Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2: Windows 8 Slate Review
HD Video Playback and Battery Life
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HD video playback is a bit of a mixed bag. Attempts to watch 1080p video on the desktop--Vimeo or YouTube streams via desktop versions of Chrome or Internet Explorer, as well as H.264 and MP4 videos in Windows Media Player or VLC Player--invariably resulted in dropped frames and screen freezing. It's a bit of a funky test anyway, though, because the ThinkPad Tablet 2's screen is only 768 pixels high, so 1080p content has to be downscaled to 720p anyway. 720p HD video streamed from Netflix or Xbox video was flawless.
You can see the Atom processor really struggling to keep up with the 1080p I Am Legend trailer in VLC. Interestingly, the same 1080p I Am Legend trailer that skipped and dropped frames in VLC or Windows Media Player on the desktop played without issues in the Metro interface's Video app.
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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.
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 ThinkPad Tablet 2 lasted nine hours in our web browsing test, and 5:44 in Battery Eater Pro.The Samsung ATIV 500T and the IdeaPad Lynx each outlasted it by over an hour in the web browsing test, though the ThinkPad Tablet 2 lasted longest of the three in the Battery Eater Pro. In the course of testing we got all-day performance from the ThinkPad Tablet 2 every day we tested it, no matter what we were using it for. This is hugely important in any tablet, but especially one for business.
