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Posted: February 23, 2018 |
Usefully the volume controls on the side swap polarity so no matter which way you have it, the top button increases volume while the bottom one reduces it. There is also a screen adjustment toggle in the settings pull-down that makes subtle changes the brightness, contrast and sound settings for Tilt (at a slight angle), Stand (upright) and Hold (handheld) modes. That’s the sort of attention to detail I like to see.Assuming you want to hold the Yoga rather than rest it on your desk, bed or coffee table, the bar makes an excellent hand grip. I took to holding the 605g Yoga 10 by the bar as an ebook reader like a Catholic takes to guilt. If holding your 10-incher in your hand is something you anticipate doing regularly [Steady on, old chap – Ed] the Yoga 10 is self-recommending.The rounded edge also does a few extra jobs. It houses the power button and a 3.5mm audio jack in places you never have to search for and behind the flip stand are the slots for Micro SD and SIM cards, though there is an issue with the former: the memory card slides all the way into the slot so I only managed to trigger the spring to get it back out with the aid of an expertly bent paper clip. The tubular section also means there is room for two forward-facing speakers at each end. The sound buttons cleverly switch so the topmost of the two always ups the volume, whichever way up you hold the tablet Now these speakers - despite Dolby Digital Plus enhancement - are not exactly game changers and sound just a wee bit tinny. But they do pump out a fair old volume and make a decent fist of stereo separation. And the position means you are not forever accidentally covering them with your hands when holding the device.For it’s decidedly mid-range asking price - £249 direct from Lenovo - the Yoga 10 is pretty well made too. The silver and black casing feels solid and robust while the hinged stand is reassuringly stiff and I suspect well able to withstand a lifetime of use and abuse.If all this sounds too good to be true, there are some downsides and cut corners. The 1280 x 800 LCD IPS screen isn’t the sharpest around as you can guess from the numbers, and though it is very bright and demonstrates excellent levels of contrast, the colours are a tad wishy-washy and lacking in saturation. Viewing angles are solid though, which is just as well given the form-factor. Similarly, the chipset isn’t going to set your pubic hair on fire if you use the slab as a literal laptop device. Running the show is a Mediatek MT8125 system-on-a-chip boasting a 1.2GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 processor, PowerVR SGX544 GPU and 1GB of RAM. That’s a combo that returns an AnTuTu score of around 13,400 which is on the lower side of average in this era of devices that can turn in scores of well over 30,000.Still, 13,400 is large enough number to suggest the ability to yank the skin off a least a couple of rice puddings at the same time.And so it proves. The Yoga 10 can run games like Real Racing 3 and NOVA 3 without any trouble, and in use it never feels slow or hesitant even if it’s not as supremely fluid as the new Nexus 7.I’ve read a comment in a British broadsheet that when updating apps the Yoga 10 “slows to a crawl” - granted, a problem with many an Android device running a less-than-manly chip - but let me say for the record that in this case No It Doesn’t. Yes, it slows a little, but come on, for £250 you can’t realistically expect the sort of performance you will get from a 10-inch Android slab costing £150 more or an iPad costing at least twice as much. Internal storage is pegged at 16GB - or 12GB and change after system requirements - but that Micro SD slot is good for cards up to 64GB in capacity, so this is a feature of the specification you don’t really need to lose sleep over.And rest of the boys in the band? The 5MP main camera is dismal (but who really cares?) while the 1.6MP webcam is very good indeed, so at least Lenovo is spending the money in the right place. The cameras are also cunningly positioned. The main snapper is built into the right-hand end of the bulge so it’s directly above your hand when you are holding the Yoga in portrait orientation in your left hand. Ditto the webcam, which, when you hold the Yoga in the same way, is directly above the centre of the screen. Lenovo really has thought all this design through with some diligence.
