Category: Hardware

I bought this €229 Android (4.2 Jelly Bean) tablet a few weeks ago and gave you my first impressions of it when it was delivered.  I thought it was good back then, and to quote 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh, I think it is freakin’ mystical now.

This is not a product tablet.  This is a pure consumption tablet.  Lenovo’s designers sat down and decided to produce a lightweight device that was for surfing, social media, occasional emails, and for travel entertainment.  I think that last one was very important to them.

You’ll not that there’s an unusual cylinder along the edge of the device.  This is the battery.  It allowed Lenovo to do several things:

• Put in a larger battery than usual (more later).
• A mini kick stand rotates out of the back of the tablet for when you want to watch video or rest the device down.
• The very thin device is formed to provide a comfortable hand grip for when you hold the device in portrait mode.

The form factor works perfectly.  I’ve had it resting on the kickstand almost all of the time since I got the tablet.  And it sits very nicely on an airplane tray/table allowing me to watch a movie even when I have a meal in front of me.

The build is an aluminium frame and lower half, and a high quality textured plastic (not tacky Samsung plastic) upper back.  The screen is excellent – 1280 * 800 is perfectly acceptable on an 8” device.  It’s all about pixels per inch rather than pixel counts when you are talking about display, as any professional printer will tell you.  device is solid.

The processor is running at just 1.2 GHz but that’s a deliberate choice by Lenovo to provide better battery life.  It runs Plants VS Zombies 2 perfectly fine and I am not planning on running AutoCAD on this thing.  It is a companion device designed for consumption, which Lenovo got 100% correct in my opinion.

Why did I buy this tablet when I was going to get a Windows tablet for work?  I had no plans on buying it.  But then I saw it on the Lenovo site and saw the battery life: “Up to 16 hours”.  That got me straight away.  Imagine flying to the USA west coast from Europe with a hop through London, without fearing that the battery would die half way there.  No running to find the 3 power sockets in the terminal at Chicago O’Hare.  No squeezing out the last drop of juice at the gate in Heathrow before boarding the 747.  The promise was too much. How did it do?

Last week I flew from Berlin to San Francisco via London Heathrow.  That’s a 1.5 hour hop followed by an 11+ hours flight, with 3 hours in London.  The battery was at 100% when I left the hotel in Berlin.  I used the tablet in airplane mode to watch video for almost every second of the flight, probably around 11 hours of video play time.  I did not go near a power socket on the journey.  I checked into my hotel in San Francisco and the battery was at 54%.  When you do the maths, the tablet would have played video for 23 hours!!!

What!!!!  23 hours of video play potential.  That promised 16 hours is a lie.  A good lie by marketing!!!!  I’ve talked with some of my fellow MVPs about this and we’re in agreement – we think Lenovo played it very safe, promising a still amazing “up to 16 hours” and delivering way beyond this.  Who would believe a statement of “up to 23 hours”?  Does this tablet drain power from dark matter in the cosmos?  By the way, the Yoga Tablet 10 has a bigger battery and promises “up to 18 hours”.

The only downside I can find are the speakers.  Every portable device will suck in comparison with the HTC One (Android phone) on this front.  I have no idea how HTC manage to do what they have done.  The speakers on the Yoga are tinny.  I cranked up the output using the supplied Dolby app.  But to be honest, my Bose headphones are plugged in most of the time, and the laptop’s volume only needed to be on 8/14 during a flight for perfect loudness.

I’ve been using the Yoga during my sleep deprived jetlag zombie hours while over here.  Surfing (Dolphin), social media (Facebook and Tweetcaster), media (Netflix and MX Player), all work superbly.  I’ve checked into flights, used the alarm, and kept up email.  Whatever I want, it’s there in the Google Play store.  And the tablet is siting on the kickstand by the bed whenever I wake up at the wee hours of the morning.

I am blown away by the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 8.  It contrasts 100% with my poor quality experience with the Dell Venue 8 Pro.  To me, the Lenovo Tablet 8 has set the bar for a mini consumption tablet.  The form factor, the quality, the build, don’t forget the huge Android app catalog, and the price make this a player in the market that you cannot overlook.

Last Sunday morning, I was lying in bed in Rome, surfing the web and looking to see if Lenovo had started selling the new Yoga 2 in Ireland.  I saw something that caught my attention – a new tablet with 18 hours battery life!  Whoah!

I dug a little deeper and saw that Lenovo had just launched the Yoga Tablet 10 (up to 18 hours battery) and the Yoga Tablet 8 (up to 16 hours battery).  Both had low horsepower 1.2 GHz MTK quad-core ARM processors running Android Jelly Bean 4.2.  There’s 1 GB RAM and 16 GB internal storage with micro SD expansion.  The display is a 1280 * 800 IPS – not retina but fine enough for me.

But this is not the usual tablet.  Look at my photo – this thing is standing up by itself.

What Lenovo appear to have done is designed a tablet for the person who is travelling a lot and is tired of hunting for that power supply that is used by the cleaners in the airport.

The bulge at the bottom serves several purposes:

• It is a rotating hinge (with just the right amount of friction) for a mini-kickstand.
• This bulge contains the battery.  Combined with just 1.2 GHz CPU, this is how the device gets long battery life.
• A low centre of gravity keeps the device stable when stood up.
• If feels like a nice grip when held in portrait mode for reading.  There is an ergonomic slope to the grip for your fingers.

