Lenovo YOGA Tablet 2 10-inch Review

The YOGA Tablet 2’s 8MP rear camera features an f2.2 wide-aperture lens, glare-reducing glass, and a BSI 2 sensor. In the camera controls, you’ll find options to change the resolution, select a scene mode, adjust various effects, and much more. Scene modes include Auto, Portrait, Landscape, and Sports. In the Effect menu, you can adjust the exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpness. In the final control menu, you can adjust the white balance, anti-banding, enable GPS, change the focus mode, and more.

During our tests with the YOGA Tablet 2, images taken with the rear-facing camera were acceptable.  The camera did a good job at focusing quickly, and you can touch the screen to adjust the focal point. Holding the YOGA Tablet 2 to try to take a picture with the rear-facing camera was a bit awkward since the tablet is large. However, we like that Lenovo put the camera in the corner of the tablet on the YOGA Tablet 2 as opposed to a centered camera as found on the Tablet 2 Pro. Here are a few sample pictures:

Battery Life

Lenovo designs its YOGA tablets around the cylindrical battery that also serves as a handle for the tablet and provides space for the speakers. According to Lenovo, the fixed 9600mAh Li-ion battery in the YOGA Tablet 2 should last for up to 18 hours of usage time. This is about three hours longer than the Pro model, likely due to the difference in screen size.

In an attempt to quantitatively measure the YOGA Tablet 2's battery life in a controlled benchmark environment, we ran our own HotHardware Web browsing test where we set up a webpage with a mix of graphics, media, and text. The page automatically refreshes every few minutes. This is a simple baseline test that measures up time while browsing the web. For this test, we set the YOGA Tablet 2's display to 50% brightness and connected to the web via a wireless network. In this test, the YOGA Tablet 2 lasted for more than 12.5 hours which is not quite as long as Lenovo’s claims.

We also ran the latest version of the AnTuTu battery test, which is available on the Play Store. Because the new version is not compatible with the old version, we aren’t able to use the comparison numbers from previous tablet reviews to see how the YOGA Tablet 2 compares. The test reported a score of 10170, which was at the top in AnTuTu’s in-app comparison chart.

During our real-world testing, the YOGA Tablet 2 had no problem making it through a couple days while checking emails, surfing the web, taking pictures, leaving the screen on for 30+ minutes while the tablet sits idle, and playing a few games. We would expect an average user should have no problem making it through an entire day with moderate to frequent use as well. Of course, battery life can vary considerably depending on how the tablet is used.