Battery life is impressive thanks to a 9,000mAh power pack that will pony up well over nine hours of 1080p video playback or half as much again of more mixed usage, and there is support for USB hosting out of the box. GPS, Bluetooth and single band 802.11n Wi-Fi are all present and correct, but there’s no NFC chip or IR transmitter. Given the price, that is exactly what I expected. There was some bloatware pre-installed on my review unit, such as Navigate 6, but all of them can be removed just as you would any other downloaded app.The Yoga 10 runs Android 4.2 with a Lenovo makeover which essentially means the design has been tweaked and the app tray has vanished in a misguided attempt to give the interface a more iOS-ish feel. This is a pain until you get around to dumping all the apps you seldom use into one folder after which it ceases to be an issue. If you want an app tray, just install a good third-party launcher like Nova Launcher. Finally, Lenovo deserves a tip of the hat for only asking a £30 premium for the 3G version of the Yoga 10, which retails for £279.In line with its asking price, the Yoga 10 has a mediocre screen resolution and a mid-range chipset, but it still does everything you are likely to want a tablet to do and with a decent lick of speed. What separates it from the herd is the rather clever form-factor, which pays dividends should you wish to pop it on a desk or hold it in your hand.If you plan on using your tablet primarily for reading books, watching videos or video chatting then the stand-me-up and sit-you-down stand options and ergonomic bulge are well worth having. Seagate introduced its direct access Kinetic Drive technology in October, with a 4TB drive. These drives are accessed over Ethernet by applications, and have object storage style access using key:value stores. Seagate said; "The majority of today’s mass scale object applications do not need either file semantics or a file system to determine and maintain the best strategy for space management on a device." It said the total cost of ownership for a disk-based storage infrastructure could be lowered by up to 50 per cent for cloud storage service providers with such drives. In effect the drive space management functionality provided by a storage array controller is divided between the drives, which are more intelligent, and server system software.The announcement including supporting quotes from Basho Technologies, Dell, EVault, Huawei, Hyve, Rackspace, Sanmina (Newisys division), Supermicro, SwiftStack, Yahoo and Xyratex. Note that last company's involvement.If either WD or Toshiba support the Ethernet carried object style access then Kinetic drive technology has a more assured future. We watch and wait. WD went and reinvented hybrid drive technology with its Black Dual Drive laptop spinner. This featured a vastly larger slug of flash than other hybrid drives, at 120GB, and presented it as a second logical drive even though it was in the same 2.5-inch enclosure as a 1TB spinning disk drive. This drive theoretically provides flash speed for the host operating system and applications while also providing a terabyte of cheap disk capacity for data; the best of both flash and disk worlds.Will Seagate and Toshiba follow suit? They are not saying. Once again, we watch and wait.The product's flash and disk separation marked it out as different from Apple's Fusion drive which presents two physically separate drives, one flash and one disk, as a single logical drive. August - Toshiba invests in Zadara which is developing technology for virtual private storage arrays in the cloud. It said; "The two companies will be working together to introduce innovative Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) products using cutting-edge technologies they have each developed." September - WD buys Virident and gives it to, yes, its HGST subsidiary which handles nearly all matters flash for WD (except for hybrid flash/disk drives). Seagate rejected a chance to buy Virident December - Seagate buys Xyratex for its HDD test equipment, its OEM disk array enclosure, and its ClusterStor HPC array businesses On the financial front Seagate is looking more likely to get a $630m boost to its coffers courtesy of an arbitration award over WD recruiting on of its execs and allegedly using secret Seagate information to develop new read/write head technology. This had risen to $706m in October.
It seems noteworthy that with Helium-filled drives from HGST and Kinetic Drives from Seagate there is no second source. It used to be a rule in enterprise disk drive purchases that you never restricted yourself to single source disk drive technology. That idea seems to no longer apply, rendering customers for such drives utterly dependent on one supplier. The benefits of new technology, such as Kinetic or SMR drives, outweighs the single source risk for the large customers involved.In 2013 we saw the three disk drive manufacturers and their strategies diverging. WD is going after flash products more determinedly while bringing out its SMR tech and HGST its Helium-filled drive products. Seagate is building disk-based products for the cloud and these are taking precedence over its flash storage activities, for now.
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