Lenovo Yoga 10: Mediocre tech, yes, but beautifully fondleable Do tablets have to be dull, flat slabs? If you are Asus, Apple, Samsung or Nokia, the answer to that question is clearly ‘yes’. Sure, each may boast a decorative lip here, an extra button there, or an unusual profile curve someplace else, but essentially they all look much the same. Sony once tried something different with its …
Lenovo tend to do things their own way, very rarely copying the norms. I've noticed this in a few of their "fondelslab" designs
The pop out stand is a nice little touch, even if the Yoga's specifications aren't exactly ground breaking.
Ideal for those who just want a tablet that is a tablet, but also enjoy the convenience of a device that can stand on its own opposed to needing a 3rd party cover come stand.
As an owner who has accumulated three Android slabs and one IOS device over the years, the Lenovo Yoga design sort of makes sense.
What caught my attention is the power button and headphone jacks being situated on the bottom, out of harm's way. I quite often accidentally power my Galaxy 10.1 off when scrambling for the volume buttons in a hurry. Also the headphone jack placement looks solid, thus minimising the risk of damage to the socket
A decent review for a mid range product that has some caveats that other manufacturers don't offer [yet]
Bootnote: When laid down with the stand up showing the power button on the side, it does remind me of the Mac Pro keyboard
the memory card slides all the way into the slot so I only managed to trigger the spring to get it back out with the aid of an expertly bent paper clip
I actually think this is a plus, stick a 64GB card in there and forget about it, and the rounded edge reminds me of the vanished Notion Ink Tablet, which I liked the look of. Great price too.
For some reason I'm reminded of Monty Python:
"All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?"
"..apart from a better screen, processor etc, is for the tubular part top open, revealing space for a set of AA batteries a la Psion S5."
I saw this tablet on QVC a week or so ago (I know, I know.... :( ) and according to them, that tubular part does contain the batteries hence the average 10 hour use.
http://tinyurl.com/nmg7btw
It's a nice tablet. I was playing with one over Christmas, and it's the first tablet in a while that's stirred the gadget-lust in me, and endangered the credit card.
The iPad Air is nice, and the weight loss over my iPad 3 is a temptation, but not enough to seriously disturb the moths in my wallet. The Samsungs with pens are all nice, but expensive and with a messy user interface. The Lenovo Yoga laptop is also very pretty, and looks and feels lovely. I'd love to see them do a 10" Android one, if it could be almost as small as this - but I guess the keyboard makes it too big for prolonged one-handed use [fnarr, fnarr]. But I've not owned an Android device since 2.2 and my old underpowered Wildfire - and I want to get a cheapish one to play with.
Anyway, congrats to Lenovo for thinking a bit differently. It really does feel very nice in the hand, which is important in a tablet or phone. It's also got that feeling of design elegance. By which I mean it looks pretty and feels nice, but you know that this has been achieved without sacrificing practicality. So it's satisfying in a way that so many things fail to be, when they try too hard to look good.
"Let me explain. The Apple Bluetooth keyboard is a keyboard. This is a tablet. It has NO KEYS AT ALL.
So could you please explain how this is a rip off?"
Don't bite, feeding the animals is a mistake. Let them starve ('cause they spent too much on a mediocre piece of shiny shiny oh-so-last-decade tech to buy food)
Sure it is....... Something that's thin on one side, thicker on the other side and with fold out feet never existed once in the history of the world until Apple did it.... Oh wait the keyboard i'm using!
Apples genius was to put the batteries in the rounded thick bit that you grip... Oh wait that camera I've got!
quote: "People complain when Apple sue over copyright, yet this is blatantly a copy of an Apple bluetooth keyboard"
Which is blatantly a copy of the design of papyrus scrolls. Go talk to Egypt about licensing their IP from several thousand years ago :)
(I suspect that both the patent and the registered design may have expired, though, leaving Apple and by extension Lenovo free to use it themselves)
My first hearty laugh of the day "Go and takl to Egypt..."! Thanks! Gave you a +1 for that. Note, not laughing at the commenter who was down-scored. It is disappointing that scoring systems don't compel justification and don't allow for openly re-boosting those knocked down -- again, with justification. (I say that because while one person can say something and get pummeled for it, another person can come along and comment in a way that bolsters or buttresses what the knocked-down person said, yet the knocked-down person still gets no liferaft in the process....)
Anyway, I didn't think "Apple" when I saw the round/tubular bit. I though Sony/HP/Samsung, and thought, "Yeesh, I don't like that part.", but that is just me. Surface has a nice kickstand, but I'm not given to Surface, old or new. If given to me for free, I might use it, and ONLY if I can run CAD and do not have to take a win-8 interface. (OK, I veered off topic and am risking negatory scoring....)
Again, thanks for the bit about the papyrus, the Egyptions, and IP lawsuits all in one, hahahaha. Nice conflatioon/combination/laughter generation.
Cheers!
... what the hell did the author mean by: I took to holding the 605g Yoga 10 by the bar as an ebook reader like a Catholic takes to guilt.?
Maybe some words left out? Or "Warning - contains some elements of confusement"?
(For the Title, compare with "I am not a racist, but...")
> (For the Title, compare with "I am not a racist, but...")
So what you're implying is that you "don't like an analogy as much as the next man" then?
Or do you not understand what an analogy is?
Or do you not think that the Catholic church is not obsessed with guilt and that we are all inherently evil?
So, Lenovo takes the parts that are flooding into low end chinese tablets, wraps them in a shiny case with a tube moulded on to the side (which, I suspect will just become annoying as time rolls on) and then charges 2 to 3 times what the competition wants?
Allow me to point out that the cylinder thingy that everyone is raving about would be better incorporated into a case/cover which could be removed when not needed.
Other than that...pass
This post has been deleted by its author
Concerning the "slows to a crawl" comment, I have an Asus Transformer which has the exact same issue. In the Transformer's case, it is cheap and crap flash which is the problem - the IO overwhelms it and acts as a bottleneck. If its a similar issue for this device then oh dear. It boggles the mind that they would produce what is clearly a nice looking device and then skimp on the actual bits inside the case.
I've experienced the same problem with the TF300T, though more so with aftermarket firmware than with stock firmware. I imagine ASUS probably made some modification to the scheduler to slow down and better manage the writes and give higher priority to the read speed. It's amazing though that the same company produced the Nexus 7 (both 2012 and 2013) without the same problems with the flash.
"...It boggles the mind that they would produce what is clearly a nice looking device and then skimp on the actual bits inside the case."
I consider it highly likely that the Lenovo Yoga 10 has exactly the same number of "actual bits inside the case" as every other 16GB/32GB Flash - 1 GB RAM tablet.
(OUCH! Don't kick!)
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