Review: Two 8-inch Lenovo tablets, only one clear purpose

One of the frustrating features of the PC market is the way major PC OEMs produce dozens of similar-but-different products. It divides the broader market into an astonishing array of categories that tends to overlap and serves to make buying decisions more complicated than we’d like.

So it’s no surprise this same attitude and approach is being applied to the tablet market. We’ve been taking a look at a pair of 8-inch, x86 Atom tablets running Windows 8.1 from Lenovo: the $299-$319 Miix 2 8 (an awkward name if ever there was one) and the $399 ThinkPad 8.

Two peas in a pod

The basic parameters of the two systems are very similar. They’re both built around Intel Bay Trail Atom processors, with a 1.33GHz to 1.86GHz Z3740 in the cheaper tablet and a 1.46GHz to 2.39GHz Z3770 in the more expensive one. Both have 2GB RAM. The cheaper tablet can have 32 or 64GB of eMMC-attached storage; the more expensive one only has a 64GB option. There are also small differences in size and weight.

The Miix’s rear camera is 5MP; the ThinkPad’s is 8MP and also has autofocus and a flash. Both have front-facing 2MP cameras.

Both have 802.11a/b/g/n with 2.4 and 5GHz support. The Miix has optional 3G connectivity (in some parts of the world) and includes GPS. Strangely, neither the GPS nor the 5GHz support are included on Lenovo’s spec listing.

The most important difference between the two machines is the screen. The cheap tablet has a 1280×800 8-inch display. The expensive one? 1920×1200, and 8.3 inches. Both are IPS screens. This imbues them with decent viewing angles. The IPS hallmark purple sheen on the cheaper tablet is, to my eye, a little more significant than what’s on the more expensive tablet, but they remain legible without appearing inverted or anything like that. Brightness levels on both seem reasonable, if not eye-searing, with the cheaper unit feeling a little brighter.

ThinkPad 8 rear camera.

ThinkPad 8 rear camera.

ThinkPad 8 front camera.

ThinkPad 8 front camera.

ThinkPad 8 rear camera.

ThinkPad 8 front camera.

Miix 2 8 rear camera.

Miix 2 8 rear camera.

Miix 2 8 front camera.

Miix 2 8 front camera.

Miix 2 8 rear camera.

Miix 2 8 front camera.

The styling of the units is the only other notable hardware difference. The cheap unit is finished in silver plastic, and its buttons feel a bit mushy. The Lenovo logo on the back is slightly raised, and this feels annoying when holding the unit in landscape mode—you can feel the roughness of the text. The expensive unit is all black, and its buttons feel much more solid. Its back is smooth and plain, with neither raised lettering nor any texturing.

Miix 2 8 on the left, ThinkPad 8 on the right. Note the raised logo on the back of the Miix 2 8; you can feel it when you hold it. Yuck.

Both devices have some first-party accessories available. The Miix has a magnetic folding cover that also includes a capacitive stylus, but we haven’t tested it. The ThinkPad 8 also has a magnetic cover of a slightly different design—no stylus—and this we have used.

Called the Quickshot Cover, it’s a magnetically attached folding cover. It has hidden magnets both to keep it closed and to hold it open, and it turns off the screen when covered. Its major novelty feature is that the corner folds back, exposing the rear camera and magnetically latching in place. Revealing the camera in this way is detected in hardware, and the Windows 8 camera app is automatically started whenever you do.

Miix 2 8 on top, ThinkPad 8 underneath. On the top, from left to right: USB 2, microSD (and micro SIM, on 3G models) behind the cover, volume button, power button. On the bottom: USB 3, volume, power.

The cover can also be used to prop the thing up for watching movies in what Lenovo so charmingly calls “tent mode.” For an extra $35, picking up the cover seems like a no-brainer.

Significant software

On the software front, both systems by default include 32-bit Windows 8.1. They each come with an array of bundled apps, most of which we wish weren’t included. It was a little peculiar that the Miix has a 30-day McAfee trial, whereas the ThinkPad has a 30-day Norton trial. Neither is welcome, as Microsoft’s own anti-virus software is adequate for most purposes.

The ThinkPad also includes Office Home & Student 2013; the Miix only includes an Office trial. For an extra $100, you can get Windows 8.1 Pro on the ThinkPad, but this means forgoing Office.

Many of the software issues described here when reviewing the Asus W3 last year remain essentially true when using the Windows desktop: 8-inch screens are not very big. The Windows desktop is remarkably cramped on an 8-inch screen. The Metro environment works substantially better, especially with the multitasking improvements Windows 8.1 offers above Windows 8. Side-by-side snap works very effectively.

Because of this, 8-inch Windows tablets are still a bit of an oddity. Used solely as a tablet, you’ll never want to leave the Metro world. The desktop is too small and fiddly to be valuable. This is not a machine for desktop apps… which means, in turn, that the x86 processor isn’t particularly valuable. While Windows RT, the ARM version of Windows, continues to have its detractors, on this kind of machine, its lack of compatibility with x86 desktop software doesn’t feel like much of a hardship.

