Lenovo held a media event in New York today where it announced the Yoga Tablet, an oddly designed Android device with a cylindrical bulge on one side. This bulge is actually a huge battery, which Lenovo says should give the tablet 18 hours of battery life.

The Yoga Tablet is very much a budget device. There are 8- and 10-inch varieties, priced at $249 and $299 respectively. These come with a 1.6MP front and 5MP rear camera, 16 or 32GB of storage, and Android 4.2. And the specs and design of both sizes are identical: a 1.2 GHz quad-core Mediatek processor, 1GB of ram, and a 1280x800 screen. It's worth noting Google destroys those specs at a similar price point. Heck, last year's Nexus 7 had better specs than this at a cheaper price. Google may have Play Store revenues to fall back on, but that is of no concern to an end user.

This should come as a surprise to no one, but with specs like that, performance is best described as "bad." Nothing really scrolls smoothly, every animation lags—the whole device is a slow mess. The outsides are just as cheap as the insides: the Yoga Tablet is coated in a silver flake plastic that looks like something from a 90s Radio Shack shelf. There's no soft-touch backing to be found here, meaning the Yoga is easily outclassed by any Samsung or Google tablet.

Lenovo's big selling point for this device, besides the all-day battery life, is the integrated kickstand in the battery bump. A quick flip out, and the device can stand up in two different configurations—one is completely upright, and the other sits at a more horizontal angle. When standing up, the device is sturdy and bottom-heavy enough to use without it falling over. Using it in portrait mode on a table, which I do quite frequently with my Nexus 7, is a bit more of an awkward proposition. It's always going to be tilted over to one side.















While the 8-inch version is an inch bigger than the Nexus 7, it's hard to imagine why anyone would pick the more expensive Yoga over Google's tablet. The Nexus 7 has a lower price, a faster processor, better build quality and materials, a brighter, higher resolution screen, and a newer version of Android. You'll be losing out on an inch of screen real estate (not necessarily a bad thing), and you'll lose a few hours of battery life. The 10-inch version has a slightly better chance in the market thanks to the $300 price tag, but then you are dealing with a 150ppi screen. Either one is going to be a tough sell for the PC OEMs. The 8- and 10-inch Yogas launch tomorrow, October 30, at the usual electronics dealers.