Gadgetory

hey what is going on guys lon here from Android authority and usually when we think of budget or cheap not a whole lot of good really comes with it but Lenovo seems to believe they can offer up some really nice tablets for a very affordable price but let's find out how good they actually are let's take a look at the Lenovo tab a8 and the Lenovo Tab A 10 alright so let's get right into it starting off with the design in both the a8 and a10 feature a pretty simplistic design with some slight curves on the corners and sides nothing too special that's going to make it stand out or anything but it's practical and it gets the job done and for many people that is all that really matters anyways they're both entirely made of plastic but they feel very solid and well-made and the matte finish on the back does a great job of detracting fingerprints all while giving the tablets a very nice grip making them easy to hold on to they're not the thinnest tablets in the world both coming in at roughly 9 millimeters but they're fairly lightweight for their respective sizes making them very easy to carry around and hold onto for long periods of time the bezels around the display are a little large for my liking but they do serve a purpose besides being a nice spot to rest your thumbs they also house the front-facing speakers that are actually enhanced with Dolby Digital Plus so you actually get a Dolby audio interface built-in for controlling the audio fidelity whether you're listening through headphones or these speakers themselves it's essentially just an equaliser app as far as I can tell but it does make quite a bit of a difference in terms of how loud and fuller everything sounds both tablets with their respective display sizes feature the same resolution at 1280 by 800 which is a rather typical resolution when it comes to more mid-range tablets it's not anything that will blow you away and pixels are noticeable especially on the 10-inch model where the pixel density takes a much bigger hit but it's certainly more than passable with great colors viewing angles and brightness so I don't think many people will have too much of a problem with it while I do wish the resolution was a little bit higher it didn't detract much from my overall viewing experience whether it was playing games or watching videos on the inside both the a8 and a10 are being powered by MediaTek processor clocked at 1.3 gigahertz with one gigabyte of RAM and 8 or 16 gigs of internal storage on the a8 and 16 or 32 gigs of storage on the a10 with microSD card expansion on both up to 32 gigs the specs sound really generic but general performance through day-to-day usage has been far better than I've expected it to be it probably also helps out they're both running KitKat but we'll get to that in a sec swiping through home screens opening up apps and browsing through the web was all fairly smooth and quick and multitasking was also not much of an issue either I do notice a few hiccups every now and then but nothing that really took away from my overall experience whether these tablets struggle most is in gaming performance more simplistic games play just fine no real problems there but with graphically demanding titles while certainly more than playable I do notice some lag and the occasional drop frame especially when there's a lot of stuff happening on the screen at one time the camera around back of both of these tablets is extremely basic it's a 5 megapixel fixed-focus shooter and no LED flash like most tablet cameras it's not going to replace the camera on your smartphone which is most likely better anyways but it's a nice secondary option if you really need it Lenovo's camera UI is just as basic in bare-bones as the camera itself there's a few basic shooting modes like panorama HDR and beauty face but nothing too unique that's worth mentioning if you're planning on uploading these photos to social networks the camera is certainly good enough for the at but really not much better for anything else with only five megapixels you don't have much to work with as far as zooming and cropping goes and photos lack a lot of detail sharpness and dynamic range is pretty bad it also doesn't get any better in low light especially when you don't have a flash to compensate leading to a lot of dark and grainy looking shots and without a variable focus taking clear close-up shots become virtually impossible the a 8 and a 10 compact with some decently sized batteries at 4200 milliamp hours and six thousand three hundred forty million hours respectively and battery life isn't terrible but I've certainly gotten better on other tablets like I mentioned before I'm a pretty heavy user when it comes to tablets I primarily only use them for gaming and watching videos on YouTube but even with my usage I only managed to get between six to six and a half hours of screen on time on both so it felt a little bit short of what I was expecting I was hoping for between 7 to 8 hours but on the positive side these tablets do idle extremely well losing only between 1 to 2 percent overnight and if you're a lighter more average user you're probably going to get a little bit more out of the battery than I was able to so like I mentioned earlier the a 8 and a 10 are running on the latest version of Android with 4.4.2 kitkat so it's nice to see Lenovo keep these tablets up to date even if they are mid-range tablets but not only is it running KitKat it's a mostly stock version of KitKat which was very nice to see there are some lenovo customizations namely the custom launcher that's filled with a lot of very bright and colorful looking icons and this very weird sliding pane that comes out from the left or right edge of the display that gives you access to some recently open apps but you can't actually use it for multitasking because you can only get to it when you're on your home screen the good thing is lenovo does give you the option to disable it if you don't like it there's also no app drawer so your home screens will get cluttered up very quickly if you like to download a lot of apps but this is Android afterall so if you don't like Lenovo zone launcher and want a more standard Android experience just download a different one from the Play Store in problem solved the Lenovo tab a eight and a ten are available now for a price of one seventy nine ninety nine and two forty nine ninety nine respectively and they're both currently on sale through Amazon as of right now if you want to take advantage of that price they both come in Wi-Fi only in 3G models but as far as I can tell the 3G model is either really hard to find or currently not available either way I think the price is pretty fair for what you're getting and the overall specs are actually very comparable to something like the Galaxy Tab four line of tablets which I reviewed earlier and in some ways they're actually better like the front-facing speakers and the higher resolution camera so if you were considering a tablet from the Galaxy Tab four line but the price was a little bit too steep the Lenovo Tab a eight and a ten are certainly great alternatives that won't put such a big dent on your wallet but that is it for this review of the Lenovo Tab a eight and a ten there's a lot of things that these tablets do really well and a lot of things that they do not so well but at the end the day I think they're pretty fairly priced for what they're capable of and are a perfect example of you get what you pay for anyways thank you so much for watching this review hopefully you guys enjoyed it if you did give a thumbs up down below and also subscribe to the channel which is also down below and make sure to check out the website at Android authority um and keep it locked on Android authority as we are your source for all things Android