Lenovo A8-50 8-Inch IPS Tablet Review

It's quite surprising that the Lenovo A8 Tablet has excellent customer reviews. If you take a look at the Lenovo A8 A806 4G Smart Phone you will see that the reviews are nowhere near as positive as they are for the Lenovo A8-50 8-inch Tablet. The same goes with a lot of the IBM Lenovo laptops. I have personally owned a few over the years. They are middle to bottom of the road when it comes to reliability. Every one I have owned developed a fault and broke down within 6 months to a year. 

 

But it looks like Lenovo have pulled off a miracle and actually made a product that has excellent customer reviews and not too many reported faults, so I take my hat off to them for that. Since writing this review post Lenovo have really made a mark on the Tablet scene. They have some excellent, low priced devices out there that really are impressive. Such as the Lenovo Tab4. So credit where its due, I take back some of what I said above.

 

Lenovo A8-50 Features

 

When this post was written, most Tablets are either 7, 9, or 10 Inch. This being an 8 Inch Tablet makes it quite unique. There are a few colours to choose from; including red, yellow, blue, white and midnight blue. By most accounts this Tablet is great in every department. But the one thing that stands out more than most is the build quality. Customers are very impressed with the overall quality of the Lenovo A8-50. There are two models available. 

 

One is the WiFi version and the other is the 3G version. Of course the 3G enabled model is more expensive but means you can put your 3G micro sim card into the Tablet and use all your phone contract features like Internet etc on the Tablet. You can even text.
 

Unfortunately, this option (To add a sim card) was taken out of the newer Lenovo A8 models to make way for the GPS facility. However, you could use your mobile phone to connect, or use a MIFI dongle. If you can find one for sale (Still widely available), the earlier A8 models do have the sim slot. Most people buy the cheaper priced WiFi model A8 as that is all most people require if they are using the Tablet at home most the time. The WiFi will of course pick up hotspots if your out and about and within range.

The Lenovo A8 has Dolby Digital Plus speakers built-in, so the device is capable of really good sound quality. However, be aware that the WiFi model only has one of these speakers whereas the 3G model has two. The screen on the Lenovo A8 is IPS, which is the same as what the new Fire 7" Tablet by Amazon is using. So the screen quality is excellent with almost any application.

It comes installed with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and has most of the features that Tablets within this price range are equipped with, like dual cameras, Quad Core Processor which is broken down into 4x 1.3GHz Cores, 1GB RAM, 16GB eMMC internal storage (Upgradable to 32GB), Bluetooth and a Micro SD card slot. The newer models of Lenovo A8 Tablets also have GPS, which is Satellite controlled ,so even works when your offline. 

 

The A8 also works with wireless printers. Lenovo state that the battery life can last as long as eleven hours with mixed usage and has a twenty day stand by time. But this does seem a bit exaggerated.

Battery Reality

 

Expect a 3 - 5 hour battery time with mixed usage and a ten-day standby time and you won't end up disappointed. It also comes with games, utilities (Office software for documents, Excel, PDF, Word), and Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Google Play etc. Java is also installed on the Lenovo A8. Overall a great Tablet that has many happy customers and great reviews. Looking for something cheaper but still an excellent Tablet for the low price tag? Check out the dirt cheap Fusion5 and NeoCore Tablets.