Lenovo Ideapad A1 Tablet Review Hands On Demo
Uploaded by tabletpcuk on 10.02.2012
Transcript:
Hi and welcome to a WhatTabletPC.com review of the Lenovo Ideapad A1 tablet PC. So this
is a seven inch tablet as you can see here. It is interesting because it is very cheap
tablet in comparison to other tablets running the kind of specification that it has got
so it has got a little bit of plasticy back here but, to be honest, that just kind of
makes it light and it still looks pretty well built. Now it run Android 2.3.4 so it is Android
Gingerbread. Now that is an old version of Android that came along previous to, or just
before, Android Honeycomb was produced, which was the first Android version wasn’t purely
designed around the Smartphones. So you can see the Smartphone kind of interface that
it has got, is pretty simple. So it doesn't really make full use of the screen that you
have got - the larger kind of seven inch screen. But it is still quite good and quite easy
to navigate from and makes the interface not particularly cluttered etc so that is not
too bad. Now the only issue there with that is that because this is running Android 2.3.4,
so the Smartphone operating version, it does tend to think that it is a Smartphone. So
say when you run, when you are in the browser, quite often you are jumping into the mobile
versions of websites. Now that is not a terrible thing, it is pretty easy to overcome and pretty
easy to kind of, jump down to the desktop version, but it is just one of those things
that it could have been run up just a little bit smother if it could recognize that it
has got a bigger screen. So it works and as you can see it is pretty
fast. The processor within this tablet is a 1 Gigahertz processor and that is prefectly
capable of dealing with this operating system and the vast majority of apps within the Android
Market ecosystem itself. If we jump to that actually, I will show you that in operation.
So here is the Android Market application, let’s jump back to the front screen. As
you can see here, you can navigate to apps, there's games is there, eBooks, movie etc.
We are just jumping here into the movie section of the Android Market and it is just loading
up. You can see it is pretty fast and that is the advantage of this kind of processor.
So, it jumps around pretty quickly, if you want to download apps and games, they're pretty
quick to download. Now it is only a Wi-Fi enabled tablet, there is no 3G option but
that is just a limitation that you have to deal with really at this price point. But
it is pretty easy again to jump between different options. These are the top paid apps, top
free apps etc. so you can just download those quite quickly and easily. You will notice
that as I am navigating around, there's some touch sensitive keys down the bottom here,
now the only thing you will notice is they also disappear quite quickly. So there is
a little back light behind those. Those buttons are quite critical because they help you to
navigate as you are going around the tablet, not just the kind of swipes that you make
on the screen and the touch you make on the screen because the one on the left here brings
up a contact sensitive menu so that means that where you are in the tablet at that time,
it will give you options based on what you can do at that point. So I am in the home
screen here so it has given me options to add widgets and manage apps, wallpaper etc.
And similarly in the middle here, now this is the home screen button that whereever you
are in the tablet, it will just bring you back to these home screens. So say for example,
I am in the browser, I press home screen, straight back to this kind of home screen
place. It is just a quick way to find your way around if you ever got lost. You have
also got a back button here. Now you see the issue I am having is that these are light,
the back lights behind these buttons, don’t stay on very long and that means you can sometimes
miss some. So that's just one little fault with this tablet.
But all in all, that is not too bad, but the back button helps you again to find your way
around whenever you need to. The screen itself as you see, I am finding my way around here,
is pretty responsive. It is a capacitive screen that means it reacts well to taps and swipes.
Some of the cheaper tablets have resistive screens you really have to give them a firm
prod before they register where as this capacitive screen is pretty good.
