We take a look at the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 8, one of two Yoga tablets that hit the market recently. Lenovo Middle East was kind enough to send us a review unit to play around with.
The Yoga 8 comes with a unique look and impressive battery life, that’s for sure!
Design & Hardware
It weighs in at an extremely light 404g (the 3G version), despite the metal body. There’s a very different look to the Yoga; its slimmest point stands at 4mm and goes up to 22mm at the cylindrical bottom handle, but don’t let that thickness fool you. The Yoga’s cylindrical shaped handle actually serves a purpose – well, a few of them. Other than the massive 6000mAh battery sitting inside and giving it an impressive battery life, the big round edge makes for a comfortable grip. The Yoga Tablet is one of the most comfortable tablets to hold in one hand.
That part of the tablet also houses the flexible hinge that Lenovo is known for. The hinge sits hidden in back of the tablet, and opens as you twist the metal flap. It provides a “stand” position to the tablet at a flexible angle perfect for watching movies; you can also flip it so that the screen sits at a slight angle “tilt” for typing.
There’s a power button and a headset on both sides of the hinge. The power button has a good feel to it when pressed. The opposite side of the power button sits the 3.5mm headset jack, and above that are the volume button and microphone jack.
The front houses two Dolby-powered stereo speakers, which have a pretty nice output power to them. The Dolby-enhanced front-facing speakers on the Yoga Tablet 8 deliver an impressive surround-sound experience. There’s also the Dolby app which gives you the flexibility to change audio profiles between Movie, Music, Game and Voice, as well as two custom modes.
Lenovo tried to change the game in hardware engineering and it did it brilliantly. The hinge is a welcomed addition to the tablet world and I would personally love to see it becoming the standard.
Jumping to the internals of the Yoga, the quad-core processor is running at 1.2GHz and backed by 1GB of RAM. The 8-inch screen is at a resolution of 1280×800 pixels (189ppi). The screen resolution is a bit low on pixel density but it still manages to do a great job for an 8-inch device. Colors were bright and vibrant and HD video playback quality is very good.
There’s 16GB of memory on the unit we got but you can also add more via microSD card (up to 64GB), which sits hidden into a slot behind the kickstand, and right next to it is a micro-SIM slot for 3G connectivity.
The front-facing camera is a 1.6MP HD camera used for making video calls. The rear camera is a 5MP shooter.
Battery life is probably the biggest selling point of the Yoga 8; Lenovo claims 18 hours of use. We’ve tested the battery performance using the standard “Video loop with full brightness” mode. The tablet lasted a very strong 10 hours+; basically, the Yoga 8 can easily give you a day’s usage without the need to recharge.
Software
When it comes to software, the Yoga 8 is running Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, stock look and feel with a few tweaks and added apps by Lenovo. The interface has an iOS-like feel, with a home screen followed by a list of all the apps installed; there’s no app tray present and all its icons are rounded squares.
Overall the software is buggy and is probably the one thing Lenovo did not really do right – but hey, this is Android; installing custom ROMs would solve most of your problems and I’m guessing that since this is the first generation of Yoga Android tablets, Lenovo will definitely improve things or maybe just drop customization and go for a pure stock Android look and feel.
Conclusion
Software aside, Yoga 8 is an impressive piece of hardware. It’s refreshing to see Lenovo taking chances in design and trying to be different. The Yoga 8 is super light, comfortable to use as an e-book reader and to hold. The stand is very handy for watching videos or presenting and if battery life is your number one feature, then the Yoga is for you!
As mentioned previously in our “Lenovo’s multimode tablet “Yoga” debuts in the UAE” post, The Lenovo Yoga Tablet is available now at major retailers in the UAE; starting price is AED 1299 for 8” model and AED 1599 for 10” model.
