Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I use a 9.7 inch Samsung Galaxy Tab A that I bought a little more than a year ago to upgrade my old Samsung tablet. The Lenovo is smaller, about the size of my Kindle Fire, but it's much newer. While I like a larger screen for watching movies (and for reading some books) there is something to be said for a smaller, lighter tablet, as I have discovered from my Fire. The Lenovo Tab 4 is very sleek. Right out of the box it catches the eye. It's dimensions are 8.31 x 4.88 x 0.32 in compared to my Tab A's 9.55" x 6.57" x 0.29" and there is a noticeable difference in weight. The Tab A comes in at just under a pound (.99) while the Lenovo 4 weighs just .68 pounds. Just for comparison, my 5th generation Kindle Fire weighs a little less than the Lenovo 4 but is also smaller. As for how fast the Lenovo is, it has a Quad-core 1.4 GHz Cortex-A53 compared to the 1.3 GHz Quad-core Kindle Fire and the 1.2 GHz Quad-Core, Qualcomm APQ Samsung Tab A. As you can see, the Lenovo is fast, and that's apparent on firing it up - it boots up almost immediately (and if asleep, literally immediately) while the Tab A takes a few seconds, enough to get you tapping your foot. Now I love my Tab A so the Lenovo was up against some stiff competition. When it came to testing it out, I was very impressed. One thing I noticed immediately was that while punching in my pin, I could feel the vibration of my fingers touching the screen. It was an odd-feeling but at the same time, it let me know I was actually hitting the virtual keyboard. The Lenovo 4's display is 1280 x 800 pixels compared to the Tab A's 1024 x 768 and I noticed the difference immediately in opening up one of my favorite movies, The Equalizer. The film's opening sequences have some very nice lighting and it really shows up well on the Lenovo. About the only thing Tab A has going for it here is the 9.7 inch display compared to the 8 inch display on the Lenovo. The sound is clear and crisp, though I did notice some distortion at the top end that was absent on the Tab A. I don't ever have my volume turned all the way up, however, so I'm not going to mark it down for that. Lenovo claims "THEATER-LIKE MULTIMEDIA: 8-inch tablet has a brilliant HD display with booming Dolby Atmos Audio" and that's true - just don't turn the volume all the way up. They both have 5 MP cameras so that's a wash. I generally use my DSLR for serious photography or my cell phone if I'm in a hurry. The camera may matter more or less to you. The 20-hour battery life of the Lenovo beats the Tab A hands down however, at just 14 hours. Battery life is huge, so a definite edge to the Lenovo 4 here. Another nice feature noted by other reviewers is the absence of bloatware. I was very pleased by this because we bought our son an ASUS tablet that was so bloated it was useless. We gave it away in the end. I'm not quite where I would give away my Tab A but the Lenovo 4 is definitely the superior tablet, with the only real drawback being its smaller screen. I've played around with it for awhile now before putting together a review and I'm very pleased. Yes, it's more expensive (129 vs. 49) than a Kindle Fire but here too the Kindle Fire has 8 hours of battery life compared to the Lenovo's 20 and only a 2 MP camera compared to the Lenovo's 5 MP. It's a very nice tablet and well worth the $129 price tag. Dollar for dollar, it beats the Tab A hands down. So yes, 5 stars for the Lenovo 4 tablet.