Twice this year, we at Ars declared that Lenovo was onto something with its Yoga Pro laptop line, offering conditional praise for both the Yoga 2 and Yoga 3 flavors of that ultra-thin, reasonably powered, fold-and-bend model. However, at starting prices at or over $1,000, they didn't necessarily feel powerful enough to deplete someone's gizmo budget just because users wanted a 13-inch touchscreen.

Specs at a glance: Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 Pro Screen 2560×1400 13.3" (221 PPI) IPS LCD OS Android 4.4.2 (custom Lenovo fork) CPU Intel Atom quad-core 1.8GHz Z3745 RAM 2GB LPDDR3 GPU Intel HD Graphics for BayTrail Storage 32GB (plus up to 64GB micro-SD card) Networking 802.11 a/b/g/n, MiMo Ports Micro-USB, headphone Camera 8MP rear camera, 1.6MP front camera Size 13.1" × 8.8" × 1.0" (333 x 224 x 25 mm) Weight 2.1 lbs (948g) Battery 9600 mAh (non-removable) Starting price $499

Someone at Lenovo must have agreed, as the company has found a way to get that giant touchscreen onto a more reasonably priced device. If the Yoga Tablet 2 Pro had been nothing more than a 13.3-inch Android tablet with an Intel Atom chipset and 2GB of RAM, we'd have called it a day. Here, have a giant, so-so Android device for $500, we might have said, otherwise not giving the thing much consideration.

Instead, Lenovo has made a few interesting design decisions to make the Tablet 2 Pro stand out. Most notably, the tablet isn't flat like most of its peers. It sports a bulging hinge system that has been loaded with... a fully fledged projector? Really? This we had to see, and look at it we sure did.

But after getting hooked by the gimmick, we came to find that Lenovo also packed this tablet with a custom Android 4.4.2 fork with passing attempts to enable multitasking. We've whined in recent reviews about wanting legitimate Android multitasking in larger tablets, and we were anxious about blindly having faith in Lenovo of all companies fulfilling such a specific wish. After all, we've seen cheaper, underwhelming Yoga-branded Android tablets before, and we've also seen similar prices on 13-inch, touch-enabled Windows machines that can handle low-level multitasking just fine.

So we had to ask ourselves: were we just getting a projector on top of an otherwise underwhelming machine in a crowded sector, or did Lenovo really wave a magic wand here?

"Hinge" is a funny word, innit?

Lenovo provided Ars both the Tablet 2 Pro and the 10.1-inch Tablet 2; the latter comes in an 8-inch model, as well. Its specs are similar but its screen resolution is 1920x1200, as opposed to the Tablet 2 Pro's 2560x1440. (Oh, and it lacks the projector feature, which we swear we'll get to soon.)



































Otherwise, both models share a similar, hinge-dependent design, and we'll talk specifically about the Tablet 2 Pro from here on out. The front face is all glass with substantial bezels, meaning the 13.3" screen is contained in a front that measures 15.25" altogether; it's surrounded by gray aluminum trim, and the bottom of the screen is buffered by that hinge, which meets the screen with a stereo speaker array.

Flip the Tablet 2 Pro over, and the hinge stands out even more. This is already a thick tablet by body alone—measuring 0.25" at its thinnest point and gradually growing to 0.41"—before accounting for the hinge, which comes just shy of one inch in diameter. Oh, and the whole enchilada is heavy, weighing in at 2.1 pounds. In short, the design team didn't find ways to skim weight or bulk to support a 13.3-inch display.

The hinge pops open with a tap of a button and contains a ton of tension, meaning you'll have to push pretty hard to adjust its angle, but it will stay assuredly rigid in whatever position you choose as a result—in the range of 30 to 180 degrees, specifically. The hinge itself is built from thin, heavy aluminum that could cut your tummy if you tried propping it on a bare stomach, but that also makes it dependable enough to hang from a hook in your kitchen if you opt for the 180-degree option.

The hinge, which hides a micro-SD expansion slot (supporting up to 64GB of additional memory on top of its 32GB of internal flash) measures 8.5 inches wide, which is wide enough for solid propping on a table or desk, but that's a little too narrow to dependably stay upright in a lap.

Otherwise, the back is all gray-colored plastic with a slight waffle texture, and the hinge button is surrounded by a "subwoofer" opening and an 8MP camera lens. We could tell you that the camera is burdened with mixed performance and slow focus issues, but we doubt Tablet 2 Pro owners will notice much; if you thought using an iPad camera was awkward, try taking photos of the kids with this enormous bulkster.

By the way, the speakers and subwoofer come with JBL branding, as do the half-decent earbuds that come packed in the box, but don't let such branding fool you into expecting a dynamo sound system. TV series and movies sounded crisp and loud enough, but we could barely notice any punch to the bass when we tried blasting some tunes; our recent review of the Nvidia Shield Tablet, with its tiny twin subwoofer ports, actually out-bassed this behemoth. We wouldn't normally complain about overhyped speakers, but in the case of the Tablet 2 Pro's weirdest feature, you might want to project sound a little further than a few inches away.

