Introduction and design
The Yoga Tab 3 Pro is the latest in a line of Lenovo tablets that try to offer something a little bit different to the rest, and it comes closer than ever to fulfilling that ambition.
Any new Android tablet faces a tough task getting noticed. Whereas Android smartphones have been holding their own against Apple's iPhone range for some time now, Android tablets have always been seen as second-class citizens next to the mighty iPad.
Why buy a bog-standard Android tablet, with its less-desirable hardware and inferior app ecosystem, when you can pick up one of Apple's all-conquering slates from just £219 (AU$369, US$269)?
Most Android tablet manufacturers have concluded that price is the key, and so a number of cheap and cheerful devices have flooded the market. Of course, the margins on the Hudl 2, Amazon Fire and the like are extremely fine, so it's not a particularly lucrative approach to take for most manufacturers.
Lenovo has other ideas. With the £360 (AU$799, US$496) Yoga Tab 3 Pro, the manufacturer attempts to offer a different kind of premium design, and several features that you simply don't find elsewhere.
The Yoga Tab 3 Pro is Lenovo's best effort to differentiate the brand yet – but is that good enough?
Design
Lenovo hasn't radically changed the design of the Yoga Tab 3 Pro over the Yoga Tab 2 Pro, but that's okay. It still looks quite unlike anything else on the market today.
Once again Lenovo has gone with a solid, premium-build device that favours feel and heft over lightweight portability. This is a tablet that's designed to be propped up on its built-in kickstand rather than held for long periods – and at 667g, you'd soon get aching arms if you attempted the latter.
To that end, it's not a particularly thin device, even at its slimmest point. The flat-sided metal section of the Yoga Tab 3 Pro is roughly as thick as an iPad Air 2, but this curves out to a rounded back that adds another 50% or so to the thickness of the main body.
The feeling of heft is only added to when you get to the device's natural base, a thick cylindrical section that runs along one of the tablet's longer sides.
If it sounds like I'm knocking the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Pro's chunky design here, I'm not. I like it a lot. Superficially, it reminds me of the Sony Tablet S from way back in 2011, but whereas that tablet's book-like shape was a bit of a gimmick, here it feels intrinsic to the Yoga's appeal.
This bulbous base achieves a number of things. It forms a natural handle when carrying the tablet around under your arm, as well as making it slightly more manageable on those occasions you want to hold it in portrait view.
It's also this rounded section that enables all of the Yoga Tab 3 Pro's key features, which I'll discuss in greater detail in the next section.
For now, I'll just mention that this weighted edge contains a kickstand, a projector, and a fabulous speaker bar. There are also two large, tactile buttons bookending this cylinder, one for power/sleep and one for activating the projector. In other words, it's no gimmick.
The overall effect of this design approach is to create a device that feels like a different breed of device – or a half-breed, at least. It's as much a media-focused second screen as a tablet. As a result of this, it looks and feels quite unlike the plasticky, unappealing tablets that many associate with Android.
Fortunately, the Yoga Tab 3 Pro sees this media-focused design through with an excellent 10.1-inch display. It's extremely bright, its colours are vibrant, and it benefits from a QHD resolution. That's 2560 x 1600, or 2K, which is right at the top end of current 10-inch tablet standards.
This means the Yoga Tab 3 Pro's screen is significantly sharper than those of most of its rivals. Its pixel density of 299ppi places it comfortably above the iPad Air 2 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2, both of which are on 264ppi, and right level with the Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet.
Kickstand, wall mount and built-in projector
As I noted in the previous section, the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Pro looks appreciably different to other Android tablets, and the source of that difference is the unusual bulge along one of its longer sides.
This is where you'll find the tablet's kickstand. Press the release button on the back of the Yoga Tab 3 Pro and part of the metal casing will flick away. It then takes a solid yank to pull the kickstand into place, enabling you to prop the tablet up at a range of angles.
You can also flip the kickstand around 180 degrees, at which point the slot that houses the release button when the stand is folded away becomes a hook on which you can hang the tablet.
