Lenovo Yoga Tab

The Lenovo Yoga Tab makes a great first impression. Its weird shape is the very first thing you'll notice as you take it out of the box, with a large cylindrical speaker covering the length of it on one side lending it a very un-tablet like profile. However, what strikes as a design oddity soon reveals itself to be its best gimmick, as the bulky speaker also makes the Yoga Tab extremely comfortable to hold. But of course, there's more to a tablet than simply how it feels to hold.

Design

As mentioned above, the speaker makes holding the Yoga Tab in one hand effortlessly comfortable, lending it a grip that other tablets simply don't have. I personally use my tablets for reading more than anything, and holding this up while standing on a crowded bus or train was the fulfillment of a dream I didn't even know I had.

The back of the tablet also has a little flap that opens at the click of a button to form a stand, if you want to put down the Yoga Tab on your desk while video-calling or watching Netflix. The bump also packs a JBL speaker with Dolby Atmos support to further take those Netflix binges up a notch. The speakers aren't much to write about but they are fairly loud without sacrificing clarity. If you've used the JBL SoundBoost mod for the Moto Z, you can expect a similar output here. Rounding out the sides are one USB-C port and one headphone jack. Fairly standard.

Performance

The Levovo Yoga Tab packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 439 chipset with 4GB of RAM on the high end, so it's not exactly the heaviest hammer in the toolbox. As mentioned previously reading Ebooks, viewing Netflix, or even everyday web browsing and social media tasks are no problem for the Yoga Tab, but more processor-intensive tasks can bring it down to its knees pretty quickly.

Trying to draw using Sketchbook Pro was fine until I started adding more layers, and most games don't run particularly well on it either. I tested it with Asphalt 9 and Kingdom: Two Lands and both demonstrated some pretty choppy framerates. This is particularly disappointing since Kingdom is a very light game.

So it's great for multimedia consumption as long as your definition of "multimedia" doesn't include most videogames. It's far from a deal breaker but I would love to see this tablet design pack more processing power in the future.

Verdict

While the Lenovo Yoga Tab isn't anywhere near the most powerful tablets on the market right now, it's not really competing in that space either. Lenovo's priorities were clearly on media consumption and overall comfort of use, and on those terms the Yoga Tab passes with flying colours. I just hope we see a more powerful skew in the future because I'd love to play beefier games on a device that's this comfortable to hold.

Review unit provided by Lenovo Middle East