Up against the wall

That's right: the projector! One side of the hinge contains a giant, circular power button, and the other sports a projector lens without any cover or protection beyond the usual "buried beneath glass" style of a smartphone's camera. How well does it work? Without any scientific means of measuring or verifying Lenovo's 35-lumen projector rating, we trucked over to a colleague's cave-like room, already dedicated to a computer-projection rig, to anecdotally measure both performance and usability.

Our first hitch came from finding an ideal projection distance and angle. The Tablet 2 Pro is designed to project when the hinge is set at a perpendicular angle, so you have to find an ideal spot to fit that oversized wedge, which, to be fair, doesn't take up more of a footprint than a normal projector. However, once it's set up that way, Lenovo's projection has a flat aim—not upward, not downward—and that rarely works for whatever ledge or table you might otherwise place the tablet on. Without any adjustable feet or other stable way to angle this right-angled, wedge-shaped rig—with only an 8.5-inch stand on one end, mind you—setting this up to project a perfectly square display is pretty precarious.

Lenovo also doesn't offer a way to change the projected size, so you'll have to prop this up at a sweet spot if you want to fill a particular wall. The only adjustments on offer are focus and brightness. The former comes in the form of a touchy hardware slider; it's incredibly tough to budge, and precision tweaking is nigh impossible. All dreams of consistently projecting crisp text should go right out the window—a task made doubly difficult because of the projector reducing resolution output to 854x480 pixels.

Thus, this isn't so much a dependable work-related projector, but rather a fun option for multimedia sharing while hanging out with friends. Want to go on a trip and then project a giant Netflix stream or your favorite reddit idiocy on a hotel wall? Assuming you aren't desperate for the crispest resolution, and you jack up the font sizes, you can make that happen, and that's pretty flippin' cool. However, if you plan to do the same thing while, say, camping or sitting in a giant parking lot, you'll need both an external speaker system and enough nighttime darkness to assure you can see your display.









As far as brightness goes, you'll want to crank the slider to max for anything approaching usability. Our above photos compare the Tablet 2 Pro's projection at maximum brightness with the maximum brightness of a $400 Vivitek projector, and the comparison comes in two flavors—with the camera adjusted for the Lenovo's brightness, and with the camera adjusted for the other projector's brightness. The difference is incredibly clear—namely, the Tablet 2 Pro's option is quite dark—and this is coming from a room designed for a projector, meaning drawn blinds and closed doors all around. Projecting from the Tablet 2 Pro onto an average daytime wall certainly works in a pinch, but again, crisp text will suffer.

We know, we know, this is a lot of scrutiny over what amounts to a bonus gimmick, but we figure Lenovo will go down this road again in future tablet releases. If so, we'd love to see some optional feet that we could attach to the tablet's bottom, not to mention a completely redesigned focus knob. We won't hold our breath for a significantly brighter projection in the future, but who knows? In the meantime, grab a Bluetooth mouse if you plan to use this feature for any reasonable amount of time; tapping the screen to pick movies or click links will almost surely knock the Tablet 2 Pro out of its ideal, tough-to-pose projection angle.

Multi-window mode! Yes! (Mostly!)

The Tablet 2 Pro asks users to travel back in time to the days of Android 4.4.2, a release from December of 2013—and Lenovo has applied plenty of customizations to the OS. Some of the changes are small, like a from-the-bottom swipe menu that is full of toggles that have since become standard from-the-top swipe options in Lollipop (brightness, airplane mode, Bluetooth, etc.) and an icon-heavy dashboard that looks more iOS-like than most Android forks.









The biggest difference comes in the form of multi-window support, something that can make better use of a tablet with a screen this large—it's a slightly different approach from the adjustable split-screen mode included in many of Samsung's tablets. However, this one comes with a major usability limit. At any time, users can tap a tabbed-window icon at the bottom-left of the screen to pull up only six options for multitask-friendly apps: Chrome, a file browser, a calculator, and the tablet's native gallery, video, and e-mail apps. Pick any of those, and they'll appear in a window that occupies roughly one third of the tablet screen by default; you can easily drag from a window's edges to resize at will.

In a dream Android tablet world, we'd configure Hangouts, Google Docs, and Chrome to run simultaneously while rocking a Bluetooth keyboard and typing with this guy at a coffee shop. (Pardon our bias, but a typing-first machine is sometimes all we need, which is why we even given Lenovo's multitasking efforts a second glance.) In the meantime, having a Chrome window open while switching between other primary apps is a nice option to have.