It is also quite sharp with a resolution of one thousand and twenty four by six hundred
pixels. That is pretty good given this is a seven inch tablet PC, you get a good screen
particularly if you are watching video. Now the tablet itself is light, not too thick
and it is a seven inch tablet. It is pretty light and easy to kind of carry around. You
will notice that there is a few sort of ports and other features within this tablet. First
off this kind of camera is here, so you have got a rear facing camera that is three million
mega pixel camera. And on the front here you have also got a naught point three million
mega pixel camera. Now those are for taking a video and stills on the back here or for
web chat here. I will say the camera on the back is not particularly good quality, it
is only three million mega pixel, that is not a great resolution, you are probably not
going to use that much, where as the web cam chat, as a web cam video chat front facing
camera is very useful and provides decent kind of pictures for web chat
And other kind of port etc on the tablet. You have got a head phone port here. This
here is just the power on and off button. You have got volume up and down rocker here,
a little switch here that allows you to lock the tablet into the orientation it is at that
point. And also on the bottom here, you have got a micro SD port and a mini USB port. Now
the micro SD port is going to come in useful because this is a 16 Gigabytes internal storage
included on this tablet, but you can extended it using a micro SD card that you can buy
and that will extend it up to 32 Gigabytes. So that gives you quite a decent amount of
space. Now also with this, you will notice that as
we have been going around, there are few apps included, just a few bits and pieces. One
of the key ones I think here is Docs to Go is included, and that is kind of a Microsoft
Office equivalent so you have Word and Excel type documents here that it will read and
it will allow you to edit those. And there is also some GPS apps you might have noticed,
and that is because this tablet does have a GPS receiver. It is useful for mapping applications
etc. Now the other good thing with this tablet
is that it runs Flash. So if I jump on to the BBC website, we can jump up to the iPlayer
and you will find the actual Flash performance is pretty good. Now as I said the screen is
good so you will see that, you will get a pretty good picture for this. Now I have just
been told to update the Flash player, so I will do that as we are going through. But
of course with the processor as well, again that is quite critical for making sure you
have a good Flash performance. So that is just installing for me. And it has successfully
installed so if I go back that is jump to browser again and refresh here, and here we
go, it is running. So as I say we are on Wi-Fi here so this should be fairly quick. This
is just a episode of Masterchef, but actually you can see it is straight in, and it is just
buffering up, and we are on. Now we won’t carry on with that so I am going to stop there.
So the actual picture there is pretty decent and pretty good. So that is a really good
plus point for this tablet. So that is it really for the Lenovo Tablet
Ideapad A1. So it is pretty impressive at the price and I think it is well worth a good
look at. Now we are going to come back with some further videos, giving a bit more insight
into this over the next few days, but if you want to learn some more about this tablet
or other tablet PCs, subscribe to the tabletPCUK channel on Youtube and this way, you will
find a lot more of these videos. Or come along to WhatTabletPC.com where you can sign up
for our free newsletters and we will give you an update as soon as we have got more
videos coming your way. Thanks very much.
is a seven inch tablet as you can see here. It is interesting because it is very cheap
tablet in comparison to other tablets running the kind of specification that it has got
so it has got a little bit of plasticy back here but, to be honest, that just kind of
makes it light and it still looks pretty well built. Now it run Android 2.3.4 so it is Android
Gingerbread. Now that is an old version of Android that came along previous to, or just
before, Android Honeycomb was produced, which was the first Android version wasn’t purely
designed around the Smartphones. So you can see the Smartphone kind of interface that
it has got, is pretty simple. So it doesn't really make full use of the screen that you
have got - the larger kind of seven inch screen. But it is still quite good and quite easy
to navigate from and makes the interface not particularly cluttered etc so that is not
too bad. Now the only issue there with that is that because this is running Android 2.3.4,
so the Smartphone operating version, it does tend to think that it is a Smartphone. So
say when you run, when you are in the browser, quite often you are jumping into the mobile
versions of websites. Now that is not a terrible thing, it is pretty easy to overcome and pretty
easy to kind of, jump down to the desktop version, but it is just one of those things
that it could have been run up just a little bit smother if it could recognize that it
has got a bigger screen. So it works and as you can see it is pretty
fast. The processor within this tablet is a 1 Gigahertz processor and that is prefectly
capable of dealing with this operating system and the vast majority of apps within the Android
Market ecosystem itself. If we jump to that actually, I will show you that in operation.
So here is the Android Market application, let’s jump back to the front screen. As
you can see here, you can navigate to apps, there's games is there, eBooks, movie etc.
We are just jumping here into the movie section of the Android Market and it is just loading
up. You can see it is pretty fast and that is the advantage of this kind of processor.