In theory, using ARM should mean better battery life and lower cost—that’s how Microsoft justified supporting ARM in the first place. So it’s a bit surprising that these 8-inch tablets aren’t using ARM processors. It’s possible that with Bay Trail, the supposed ARM advantages just don’t exist. Nonetheless, it’s odd that after Windows now supports the form factors where ARM makes sense, nobody seems to be experimenting with ARM processors.

To take advantage of the x86 processor and the Windows desktop, you’re going to need an external screen, mouse, and keyboard. In an inexplicable decision, however, the Miix doesn’t support an external screen. It has no micro-HDMI port. The ThinkPad 8 has the requisite port, and so, if you were willing to buy all the extra peripherals, it could fill pretty much any computing needs.

Graphs and things

We ran our normal battery test, which loads a bunch of webpages in a loop with the screen at 50 percent brightness. We also ran these devices through an array of performance tests.

Our battery life test cycles through a set of webpages until the machine dies.

The battery life on both machines is somewhat lower than I would have liked. I’m not actually sure why it’s so low. Lenovo’s own spec sheet claims that the ThinkPad 8 should have somewhat longer battery life than the Miix 2 8; “up to eight hours” compared to “up to seven hours.” Our testing found the opposite. Neither comes close to the 10 hours we got out of the Dell Venue 8 Pro.

The performance tests were striking. Most of the time, the ThinkPad 8 was a lot faster than the Miix 2 8, as expected from its faster processor; however, in the multithreaded Cinebench tests, it showed no advantage. Investigation suggests that the ThinkPad 8 is thermally limited. At the start of the test, it would hit 2.2GHz for a while… but then it dropped down to 1.4GHz. It would then cycle between 2.2 and 1.4GHz at about 5-second intervals. This is consistent with hitting thermal limits.

Further supporting this theory: after prolonged CPU-bound testing, the clock speed dropped to 1.3GHz, and the machine then blue-screened. Nothing like this ever happened in normal usage, but it’s somewhat disturbing nonetheless. We’re not entirely surprised that the machine hit thermal limits; it’s something of a fact of life these days that systems will throttle under stress to remain within their power envelope. But they shouldn’t crash, and while it was a one-off, it’s concerning that the ThinkPad 8’s thermal solution may not be quite enough to handle the processor.

A strangely fragmented market

So what have we got? Two very similar tablets. An extra $80 gets you a better screen, a much faster processor, Office Home & Student 2013, somewhat better build quality, and much better aesthetics. You take a small hit in battery life.

And honestly, I don’t really get it. I don’t get why both exist.

The ThinkPad is altogether the more capable device. Aside from its better specs, it’s simply more versatile. You could, if you desired, hook it up to a monitor with its micro-HDMI port and Bluetooth input devices and use it as a full-blown PC. The processor and RAM may be a little puny, but you could run Photoshop on this thing if you really wanted to.

So it’s a struggle. Who are these tablets for? Lenovo surely has different demographics in mind for each tablet, but it’s not clear what those demographics are.

The great virtue of a Windows tablet is that, if you want it to be, it can be more than a tablet. We see this exemplified with Microsoft’s Surface 2: the kickstand and keyboard covers make it quite functional as an Office machine as well as a Metro tablet. But the Surface range has 10.6-inch screens. While 10.6 inches is small, as long as your vision is reasonable, it’s big enough for using the Windows desktop. With the Surface 2 you pay tablet money but get the utility of a tablet and most of the utility of a laptop.

The folding corner reveals the camera.

The same is true for various other devices on the market. Lenovo’s ThinkPad Helix—a truly glorious, albeit expensive, machine—is an 11.6-inch tablet with a hinged keyboard dock, so it converts into a more or less conventional clamshell laptop. You pay high-end laptop money for the thing, but you get a pretty high-end ultra-portable laptop that also doubles as a highly capable tablet. HP has a number of tablet-laptop hybrids that similarly offer the best of both worlds.

But all this breaks down at eight inches. The 8-inch screen isn’t big enough for any kind of comfortable extended desktop usage. Either you make the desktop easy to read—in which case there’s not enough room for toolbars, menus, and the working area—or you make enough space for your apps, and you can’t read the screen.

Can you still use an 8-inch tablet to power your desktop usage? Sure. The processor and GPU are fast enough. You wouldn’t want to game or anything like that, but for Web browsing and Office, they’re sufficient. But with an 8-inch screen, the neat docking solutions that work well on 10-inch and bigger devices aren’t an option. To solve the screen problem, you’ll need an external monitor.

Falling between the gaps

This all makes the purpose of the Miix a mystery. The Miix doesn’t support this style of usage, because it has no HDMI port. If you were desperate you could likely hook something up by USB, but that’s going to be suboptimal at best. It’s a Windows tablet that offers a fully functional Windows desktop but virtually no way of meaningfully using it.

The ThinkPad 8 isn’t clear either—because if this “one device to do it all” use case is important to you, those 10-or-more inch devices do it so much better. The fact that their built-in screens are big enough to be usable means that they can work in a laptop-like way. If this is how you want to use your computer, get one of those instead.