Table of Contents
Last Updated on March 29, 2020
Design
The Lenovo Tab M10 is available in black and white. It features a complete plastic body, as you might imagine at this cost stage. While it looks pretty nice and similar to the Lenovo Tab P10, it’s made of metal and glass. Well, the M10 Tab is produced of plastic, but it appears to be well constructed. It is thin at 8.1 mm and weighs 480 g.
We get a front-facing2-megapixel camera and a status LED above the screen. A standard headphone jack and a USB C 2.0 port are available on the right. A microSD card slot lies below. The whole way down is a dock connector and the power button and volume controls are on the left side.
On the back of the tablet there is a 5-megapixel camera. Unfortunately, the two cameras are not so great. But in this class that’s not unusual. The quality is good for snapshots and video chats in good lighting conditions. But with it, you can’t take good photos.
Display and Audio
The Lenovo Tab M10 has a 16:10 aspect ratio 10.1-inch display. It is a full HD screen with 1920x 1200 pixels resolution. To be honest, the HD resolution on a 10-inch screen is perfect on any tablet and that’s also the case here. Texts and pictures look pretty sharp, while videos are smooth and clear. The rest of the details also depend on the other capabilities of the screen.
The display of this tab is actually an IPS panel with wide viewing angle. Color and contrast reproduction is good. And for its brightness, that’s also true. It’s light enough to use in and out in the dark. However, it’s far too dark to use under direct sunlight. A little brighter is the P10 Tab. For this tablet, Lenovo does not offer an active stylus. However, that’s the norm for systems like this.
Two speakers are positioned directly above the screen and are angled to the front. These stereo speakers ‘ sound quality is acceptable, but not really great. There’s no true bass and it sounds a little flat. However, if you connect some good headphones to it, it will sound much better.
Performance and battery life
Lenovo ships the Tab M10 with a 450 Octa-core processor from Qualcomm Snapdragon. You can get it with 2 GB or 3 GB of RAM depending on the variant. You can also choose from an internal storage of 16 GB or 32 GB. You can also get it with built-in LTE if you want. With 2 GB RAM and 16 GB storage, my review unit is the cheapest option. You can use just over 8 GB of those 16 out of the box.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 is already known from tablets such as the Lenovo Tab P10 and Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.5. Both are somewhat more priced. Because all three tablets have the same processor, the findings of the benchmark are almost the same. It gets about 770 and 3895 points in Geekbench 4. The Tab M10 scores about 70700 marks.
The performance is good enough for most tasks during daily use. I had no problems with the operating system itself and also very smooth running applications like Chrome, YouTube, and Word. Adobe Lightroom is another tool I attempted. It’s not as soft as pricier tablets while it works. Well, that’s what to expect.
Some applications may be shut in the context of changing between several applications. This usually happens with the unit that is only equipped with 2 GB of RAM. While that’s quite normal in this price range, if you’re used to high-end smartphones with much more RAM, it’s something to notice. You should probably go for the 3 GB RAM variant if you want to do a bunch of multitasking.
The Lenovo Tab M10 features a 4850mAh battery. That lasted just over 8 hours in my standard battery test. For this experiment, at medium brightness I always loop the same HD image and turn on Wi-Fi. Sadly, those 8 hours are pretty weak. As you can see in my comparison chart, all direct competitors get better results.
Should you buy the Lenovo Smart Tab M10?
The quality of this tablet’s construction, the screen and efficiency of its processor are great considering its cost. With HD resolution and the quality of most applications, as well as a superior screen and design, most users are already satisfied with this product. The fact that here we get almost sheer Android and no third party is providing the software is highly appreciated.
The battery life on the adverse hand is quite brief. And you can’t watch Netflix in HD, it’s also disappointing. If you don’t want to spend much money and want a tablet with almost Android vanilla, I can recommend it. Again, it’s a big highlight and no immediate competitor offers something better at this moment.