So, it jumps around pretty quickly, if you want to download apps and games, they're pretty
quick to download. Now it is only a Wi-Fi enabled tablet, there is no 3G option but
that is just a limitation that you have to deal with really at this price point. But
it is pretty easy again to jump between different options. These are the top paid apps, top
free apps etc. so you can just download those quite quickly and easily. You will notice
that as I am navigating around, there's some touch sensitive keys down the bottom here,
now the only thing you will notice is they also disappear quite quickly. So there is
a little back light behind those. Those buttons are quite critical because they help you to
navigate as you are going around the tablet, not just the kind of swipes that you make
on the screen and the touch you make on the screen because the one on the left here brings
up a contact sensitive menu so that means that where you are in the tablet at that time,
it will give you options based on what you can do at that point. So I am in the home
screen here so it has given me options to add widgets and manage apps, wallpaper etc.
And similarly in the middle here, now this is the home screen button that whereever you
are in the tablet, it will just bring you back to these home screens. So say for example,
I am in the browser, I press home screen, straight back to this kind of home screen
place. It is just a quick way to find your way around if you ever got lost. You have
also got a back button here. Now you see the issue I am having is that these are light,
the back lights behind these buttons, don’t stay on very long and that means you can sometimes
miss some. So that's just one little fault with this tablet.
But all in all, that is not too bad, but the back button helps you again to find your way
around whenever you need to. The screen itself as you see, I am finding my way around here,
is pretty responsive. It is a capacitive screen that means it reacts well to taps and swipes.
Some of the cheaper tablets have resistive screens you really have to give them a firm
prod before they register where as this capacitive screen is pretty good.
It is also quite sharp with a resolution of one thousand and twenty four by six hundred
pixels. That is pretty good given this is a seven inch tablet PC, you get a good screen
particularly if you are watching video. Now the tablet itself is light, not too thick
and it is a seven inch tablet. It is pretty light and easy to kind of carry around. You
will notice that there is a few sort of ports and other features within this tablet. First
off this kind of camera is here, so you have got a rear facing camera that is three million
mega pixel camera. And on the front here you have also got a naught point three million
mega pixel camera. Now those are for taking a video and stills on the back here or for
web chat here. I will say the camera on the back is not particularly good quality, it
is only three million mega pixel, that is not a great resolution, you are probably not
going to use that much, where as the web cam chat, as a web cam video chat front facing
camera is very useful and provides decent kind of pictures for web chat
And other kind of port etc on the tablet. You have got a head phone port here. This
here is just the power on and off button. You have got volume up and down rocker here,
a little switch here that allows you to lock the tablet into the orientation it is at that
point. And also on the bottom here, you have got a micro SD port and a mini USB port. Now
the micro SD port is going to come in useful because this is a 16 Gigabytes internal storage
included on this tablet, but you can extended it using a micro SD card that you can buy
and that will extend it up to 32 Gigabytes. So that gives you quite a decent amount of
space. Now also with this, you will notice that as
we have been going around, there are few apps included, just a few bits and pieces. One
of the key ones I think here is Docs to Go is included, and that is kind of a Microsoft
Office equivalent so you have Word and Excel type documents here that it will read and
it will allow you to edit those. And there is also some GPS apps you might have noticed,
and that is because this tablet does have a GPS receiver. It is useful for mapping applications
etc. Now the other good thing with this tablet
is that it runs Flash. So if I jump on to the BBC website, we can jump up to the iPlayer
and you will find the actual Flash performance is pretty good. Now as I said the screen is
good so you will see that, you will get a pretty good picture for this. Now I have just
been told to update the Flash player, so I will do that as we are going through. But
of course with the processor as well, again that is quite critical for making sure you
have a good Flash performance. So that is just installing for me. And it has successfully
installed so if I go back that is jump to browser again and refresh here, and here we
go, it is running. So as I say we are on Wi-Fi here so this should be fairly quick. This
is just a episode of Masterchef, but actually you can see it is straight in, and it is just
buffering up, and we are on. Now we won’t carry on with that so I am going to stop there.
So the actual picture there is pretty decent and pretty good. So that is a really good
plus point for this tablet. So that is it really for the Lenovo Tablet
Ideapad A1. So it is pretty impressive at the price and I think it is well worth a good
look at. Now we are going to come back with some further videos, giving a bit more insight
into this over the next few days, but if you want to learn some more about this tablet
or other tablet PCs, subscribe to the tabletPCUK channel on Youtube and this way, you will
find a lot more of these videos. Or come along to WhatTabletPC.com where you can sign up
for our free newsletters and we will give you an update as soon as we have got more
videos coming your way. Thanks very much.