It's pretty ingenious, and reinforces the idea that this is a second screen that can be placed in a kitchen, utility room or anywhere else where you might want to consume media but don't necessarily want to set up a TV.
Rotate the stand 90 degrees and lie the Yoga Tab 3 down on its back and it'll be propped up at an angle. This serves to make typing on the tablet's keyboard a little easier, but it also positions the projector better to do its thing.
Yes, the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Pro also houses a projector in that multi-functional hinge, which beams a 70-inch picture onto a wall or surface of your choice.
It turns the Yoga Tab 3 into a fantastic travel device, as you can potentially turn any hotel wall into a large widescreen TV at the touch of a button. It also makes it a great device to take with you for presentations, or simply when you want to show off some pictures to a large group of people.
The Yoga Tab 3's projector isn't quite perfect, as the picture is a little dim even in a pitch-black room, but it's a welcome addition any way you cut it.
There's a control for fine-tuning the focus of the projector, and it'll automatically square the picture off when not at the optimal angle.
The final noteworthy feature stashed away in that hinge is a superb four-speaker soundbar. It's loud and crisp, while Dolby Atmos technology ensures greater depth to its sound profile than you'll get from most tinny tablet speakers.
It's still no replacement for a half-decent set of cans or a Bluetooth speaker, but it's more than serviceable in a pinch.
Specs and performance
The Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Pro's hardware made quite an impression on me. Unfortunately, the tablet has a couple of problems on the software and performance side that hold it back from greatness.
Things start well, with a lightly customised version of Android 5.1.1. This is recognisably Google's popular mobile OS, with minimal bloat. There's just a single starting home screen, and only a discrete (and easily removable) Netflix widget and a Google search bar on show above a small selection of apps and folders.
The pull-down notification and settings menu is recognisably Android too, although I'm not a massive fan of the way it's been tweaked to blur out everything else when it's down; it almost feels like you're navigating to a separate app rather than dipping into a quick side menu, which is what it's intended as.
Bringing up the multitasking menu through the established Android virtual buttons along the bottom of the screen highlights one of the persistent issues I had with the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Pro's software. It's a little glitchy.
I found that pressing the virtual multitasking button would frequently result in the horizontal list of open apps stuttering and flickering, interrupting the flow of the experience and making jumping quickly between open apps a bit of a challenge.
Meanwhile, interface buttons (such as the settings shortcut in the notification menu) would often seem unresponsive, requiring a second or third press to activate.
Performance also wasn't great during my time with the Yoga Tab 3 Pro. General home screen navigation was fine, but Chrome performance was pretty terrible at times. Scrolling and general navigation through content-rich websites was often sub-par, especially when embedded videos were involved; starting up those videos would often make things worse.
How much of this is to do with the Yoga Tab 3 Pro's Intel Atom Z8500 quad-core CPU, I'm not sure. A relative lack of RAM – just 2GB – probably doesn't help.
Running the tablet through several Geekbench 3 tests suggests that it's a mid-field runner at best. An average multi-core score of 2974 pitches it roughly halfway between the entry-level Tesco Hudl 2 (at 2147) and the top-end Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 (at 4077).
Putting the tablet through its gaming paces also suggests that the hardware is adequate. Dead Trigger 2 – always a good hardware test – ran well on High settings here, as did Trials Frontier and 2D fare like Badlands.
All of which suggests to me that it's the Yoga Tab 3 Pro's software that needs addressing. It simply doesn't run as well as it should in general usage at present, which is a major issue given its multimedia aspirations.
Battery life and essentials
Battery life
Lenovo has packed the Yoga Tab 3 Pro out with a huge 10,200mAh battery, which is evidently another area in which that chunky hinge comes in handy.
To place that in context, the iPad Air 2 comes with a 7,340mAh battery, and the Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet has a 6,000mAh battery.
It's arguable that such a sizeable battery is essential to the Yoga Tab 3 Pro. With power-hungry components like a 10-inch QHD display and a pico projector, this is a tablet that's going to be used for watching a lot of high-definition TV shows and films.
