kind of hands-free media playback. The stand lets you adjust the angle to suit you, and you can reverse the tablet and use the stand instead to prop up the screen for more comfortable gaming or typing. It’s a brilliant piece of design.

The stereo speakers also benefit from Dolby Digital software, adding a sense of space that such small speakers shouldn’t possess

Despite its shiny-silver finish the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 10 isn’t all metal, but then we wouldn’t expect it to be at this price. The kickstand is metal as are the side pieces of the chassis, the rear panel is plastic but it’s nicely textured and looks smart.

DISPLAY

After all this brilliant design and styling, it comes as a bit of a shock when you turn the tablet on and discover it has a basic 1,280×800 resolution screen. It’s the main compromise made in order to keep the price low and those who are used to high-resolution smartphones might find the pixelated display a bit much to take.

That said, it’s not a bad panel, colours are vibrant, viewing angles are excellent and it’s nice and bright. unsurprisingly it’s an IPS panel and its lack of pixels is about the only stick you can beat it with. We found we noticed the low resolution most when browsing the web or just using the operating system, when watching video or playing games it’s less of an issue.

CHIPSET

Inside the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 10 is a modest MediaTek quad-core chipset running at 1.2GHz. This is based around the older ARM Cortex A7 architecture, so it’s not going to compete with the latest offerings from Qualcomm or Samsung. That said, it’s not problematic either, Android 4.2 ran smoothly on it with no major hiccups. It is the same chipset as in the Asus MemoPad HD 7, though, which costs just £130, so while it may be capable you certainly aren’t getting a top-end specification here.

It did perform admirably in our tests though with practically the same scores as its younger sibling. Browsing ticked along at a respectable 1,354ms and it was quick enough in 3D to run the current crop of 3D games smoothly. That, however, is due to a lack of ambition from Android games developers, there’s simply nothing to push the latest devices, and its scores in benchmarks were merely mediocre.

Battery life was anything but though, with an excellent 12 hours and six minutes. That’s about two hours more than more than any other 10in Android tablet we’ve seen. It’s no doubt down to the whopping 9,000mAh battery inside, which will keep you browsing all day long.

There’s the usual poor 5-megapixel camera, we don’t know who takes photos with a tablet, but these poor cameras really should put them off. The front-mounted camera is good enough for video chat and the like, but nothing more.

It’s just as good looking from the side, though it’s not all metal

ANDROID

Lenovo has taken the brave move of messing with the Android operating system. It’s gone for an iPad-style design with no app tray and each icon on the screen representing the application itself, rather than merely a shortcut to it. If you don’t have a lot of apps installed it’s not a bad thing, as it keeps stuff simple and makes it easy to uninstall things you don’t need. For those who like to have tons of apps installed at once, it simple makes a mess of your home screens unless you’re very careful.

Android has been dumbed down, though some will prefer it this way

A more clear cut problem is the lack of multiple user support on the device. It’s based around Android 4.2, and the vanilla version allows for multiple user accounts with their own home screens, apps, email accounts and the like. It’s great to be able to share the tablet and still have all your own stuff just where you want it. It’s also one of Android’s major advantages over the iPad. We can see it’s simpler to leave it out, but we’d much rather it had been included.

CONCLUSION

The Lenovo Yoga Tablet 10 is the kind of device that will split opinion. It puts a clever and practical design, a long battery life and a stylish appearance above a high specification. It has a dumbed down version of Android, that first-time users might like, but which lacks multiple user support.

If you value the physical design and immediate ease-of-use over technical potential and long-term flexibility then this is a great buy. While those who are keener to get to grips with everything Android has to offer should hold out for the next iteration of the Google Nexus 10. It’s not for everyone then but this is still a great device at an attractive price.