Lenovo Yoga Tab 3

What's Hot: Affordable 8" tablet with a colorful and sharp display, built-in kickstand and a big battery.

What's Not: It won't win any races against high end Android tablets, but that's fair for the $169 price. 

The Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 is the meatloaf of Android tablets. It's appealing and you know a lot of folks will hunker down with one, but it's not glamorous. That's not to say it's a bad looking tablet--- Lenovo Yoga tablets are in fact good looking thanks to their tapered silhouette, barrel hinge and metal flip-down kickstand that integrates so nicely into the overall design. But this is a $169 tablet with an 8" display, and for that price you know you're not getting top specs or a light tablet. The Yoga has a soft touch black plastic back that's grippy and it has fairly large bezels. It has a low end Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU. Did you know that there's a Snapdragon 200 series? Most folks know about the 800, 600 and maybe 400 series, but this is the lowly Snapdragon 212 (Lenovo avoids mention of that and refers to it by its Qualcomm MSM number instead). The good news is that mobile CPUs are so fast that even a low end CPU allows for a usable experience.

The Yoga Tab 3 is an Android 5.1.1 tablet and it's fairly clean without the heavy UI customizations Lenovo employed in older models. It has single band WiFi 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.0, a GPS with GLONASS and an 8MP camera that swivels so it's both the front and rear camera. As with all Lenovo Yoga Tabs, it has a capacious battery in the barrel hinge for long battery life. For those who prefer a larger tablet, it's also available in a 10" size.

Display

Lenovo knows that a good looking display is one of the most important features--if you look at the screen and say "bleh", it won't sell. The 1280 x 800 display won't win resolution awards, but it provides sufficient pixel density at 8 inches, so I doubt anyone would complain or claim to eyeball individual pixels. It's an IPS display with good viewing angles, pleasing blacks, good contrast and vivid colors. It makes for a nice experience when viewing movies and photos and is sharp enough when reading eBooks or web pages. It's a much better display than you'll find on no-name Android tablets in the lower price ranges.

The Yoga Tab 3 has Lenovo's AnyPen digitizer, where you can literally use any pen or pointed object as a stylus. The glass is hardened and resists marks from pens and pencils, though it always makes me feel squeamish to use a writing implement on a glass screen. Lenovo has encouraged us to test using screwdrivers and scissors, which we've done without damaging the glass.

Build and Quality

Beyond the attractive display, the Yoga Tab 3 is better built and is more attractive than many budget tablets. It feels sturdy and is rigid. The metal rotating kickstand is robust and designed to be strong enough to use the tablet as a wall hanger. The stand's action is firm and it holds the tablet upright against spirited pokes on the touch screen. This isn't an infinite position hinge however; it locks into one of 3 positions: upright for use, closed flush and straight up as a wall hanger. Given the barrel design, you can use it on a table with a slight angle for better viewing, and the barrel acts like a magazine's spine for holding when reading. The back is rubbery plastic and the 180 degree swivel camera in the barrel hinge makes a satisfying set of clicks as you rotate it, not unlike a precision instrument. At 1.04 lbs. it's a heavy 8" tablet that weighs as much as the 9.7" iPad Air 2, and it's far heavier than Samsung's Galaxy Tab S2 8" model. Something has to give with a price this low.

Performance

It's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. The 1.3 GHz quad core Snapdragon 212 with 1 gig of RAM does lag here and there, sometimes more often than not. Again, in this price range, you won't get blistering performance or even consistently snappy performance. But I'd assume that buyer expectations aren't lofty in this price segment, and it delivers a functional experience. With 1 gig of RAM, you'll want to keep an eye on multitasking, particularly with heavy apps like games and YouTube. The tablet has 16 gigs of storage and a microSD card slot under a plastic door on the back.

Lenovo has thankfully dropped their heavy-handed UI overlay and gone with a much cleaner Android 5.1.1 experience. Since this is a budget tablet, I wouldn't expect years of OS upgrade support. In fact, I'm not sure it will get any OS version updates.

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