Lenovo IdeaTab Lynx Windows 8 Tablet Review

HD Video Playback Performance Playback of 1080p AVCHD Content

To test Clover Trail's video decode performance we watched a number of 1080p HD video file formats and played them back on the Windows 8 desktop.  The screenshot below shows the Windows 8 Task Manager above a 1080p movie trailer playing in Media Player.

Here we can see that Clover Trail and the Lynx as a whole are barely breaking a sweat, playing back HD video with only about 17% CPU utilization. And if you're curious, 1080p playback on YouTube was equally smooth in both IE within Metro and IE on the Windows 8 desktop.

BatteryEater Pro and Web Browser Test Battery Performance

You can use a tablet while it's charging, but it's inconvenient, to say the least. Put your notebook on a desk and you can forget that the power adapter is plugged in, but when you're holding a tablet, a power cord really feels like a leash. So, battery life is a big deal and it can be a make-or-break factor in the buying decision.

BatteryEater Pro gives the tablet a heavy workload, putting more strain on the battery, exercising graphics, memory, storage and its processor. Because everything you do with your tablet impacts its battery life, your experience will be different from our benchmarks, but they provide good, consistent data points for comparison with other tablets and ultrabooks on the market.

We set out to test the Lynx with two battery benchmarks. The first is our own light-duty web browsing test, which refreshes a webpage at regular intervals. It's meant to give you a feel for battery performance under light use.

Before running these tests, we set the display brightness to 50% and disabled the screensaver, hibernate, and similar power-conserving settings so we could see how the tablet performs under constant use. Wi-Fi was on so the tablet could connect to the Internet.
The Lynx lasted surprisingly long in our battery benchmark, providing more than 10 hours of web surfing time. Beyond that, the slate lasted over 5 hours in Battery Eater Pro, which is a very respectable result from a tablet for this worst-case test.  In fact, it's comparable to Ultrabook performance in this area. When popped into the optional $120 keyboard dock, these figures roughly doubled due to the dock's built-in battery pack.