Lenovo ThinkPad 8 Windows 8.1 Tablet Review

Name: Lenovo ThinkPad 8 Windows 8.1 Tablet Review
Brand: Lenovo

by Joshua Gulick — Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 11:38 AM EDT

Tablets generally have sealed-in batteries, which makes poor battery life a potential deal breaker. Lenovo estimates that the tablet will last about eight hours during normal usage. Obviously, the way you use the tablet is going to be different from the way the next tablet toter does, so we run review tablets through a simple, easily-reproduced test and compare how the battery life of our reference tablets hold up in those conditions. We refresh a webpage with a mix of standard web media and Flash regularly until the tablet battery is drained.

The ThinkPad 8's battery life won't knock you over. Lenovo estimates the tablet battery will last for about eight hours of use, which is almost two hours shorter than the Dell estimate. But in our Web browsing test, we found the gap to be even wider: The ThinkPad 8 refreshed the test webpage for 8 hours, 52 minutes to the Dell tablet's 14 hours, 6 minutes. Still, the ThinkPad 8 has the battery to get you through a workday in which it is constantly used, so whether the battery is an issue depends on how you see yourself using the tablet.

Tags: Intel, Lenovo, Atom, quad-core, Windows, tablet, full hd, Bay Trail, QuickShot

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.