Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Hands On Reviews || First Look & Specs,Features,Price

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Most tablets are black rectangles. Looking at them for too long is a sure recipe for a good night's sleep. Front-on the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 seems like just another among that crowd. But it's totally different.
The Yoga is a tablet with a built-in stand and battery life that destroys all the competition. At £149 for the 8-inch model it doesn't cost too much either, and is cheaper than its Yoga Tab 2 predecessor.
But at this price point the Tab 3 is let down by its screen and general performance. And, well, those factors are both pretty important in tablet town. Is it worth a look in, or should you look to the larger 10-inch Pro solution?

Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 review: Design
What makes the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 so special, so unusual, is its stand. Rather than trying to get as slim and light as possible, this tablet balloons out into a slightly bulbous scroll at the end. One side is the sort of column you might make by folding the pages of a magazine right back over its spine.
This design tells you instantly: this isn't meant to be an ultra-portable tablet that slips into hand or man bag, to be taken anywhere and everywhere. While the smooth rounded side is handy to grip onto, the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 is heavier (467g) and much thicker than your average 8-inch tablet. This is a home tablet for reading, more or less.

Lenovo sees it as quite a different beast from the sort of tablet hybrids the Yoga 3 seems to be genetically related to. It's out to be a bit of a domestic demigod.
It also angles the speakers towards you if, say, you want to use it to listen to a podcast while working. Or maybe to watch a bit of Netflix in bed. It'll probably come in handier than you at first imagine.
The Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 is impressively built for a £150 device too. The metal stand feels like it could do some serious damage to your nice wood flooring should you drop it from a decent height (we didn't try), and the rear has a sandstone-style finish. This is a rougher-than-usual soft-touch finish that feels far, far better than the glossy plastic of the Amazon Fire HD 8.

It's when we switch the thing on that we encounter one of the main issues with the tablet. Its screen just isn't that good, which is arguably befitting of the price, but you have been warned.
The Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 does have an IPS LCD screen, so reaches a certain base level of quality to ensure viewing angles are ample from steeper angles. Its colours don't go haywire when the display is tilted the wrong way, as you'll see in older budget tablets with TN panel screens. That's about it, though.
Resolution is at 1280 x 800 pixels. When spread across the 8-inch display, the pixillation is pretty obvious - but perhaps that's just us getting so used to HD resolution on yet smaller devices.

If you're going to be watching a film, it'll still look good, but the granularity of the small text of the interface is hard to ignore. For those who think we should ignore this because the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 is affordable, check out the QHD-grade £170 Asus ZenPad S 8.0. Its display is far better.

The Yoga Tab 3 has been really pared down to the basics on the inside too. It uses a Snapdragon 212 processor, one of the lowest-end SoCs you'll find in a new tablet. It uses four Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 1.3GHz and, unlike its current Snapdragon brothers, is a 32-bit chipset rather than a 64-bit one.
What really matters is actual performance, though, and unfortunately this bottom-rung brain bleeds through. The Yoga Tab 3 doesn't run like a dog, but every little action seems to take that fraction of a second longer than we'd like.
Is this down to the custom user interface? That the tablet only has 1GB RAM, which can cause problems with the underlying Android 5.1 software, but we'd tend to blame the hardware, as the interface is very light.
The interface looks a lot like vanilla Android, with only the bunch of preinstalled (and fairly dull) apps and some slight interface tweaks to tell you it's not a Lollipop-era Google Now interface. It's actually not made by Lenovo, but is a version of the CyanogenMod Trebuchet launcher. Such a light-touch interface means switching over to using the Google Now Launcher app (available from Google Play) and it more-or-less feels like you're running Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

Battery life is excellent too. Part of the idea behind the bulkier frame is that it lets the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 fit a 6,200mAh unit in. While not a mind-bendingly capacious battery, it is very large indeed for something with a 1280 x 800 8-inch screen.
It'll last for around 14 hours of video playback. And even when tackling one of Android's more intense games it doesn't drop like a stone. It's one of the longest-lasting budget tablets in existence.