Lenovo Unveils A Trio Of New Android Tablets.

Today Lenovo has launched three new Android tablets in their YOGA Tab series. In order the new devices are the YOGA Tab 3 8″, the YOGA Tab 3 10″, and the YOGA Tab 3 Pro 10″. The first two tablets are fairly low-end devices, while the YOGA Tab 3 Pro is probably the most unique Android tablet that I have ever seen. You can see how these tablets compare to each other by checking out the spec table below.

The YOGA Tab 3 8″ and 10″ use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 212 SoCs, which are both quad core Cortex A7 parts with Adreno 304 graphics. As for the Yoga Tab 3 Pro 10″, it’s a much more interesting situation. This is one of the first devices shipping with an Intel Airmont SoC, and to my knowledge the first and only Android device to do so. This is Intel’s first Atom SoC built on their 14nm process, and it consists of 4 Atom cores with a peak frequency of 2.24GHz, along with a 12 EU implementation of their Gen8 graphics.

Moving on to the displays, we see that both of the non-pro YOGA Tabs use a 1280×800 IPS LCD. The YOGA Tab Pro steps up significantly with a 10.1″ 2560×1600 IPS LCD. It’s fairly clear that the non-pro YOGA Tabs are intended to be low-end tablets, with the pro model packing the more powerful specifications. One that immediately pops out is the battery capacity. At 38.76Wh, it is the biggest battery I’ve ever seen in an Android tablet, and it rivals the enormous batteries that Apple had to put in the 2012 models of the iPad. Lenovo claims that the YOGA Tab 3 Pro 10″ will last up to 18 hours on its battery.

The YOGA Tab 3 Pro 10″ also has a couple more interesting features. While both of the non-pro models feature two front facing speakers positioned in the tube at the end of the device, the YOGA Tab 3 Pro 10″ has four front-facing speakers, along with Dolby’s Atmos 3D surround sound processing. It also features a pico projector that can project an image up to 70″ in size with a brightness of 50 nits. Lenovo states that the projector can be rotated using gesture controls, although it’s not explained exactly how this works or what it entails.

Lenovo hasn’t set a firm date for the launch of any of these tablets, but their press release states that these are part of their holiday lineup, and so if you’re interested in buying one you should be able to pick one up sometime in December at the latest. Prices for the YOGA Tab 3 8″ and 10″ are unknown, but the YOGA Tab 3 Pro 10″ is priced at $499 for the WiFi model, and $599 for the LTE model.

The ASUS ZenPad S (Z580CA) Review

When I think of ASUS and Android, the first thing that comes to mind is their past portfolio of Android tablets. ASUS has been making Android tablets since the first wave of Android Honeycomb tablets hit the market. Back then, ASUS’s point of differentiation from all the other Android tablets with essentially the same Tegra 2 hardware platform was their attachable keyboard dock. One could argue that ASUS really pioneered the 2-in-1 tablet form factor with their Transformer tablets. While ASUS continued to release a number of additional Transformer tablets with updated specifications for some time, it has been a while since we’ve seen any new high end tablets from the company. Recent offerings have usually been more budget oriented devices like the MeMO Pad series, or the hard to find ASUS PadFone, with the spot for a more standard tablet being left unfilled.

Today’s review takes a look at a tablet that doesn’t pick up where the Transformer series left off, but instead kicks off a new line of tablets from ASUS under the ZenPad brand. There are a few different ZenPad tablets on the market, with multiple SKUs for each product creating even more versions. The tablet I’m looking at today is the ASUS ZenPad S, and more specifically, the ZenPad S Z580CA, which is ASUS’s most high end tablet offering. To find out everything you need to know about ASUS’s flagship tablet read on for the full review.

Understanding Qualcomm’s ImproveTouch

Although the Xperia Z4 Tablet was announced as far back as MWC, it wasn’t until recently that the enhanced noise rejection of the touchscreen was really shown off. At first it wasn’t exactly clear how this was accomplished, but it turns out that this is a Qualcomm technology at heart, namely improveTouch. For those that are unfamiliar with this technology I’ve attached a video from Qualcomm demonstrating the technology below.

At a high level, improveTouch uses a Snapdragon SoC to effectively replace aspects of external touchscreen controllers. This is done by moving touch processing from the touch screen controller to the SoC’s application processor. By doing this, it’s possible to enable faster sampling rates/lower touch latency for the digitizer and more advanced noise rejection algorithms like water droplet rejection. Although improveTouch currently doesn’t support underwater touch, according to Qualcomm it’s technically possible to implement such features in the future. It’s also possible for do additional advanced context awareness/sensor fusion with this system, such as improved proximity sensing with the use of a traditional IR sensor and the touch screen.

One obvious potential pitfall of such a move would be that power consumption could increase significantly over traditional systems, but according to Qualcomm power consumption is competitive with other solutions when at the same sampling rate and processing complexity, partially because touch controller solutions tend to lag on process node. For applications where the display is off and the AP is usually asleep like double-tap to wake, improveTouch has something called the Autonomous Touch Engine, which has an MCU and other components to avoid waking up the application processor unnecessarily. In addition, the cost of such a solution is competitive as some components from a traditional touch screen solution can be eliminated. It’s also worth noting that the CPU load of this system is said to be minimal and won’t affect performance of the AP, although Qualcomm didn’t disclose a specific figure and it’s likely that CPU load effects depend upon a large number of factors.

Although improveTouch is capable of improving user experience by reducing touch latency and more sophisticated digitizer functions like water droplet rejection, according to Qualcomm there are significant benefits on the OEM side as implementation is simpler with this architecture. By using a narrow-band filter on the analog front-end which is said to have 60 dB SNR (it isn’t clear whether this refers to dynamic range, average SNR, peak SNR, or some other measure), getting the touch sensor to work well with the touch controller is easier than traditional solutions. However, it remains to be seen whether adoption for improveTouch will become significant among OEMs that use Qualcomm SoCs.