Too bad this hardware isn't beefy enough to handle such multitasking with ease. We experienced plenty of pauses and a few crashes while the Tablet 2 Pro tried to juggle a few apps on the screen and others in background memory. If we stuck simply to Google Docs and Chrome on a fresh restart, we could maintain a lengthy typing-and-browsing session with no fear of interruption, at least. That's a shame, because we had hoped 2GB of RAM would be enough to buoy the Tablet 2 Pro's otherwise unimpressive performance numbers to, at the very least, happily handle a few apps in primary memory. The tablet's 3D performance is similarly lackluster, at least compared to other tablets in its general price range.

Intel's wimpy quad-core Atom Z3745 chipset is easier to forgive thanks to its battery efficiency, a fact that is hard to appreciate after looking at our standard web-browsing battery test. The Tablet Pro 2 tanked pretty hard in our first 200-nit test, barely lasting more than five hours, and in a second test, it died at six hours exactly. That's the number we're using in our typical battery chart, but we're surprised by both results—namely because of how otherwise efficient this tablet is in general use. We could watch movies, browse the web, and use standard productivity apps throughout the work day, leave the tablet in sleep mode overnight, and still have over 30% left to work with.











The other interesting Android tweak comes in the form of Lenovo's Security HD app, which we absolutely adore. This copies some of the cooler root functionality found in forks like Cyanogenmod, such as blocking any app's specific permissions, preventing apps from automatically booting in the background, and freezing problematic apps at will. It also allows users to control notification-bar nags on an app-by-app basis; as more apps employ these to get our attention, we're happy to see this as a root-level tweak.

Screen and final thoughts

The 13.3-inch, 2560x1440 pixel display—essentially a 720p quadrupling—has a pixel density of 221 PPI. While that pales compared to some smaller tablets, not to mention Lenovo's Yoga 2 Pro and Yoga 3 Pro laptops (whose own 13.3-inch screens enjoy a 3200x1800 resolution), it's certainly not a blurry mess, but we're more concerned with how the color spectrum changed with no rhyme or reason in our review hardware. Sometimes, it offered perfectly bright, mostly accurate color reproduction, suffering only from the slightly blue tint that is often seen in IPS displays. Other times, it turned orangey and dim.

After diving through the menus, we figured out that this was the result of Lenovo's "Smart Switch" function, which is essentially a high-falutin' way of recognizing both orientation and hinge position when displaying apps. This is where the Tablet 2 Pro's auto-brightness settings hide, as opposed to anywhere in the usual "display" section, and we recommend finding and disabling this toggle as soon as possible to avoid dealing with the device's finicky brightness sensor.

Also, confession time: We scratched our screen. It happened a few days into testing, and the reason wasn't carelessness (at least, not in our opinion). Rather, Lenovo didn't produce a cover or case for the Tablet 2 Pro (or its smaller Tablet 2 siblings), which isn't surprising, given the tablet's massive hinge. Still, this concerned us, so we tossed the Tablet Pro 2 into our daily-use messenger bag to see how it would hold up to typical day-to-day use that an owner might expect, and man, we wound up with a couple of screen slices pretty quickly. Until Lenovo gets around to producing some sort of cover option, consider, um, using a pillowcase? We don't know. This thing is huge and weirdly shaped. You'll think of something.

Really, the Yoga Tablet 2 Pro stands at the verge of goodness, in terms of pairing a giant, gorgeous multi-touch display with a working stab at Android multitasking and a reliable hinge. Already in its current state, Lenovo's latest tablet could pass as some users' sole machine for both work and multimedia, so long as you pair it with a Bluetooth keyboard. This is obviously not a one-handed device for occasional web browsing and book reading, and it's not a fully functional Windows device meant to do a ton of tasks, but for $500, there's already a lot happening here. Heck, that list is pretty good without tossing in a projector for funsies!

And yet, the screen is incredibly vulnerable; the device's bulk isn't matched by either performance or battery life; the custom Lenovo fork of Android needs to be coaxed and massaged to do multitasking in the exact right way; and the dim projector was tossed in without the rest of the hardware stepping up to support such use.

We'd gladly pay $100 more to bolster even half of those complaints in a future revision, and should that revision come along, we'll hold the next massive Yoga Tablet Pro model up high. We didn't walk away feeling like the machine was an undercooked tablet with a mere projection gimmick thrown on top, but we're also perfectly aware of the $500-700 range of 13-inch, touch-enabled devices that can handle users' needs on the go and not crash with more than a few windows running. Lenovo is this close to contending with that competition. Until then, not bad, Lenovo. Not bad.

The good

A bright, beautiful 13.3-inch screen matched with legitimate Android multitasking

Security HD app adds wonderful permission and launch control on a per-app basis

Rigid hinge keeps tablet steady at nearly any desired angle

Projector works as advertised, proves a nice little gimmick

Only $500 MSRP for a tablet this big? Come on!

The bad

Uh, this thing is HUGE

Intel Atom architecture fails at both power and battery efficiency

Multitasking only works with limited apps and crashes if users get too ambitious

Projector functionality suffers from design, brightness issues

Speakers, while solid, are wimpier than in tablets half this size

The ugly