Don’t get me wrong; this is not a productivity device.  Anyone who thinks this type of device is for running Office is a muppet.  This is a consumption device.  It’s for the sofa while watching TV, for watching video while travelling, for checking your email or posting on social networks.  It does have Bluetooth 4.0 and supports a keyboard but you’ll not see me doing that!  There is Miracast support, by the way.

I went for the 8 inch version because that, to me, is the perfect size of a companion tablet.  I have a 16 GB Micro SD plugged into it at the moment with some videos and the picture looks very good.

Price:

• 8” is €229.99 or 269.99 for the 3G version.
• the 10” is €289.99 or €329.99 for the 3G version.

At that price, the device must feel cheap in your hands, right?  WRONG!  There is some textured plastic like material on the back, but it feels like a quality material rather than the “Samsung plastic”.  But the majority of the device is aluminium, and the build feels very solid out of the box.  We’ll see how the hinge holds up after 6 months!

Any negatives?  Yes; the speakers are wimpy.  My HTC One phone shames most devices when it comes to speakers but it stomps all over the sound coming out of the Yoga Tablet.  That doesn’t bother me too much; I use Bose headphones when travelling.

I’m travelling quite a bit in the next two weeks (Dublin > Berlin > San Francisco > Seattle > Dublin) so I’ll be putting the Yoga Tablet to the test.  You’ll probably see a few tweets about it during that time.

Note: I am still getting a Windows 8” tablet.  Microsoft would murder me if I used an Android device at one of their events :)  Right now, the 64GB Dell Venue Pro 8 with stylus is my leading candidate.

Sadly, I cancelled my Xbox One pre-order this morning.  I’d been thinking about this for a few weeks but 2 things pushed me over the edge over the last 24 hours.  Let me summarize all of the reasons:

Games

I don’t play a wide variety of games.  Madden lost me a few versions ago as the controls became over-fiddly.  Most of my gaming time has gone into Rockstar titles, including GTA IV and add-ons, Red Dead Redemption, and GTA V.  I detest random maze first person shooters, from Castle Wolfenstein onwards.  None of the titles for Xbox One grabs my interest.

Performance

I, like many, own a HD TV.  It cost me good money so I like to use feeds that offer 1080p.  It was a real kicker that games companies are announcing that their Xbox One versions will be crippled to 720p because they hardware just can’t keep up.  This morning, I read that Dead Rising 3 will not only be limited to 720p, but will also only run at 30 frames per second instead of the normally expected 60 FPS.   This is where the moron will comment that Dead Rising 3 is the sort of game that I just said I don’t play – true, but it is indicative that this hardware is insufficient for what it is being asked to do.

Clearly, the PS4 is trouncing the Xbox One as a games console.  That’s the purpose of the machine – I couldn’t give a flying fiddlers about Skype/streaming on Xbox because:

• I rather do social media on a tablet/phone where I have comfort
• Hardly any services exist outside of the USA
• My Roku is waaaaay more reliable and simpler for media playback than anything Microsoft has offered so far

The Price

Xbox is inferior hardware to the PS4 – I’m not going to debate that because the results are already in.  The PS4 is $100/€100 cheaper.  Hmm.

Xbox sales started off slow due to stupid restriction policies that were later cancelled.  Then sales went up.  Now I am hearing anecdotal evidence that pre-order cancellations are rocketing.  It seems logical that if you do want to stick with the Xbox platform through the next generation, then you should wait until February when Microsoft will probably be forced to look at unbundling the Kinect and/or reducing the price.

Until then, I’m not willing to spend €500 for inferior hardware.

The Future of Xbox

You would think that Microsoft makes a fortune on Xbox.  The brand is very successful.  Gamers and non-gamers of different generations recognise the brand. Xbox loses a fortune for Microsoft every year.  I read last night that the $2billion/year that Microsoft makes from Android might be used to hide the Xbox losses (as well as those of Bing).  Wow!

I think there are three possible paths Microsoft might take with Xbox:

1. Do nothing: This is what I call the Vista strategy.  Pretend that everything is fine and keep putting up blog posts to say something like “no, you’re the one with the performance issue”.
2. Sell/Dump Xbox: Microsoft analyst, Rick Sherlund, says that Microsoft needs to sell off Xbox (and Bing).  If a new CEO does inspect the books and the headlines, then Xbox will look like a gangrenous limb that needs to be amputated.  Xbox is the very public brand that highlights many of the issues in Microsoft right now.
3. Release Xbox One Point One: Can you imagine the hatred from Xbox One customers if Microsoft released a new console that had the hardware capable of doing what Microsoft is asking of it?  It’s possible that Microsoft could do this – but unlikely I think.

Under Ballmer, history shows us that path one will be taken (EDIT: It was).  What happens with a new CEO?  That depends.  If it’s Elop then I think he’ll do what Ballmer would do and ride Xbox to it’s death.  Other Microsoft candidates might do that, or path number 3.  I think an impartial external candidate (which I doubt will happen) would have the authority from the board (i.e. Bill Gates, which I doubt will happen) to make huge changes, including implementing path number 2.

I’m saddened by what’s happened to Xbox.  I hope there is a future for the console but I’m not very hopeful at the moment.  Here’s wishing that Microsoft proves me very wrong.