Lenovo claims its tablet is good for 18 hours of battery life. Naturally, this depends on what you're using it for, but in general usage I wouldn't dispute that claim.
When it comes to more intensive usage, though, things are perhaps a little less impressive.
I ran the Yoga Tab 3 Pro through techradar's usual battery test, which involves running a 90 minute 720p video with the screen brightness cranked right up. The result was that the battery level dropped to 85%.
That's better than rivals such as the Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet (79%) and the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 (84%), but not by a massive amount.
As for the Yoga Tab 3 Pro's projector, I found that streaming a 50-minute 1080p Netflix show sapped 14% of its battery. That suggests you could get through half a dozen films in between charges, which is pretty good going.
The essentials
As I've mentioned, the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Pro offers a relatively clean Android tablet experience. This includes a folder full of preinstalled stock Google apps, as well as Chrome and Gmail.
For some reason, the customised email app icon is simply another route to Gmail which, given that there's also a Gmail icon here, is a little confusing and unnecessary. But at least the customisation ends with the icon, and we don't get another half-baked email app.
That's not to say Lenovo hasn't included some of its own apps here. These, like the Google apps, are tucked away in their own dedicated folder on the home screen.
None of these apps are particularly essential. There's a contact syncing app, a file transfer app and a sketchpad app (which is also laggy) stashed away here. These won't be used by too many people, we'd venture, but at least they're not in your face.
The Yoga Tab 3 Pro's keyboard appears to be a stock Android example, which looks identical to the downloadable Google Keyboard app, but without the built-in swipe-to-type option.
It also has a bunch of really irritating typewriter sounds to accompany your taps, which seem ever so slightly out of sync with your key presses. My recommendation: turn it off sharpish.
Camera and media
You won't often hear much discussion about a tablet's camera in a techradar review, for a very simple reason: tablets aren't meant for taking pictures with.
If you doubt that, ask yourself why most manufacturers tend to fit mediocre or compromised cameras to their tablets, almost as an afterthought – and why we don't tend to give said manufacturers too hard a time over it.
But I have to admit, as tablet cameras go, the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Pro's is pretty decent. Needlessly so, perhaps, but credit where it's due.
It's a 13-megapixel unit, which should immediately stand out to you as somewhat unusual. Even more atypical was the quality of the shots I was able to get.
Don't get me wrong – it won't be challenging any modern flagship smartphone for quality, but the biggest compliment I can give to the Yoga Tab 3 Pro shooting experience is that it reminded me of a decent mid-range smartphone.
Shots were fairly crisp and colours were balanced. The autofocus picked up on objects that were very close to the lens, and the resulting macro pictures captured plenty of subject detail while artfully blurring out the background.
It even coped with landscape shots that contained a challenging mixture of bright skies and deep shadows – this is often too much for lesser tablet cameras, with their small image sensors and poor optics.
It's a little ironic that the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Pro camera is so competent, given that it's one of the bulkiest and least wieldy tablets I've used in quite some time.
I should note that there's no flash, but even indoor night time shots under artificial lighting came out reasonably well.
The reason for the camera's surprising competence is perhaps found in its placement in the chunky hinge section. Most modern tablets are simultaneously very thin and possessed of huge batteries, meaning that the camera module is often a point of compromise. That doesn't appear to be the case here.
Video capture is merely adequate by modern standards, with no 4K or image stabilisation, but the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Pro does the job.
Music, movies and gaming
Media is pretty much the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Pro's bread and butter, and I've already espoused its capabilities in this area.
It's worth repeating, though, that this is a truly excellent tablet for watching films on. The 10.1-inch QHD display is sharp, bright and accurate, while the tablet's four-speaker soundbar pumps out uncommonly loud and clear audio.
Meanwhile, the simple addition of that adjustable kickstand makes it oh-so-convenient to set up wherever there's a flat surface – or even a hook.
Got more than two people who want to watch a film? Then there's that built-in projector, which essentially amounts to carrying around a 70-inch TV in your bag (albeit a somewhat dim one).
You probably wouldn't want to rely on those speakers for music playback, however. Google Play Music comes pre-installed, but I'd recommend keeping a set of headphones or a bluetooth speaker on hand if you want to make use of it.
