Lenovo IdeaTab A2107A review - Wired.co.uk

The Lenovo IdeaTab A2107A is the Chinese company's entry-level seven-inch tablet, coming in with a lower spec than the nine-inch A2109A and running Android 4.0. But has it got the goods to make it worth your while?

It's on sale now for around £150.

Design
This is very much a budget tablet, but that price tag stands favourably against the likes of the Google Nexus 7, Kindle Fire HD and Barnes & Noble Nook HD -- if it can perform well enough to compete with those fine examples of the tablet maker's art.

In its favour, it certainly doesn't feel like a budget product -- it's sturdy and robust, and you get the feeling it could stand up to a fair bit of ill treatment. It's on the heavy side though, at 400g, and none too slim either at a sliver under 12mm.

Features
At one end there's a panel that slides off to reveal space for a microSD card to expand on the 16GB memory on board, plus not one, but two 3G SIM card slots. So you can use two separate accounts -- one for work, one for home, perhaps, or you can slip in a foreign SIM when you go abroad to cut down on roaming costs. It won't be for everyone, but since very few tablets offer this option, the A2107A could find itself a bit of a captive audience.

The seven-inch screen offers a not-bad resolution of 1,024x600 pixels (we weren't expecting HD at this price) which adds up to 169ppi -- it certainly won't compete with the best for sharpness, but it's perfectly acceptable whether you're surfing the web, watching movies or reading ebooks.

Performance
The single-core 1GHz MediaTek Cortex processor backed by 1GB RAM won't win any prizes (it's lower powered than the A2109A) and we found it occasionally laggy in general use with clunky animations between screens (thanks Lenovo, but you really shouldn't have bothered) and some sitting around time while you're waiting for apps to open. Our AnTuTu benchmark test delivered a score of 4,369, which won't get anyone too excited, though it's ahead of some other single-core budget devices such as the Disgo 9000 and way behind the Google Nexus 7's 13,210, which has more cores and very little price difference.

Among the many preloaded apps are Amazon Kindle, NewsRepublic, Evernote, Norton Security, ooVoo, Cut the Rope and Docs2Go, along with the GameTanium games store, a BackupAndRestore facility for backing up your contacts, messages, call logs and apps to the SD card, and Lenovo's PrinterShare app. A decent mix, and of course there are plenty more to choose from on the Google Play store.

The three-megapixel camera is pretty rubbish, with poor picture quality -- you really have to work hard to get anything even half decent out of it. Likewise the 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video calls, which certainly won't show you at your best.

Conclusion
For the price, the Lenovo A2107A is a decent little seven-inch tablet, sturdily built, running Ice Cream Sandwich and with a decent set of features. It's a bit underpowered, and the camera's poor, but otherwise it's a decent budget introduction to Android tabletville. For a similar price though, the Nexus 7 is arguably a stronger offering.