Lenovo Tab 4 8 Review – How Good Is This 130$ Tablet Really?

The Lenovo Tab 4 8 is an 8-inch tablet that will be available in most countries for the holidays. Its highlights are an HD display, a Snapdragon 425 chip, Android 7.1.1 Nougat and optional LTE. Since I really enjoyed the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus, I wanted to review the cheaper version. The Lenovo Tab 4 8 starts at just 130 US Dollars. How good is this tablet? That’s what you’ll find out in this review.

Design & Build Quality

You can get the Lenovo Tab 4 8 in black and white. While both look quite nice, I decided to get the black version. Since this is a pretty cheap tablet, we are not getting a metal body here. Instead, it’s made out of plastic.

On the back, there’s a nice feeling texture which does not attract fingerprints easily. That makes it feel a bit higher end. The frame is made out of a hard plastic.

Yes, the build quality is not as good as an iPad Mini. But it’s not bad for its price. In fact, it does feel a bit nicer than the Amazon Fire HD 8 or Lenovo Tab 3 7 Plus.

Connectors, Speakers, Cameras

Unlike its more expensive brothers, the Lenovo Tab 4 8 does not have a USB Type C port. Instead, we’re getting a micro USB 2.0 connector. There is no fingerprint reader, but that’s kind of standard at this price. On the sides are a microSD card slot and a 3.5-millimeter audio jack.

As you might expect, the cameras of this tablet are not capable of replacing a high-end smartphone. The quality is fine for simple snapshots or video chats using Skype though. On the back, there’s a 5-megapixel camera and the front-facing camera has a resolution of 2-megapixel.

I like that the two integrated speakers on both sides are facing the front. Actually, the sound isn’t too bad for this price class. Considering the size, they are quite loud. There’s no real bass though.

Display: HD Only!

The name suggests that the Lenovo Tab 4 8 has an 8-inch screen and that is the case indeed. It’s an IPS panel with an aspect ratio of 16:10. The viewing angles are pretty good and the brightness is fine as well.

One of the few downsides of this tablet is the resolution. It’s an HD display only. While it’s not too bad with an 8-inch screen, you probably will notice a difference compared to your smartphone. If you compare the display of the Tab 4 8 to devices with a higher pixel density, icons and text don’t look very sharp.

Sadly, at this price point, there’s no competitor with a full HD screen. At least not from major brands. Similar offerings from Samsung or Huawei offer an HD resolution only as well.

Hardware & Performance

Inside the Tab 4 8 runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 chipset. This is a quad-core processor with four cores clocked at 1.4GHz. We’re also getting 2GB of RAM and a 16GB internal storage. Out of those you’ve got just over 8GB free to use for yourself.

While the Snapdragon 425 is a lower-middle-class chip, the performance is actually fine for most things. I was able to surf the web in Chrome without any problems and the YouTube app works great as well. You can also open two apps like Chrome and Word side by side without any lagging. You might notice some lagging if you’ve got tons of tabs open though.

As you might expect at this price point, this is not the best gaming tablet. The performance is certainly fine for playing games like Asphalt Xtreme or Dead Trigger with lower graphics settings. But Modern Combat 5 is almost not playable. There are huge lags when playing it.

The benchmarks are not the best either, but fine for this price. In AnTuTu it gets a result of over 33.000 points. Using Geekbench 4, it gets around 680 and 1900 points. These are typical results for a Snapdragon 425. As you can see in my comparison, the Amazon Fire HD 8 is quite an interesting alternative when it comes to performance.

Android 7.1.1 Nougat Software

Lenovo is shipping the Tab 4 8 with Android 7.1.1 Nougat, so it’s quite recent. I’m not sure if it will ever receive an update to Android Oreo. The Tab 3 series from last year did not get any major updates as of now.

I really like that Lenovo did not customize the interface a lot. Actually, it’s pretty much vanilla Android which is very nice. I liked the productivity mode from the Tab 4 10 Plus, but this is missing here. You can have several users though and put in place restrictions for kids.

There aren’t too many apps preinstalled either. It comes with the ones from Google and Microsoft. There’s also a file manager, as well as a Dolby app, an FM radio and two cloud apps from Lenovo. That’s it.

Overall, I quite like the software. There are no issues, it runs stable and without any problems.

Battery Life

Let’s take a look at the battery life. The Lenovo Tab 4 8 has a battery with a capacity of 4850mAh. In my battery test, it got a runtime of 10 hours and 10 minutes.

All my battery tests are done exactly the same. I’m playing an HD video at 50 percent brightness and activated Wi-Fi until the tablet shuts itself off.

In my real life use, the battery was okay as well, but not the best either. I wrote down a kind of battery diary and I got a runtime of 34 hours in total. Out of those, I used the Tab 4 8 actively for 6 hours and 30 minutes. During that time I mostly watched YouTube, participated in a Skype video call, played some games and surfed the web. The brightness varied between 30 and 100 percent. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi were activated the whole time.

Lenovo Tab 4 8 Review: Final Verdict

Can I recommend the Lenovo Tab 4 8? Well, at this price the build quality is quite good, the performance is decent and we’re getting a nice operating system. The resolution of the display could be higher, but no competitor is offering something better at this price. Overall, I think the value is quite good here.

Depending on where you live, there are some interesting and mostly cheaper competitors. For example, you could check out the Amazon Fire HD 8. Other alternatives are Android tablets directly out of China.