While those speakers are loud and accurate enough in general, they lack the bass and sound separation that even a bog-standard set of earbuds or a cheap speaker can provide.
I've already touched on the Yoga Tab 3 Pro's gaming performance. It's perfectly capable of running pretty much anything on the Google Play Store, and running it well. It's also a surprisingly comfortable tablet to hold for gaming, in spite of – or perhaps because of – its heft.
Turn it 'upside down' so the hinge is on top, and it'll rest on your supporting fingers in a most pleasing way. You might think differently after an extended gaming session, of course, but for the odd brief blast it's great.
Here, too, those speakers play their part. In particular, their front-facing nature means you won't find yourself covering them during gameplay, or when resting the tablet on your lap.
Camera samples
Click here for the full resolution image
Click here for the full resolution image
Click here for the full resolution image
Click here for the full resolution image
Click here for the full resolution image
Competition
iPad Air 2
Any premium full-sized tablet has to be measured against the latest top-end iPad, and the comparison is almost always unflattering.
So it proves with the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Pro and the iPad Air 2 – at least in most respects. Apple's tablet trumps Lenovo's on general usability, performance, design and app ecosystem.
However, the Lenovo tablet's unique media-focused features arguably make it the better bet if you're after a video-playing workhorse first and foremost.
Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet
One of the Yoga Tab 3 Pro's most direct recent rivals, if only for its similar 10.1-inch QHD display, the Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet is undoubtedly a better all-rounder.
Sony's tablet boasts a much more compact form factor, superior performance, and a more polished UI.
Again, however, the Yoga arguably has the edge as a pure media player – a testament to Lenovo's left-field approach to tablet design.
Samsung Galaxy Tab S2
The Samsung Galaxy S2 is, alongside the Nexus 9, the closest thing to an Android-powered iPad equivalent out there. It's got a very similar display to the iPad Air 2, with the same size, resolution and even aspect ratio.
Compared to the Lenovo, it's a similar story to its two aforementioned rivals: it's a much better all-round tablet, with superior performance and portability.
However, Lenovo's smart differentiation means the Samsung is an inferior media player. If all you want to do is watch movies with a little light tablet usage elsewhere, then the Yoga Tab 3 Pro might be preferable.
Verdict
In a market full of me-too Android tablets, the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Pro dares to do things differently – and it does them well, for the most part.
An unorthodox design paired with mediocre performance might not make this the best general-use tablet around, but it's one of the best pure media players you can get.
We liked
When you've seen one Android tablet, you've seen them all – except when it's a Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Pro. The best thing about the tablet's unique bottom-heavy design is that it's no gimmick.
Rather, Lenovo's thoughtful approach enables the incorporation of great sound, a built-in kickstand, an unusually large battery, and a pico projector, all of which are genuinely useful additions.
Sealing the Yoga Tab 3 Pro's position as a premiere media player is its bright, sharp 10.1-inch QHD display. All in all, we can't think of a better tablet to watch movies on.
We disliked
While Lenovo obviously put a lot of thought into the Yoga Tab 3 Pro's hardware and media-playing credentials, it comes up a little short with its software.
Its custom UI, while neat and relatively unadorned, is glitchy and sluggish, while we would have expected better performance from a premium-priced tablet.
Also, though we generally love the Yoga Tab 3 Pro's unique design, it does make for a slightly cumbersome and unwieldy tablet in typical day to day usage.
Final verdict
With the Yoga Tab 3 Pro, Lenovo has been rewarded for thinking about tablets a little differently.
The ostensibly lopsided design enables a media-playing experience that's pretty much unmatched in the wide world of tablets, making it a great pick as a second screen to place around the home or take with you on your travels.
However, as a general-use tablet it's mediocre at best. If you're after a balanced iPad-like tablet experience that excels across the board, the Yoga Tab 3 Pro isn't for you.
As long as you realise you're getting a premium media player with expanded tablet capabilities as a sideline, however, you can purchase without hesitation.
First reviewed: October 2015
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