Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Wow, Lenovo! You are killing it in the low end product line-up these days. I have an AMD-based Flex 14 and for the money its a great multi-purpose laptop. The Tab M8 continues the pattern of offering a great low-end price for very good value. I have been buying, returning, or reselling the spectrum of tablets for a long time in search of one that checks every box I want in a tablet: Inexpensive, reasonably high quality build, acceptable performance and features. First the huge surprise: The battery life is insanely good compared to just about any other tablet I've used. Screen-on time of roughly 16.5 hours at 50-60% brightness and still 15% battery left after a mix of games, browsing, reading PDFs and watching videos. This is just incredible and easily 2x or more the battery life I'm used to seeing in a cheap tablet. I could take this on a very long day of travelling and be reasonable sure I wouldn't need to top up the charge. The resolution is sufficient, but nothing special at 1280x800. However PDFs and text is very readable and quite clear unless you are pressing it to your face so a higher res isn't really necessary and would just negatively impact battery life for little gain. Performance is surprisingly good for a mediatek CPU. In the past the MTK CPUs I've used in inexpensive tablets have been severely lacking in performance, barely able to smoothly scroll a webpage, let alone play games and such. While this CPU benchmarks on the lower end of the spectrum, it still provides a surprising amount of punch and even fairly intense games are mostly smooth and playable. Warning: For netflix HD users, this tablet lacks the DRM chip needed to watch in HD. You can still watch Netflix, but I believe it tops out at DVD resolution or roughly 540p. Since the screen is only effectively 720p its really not that big of a deal for me.