Review : Lenovo ThinkPad 8

• PROS
  Small 8-inch form factor is truly portable. All-day battery life. QuickShot cover makes photos a snap. Professional, yet affordable.
• CONSQuickShot smart cover is optional (and extra). No physical keyboard option. Few ports and connections available.
• BOTTOM LINE
  The Lenovo ThinkPad 8 is an 8-inch Windows tablet that puts your work into a handheld PC you can slip into a coat pocket. It's not a replacement for your work system, but it's an excellent companion to it.

The newest category to spring up in Microsoft's world of Windows tablet PCs is the 8-inch tablet—small enough to be held in one hand and let you take Windows 8 on the go. The Lenovo ThinkPad 8 ($534, as tested) is Lenovo's first 8-inch tablet for the business set, the ThinkPad equivalent of the Lenovo Miix 2 8. It has a lot to offer, but can it replace your laptop? Not quite, but it's the perfect device to slip into your coat pocket, letting you walk away from your desk without having to step away from important work.

Design

While tablet designs usually don't vary much from one model to the next, the ThinkPad 8manages to inject the ThinkPad aesthetic into the small 8-inch form factor surprisingly well. The back of the device is matte-black aluminum, with a grippable texture and slightly rounded edges that make it comfortable to hold. The tablet is made with one-handed use in mind, and is oriented vertically, with the Windows button at the bottom of the screen.

The tablet measures 0.35 by 5.2 by 8.8 inches (HWD), and weighs less than a pound (14.2 ounces). It's lighter than the Toshiba Encore (15.6 ounces), though it is an ounce or two heavier than the Dell Venue 8 Pro (13.2 ounces) and Lenovo's other 8-inch tablet, the consumer-focused Lenovo Miix 2 8 (12 ounces).

The front features an 8.3-inch, In-Plane Switching (IPS) display that offers 1,920-by-1,200 resolution. The screen offers rich colors and wide viewing angles—nearly 180-degrees—so you won't need to worry about holding the tablet at a certain angle just to read off of it. The display is a fraction of an inch larger than that of most other 8-inch tablets, including the Lenovo Miix 2 8. That extra 0.3-inch won't feel larger in your hand, but it adds enough length to fit in a couple of extra lines of text when reading, and a slightly less cramped feel, thanks to the extra screen real estate. An anti-smudge coating helps keep fingerprints at bay, and the display is protected from scratches and cracks with a layer of Asahi Dragontrail glass. The capacitive-touch display will track up to 10 points of touch, double the five-point maximum offered on other 8-inch tablets.

Our review unit came with Lenovo's QuickShot smart cover. The cover attaches to the side of the tablet with a magnetic spine. Thanks to magnets in both the cover and the tablet chassis, the QuickShot cover won't attach in the wrong orientation, and when it does attach, it does so easily and stays securely in place. When the cover is closed, the tablet goes to sleep, but it has a couple other tricks to offer. The cover can be used to prop up the tablet in tent mode, and when folded back around, the corner of the cover can be folded down to automatically pull up the rear-mounted camera—hence the QuickShot name. It's a small touch, but it's worth mentioning if only because it's so intuitive and clever. While our review unit included the QuickShot cover, it is sold as an optional accessory, which adds $35 dollars to the price of the tablet.

While you can purchase the ThinkPad 8 with or without the QuickShot cover, it doesn't come with a physical keyboard. While the onscreen keyboard offered by Windows 8 will be adequate for entering it URLs or pecking out a Tweet or a status update, you'll want something like the Microsoft Wedge Mobile Keyboard, which connects via Bluetooth, and has a compact size to make it just as mobile as your tablet.

Features
Going around the edges of the tablet, you'll find buttons for volume control and power on the right, along with a micro-USB 3.0 port, which doubles as the power connector. On the left, a micro-HDMI port provides output for TVs and monitors, and a cover pulls back to reveal slots for microSD card and a SIM card slot. On the bottom of the tablet, centered below the Windows button, is a stereo headset jack. The tablet has accelerometers for automatic screen rotation, and vibration feedback for typing with the on-screen keyboard or using the Windows button.

The ThinkPad 8 has two built-in cameras, a front-facing 2-megapixel camera with dual-array microphones for video conferencing, and a rear-facing 8-megapixel camera with auto-focus and flash, which captures both still images and video. The rear-camera is also a step up from the 5-megapixel camera offered on the Lenovo Miix 2 8. The cameras aren't spectacular—nor would we expect them to be—but the the Quick Shot cover makes snapping a photo or shooting a video clip easy and intuitive. Using the rear-facing 8-megapixel camera, indoor photos look alright, but the auto-focus has some trouble with fine details, even in ideal lighting. Outdoor photos seem to offer better focusing, but bright light tends to leave images looking washed out, shadows swallow up any detail, and everything in between is pretty dark. This is an even bigger issue in video, where transitions from light to dark are slow. The front-facing camera has some of the same lighting issues, but the fixed focus keeps the user looking clear at arms length, and it still works well enough for video chat services like Google Hangouts or Skype.

Inside, the tablet is outfitted with several business-friendly features, like TPM 2.0, tools for mobile device management, and an auto-connecting VPN option that lets you trigger a connection whenever using an app that requires corporate network connectivity. Speaking of connectivity, our review unit came with 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. For storage, the ThinkPad 8 offers 64GB of flash memory, which can be supplemented with an additional 32GB or 64GB microSD card.

Our review unit came equipped with Windows 8.1 Pro, which many business users will want to opt for, thanks to its IT-friendly features. However, if you choose to configure this system with a standard version of Windows 8.1, the ThinkPad 8 also comes with a complimentary copy of Microsoft Office, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Given the price difference—choosing Windows 8.1 Pro adds $100 to the base price—this might be puzzling, but the consumer version of Office isn't intended for business use.

With Windows 8.1 Pro, the ThinkPad 8 comes with a 30-day trial of Microsoft Office, along with a 30-day trial of Norton Security. Even without Office, there are still plenty of useful programs pre-installed on the tablet, like Evernote, with Skitch for annotating images and adding sketches to notes, Hightail (formerly YouSendIt) for sharing large files, Kindle and Zinio reading apps, and a number of Lenovo-branded utilities for support and system settings, Lenovo QuickCast 2.0 for sharing content across multiple devices, and Lenovo Reach for personal cloud storage. Lenovo covers the ThinkPad 8 with a one-year warranty, with free depot or carry-in repair.

Performance
Like other 8-inch Windows tablets we've seen, the ThinkPad 8 is equipped with an Intel Atom processor. In this case, it's the 1.46GHz Intel Atom Z3770 quad-core CPU, along with 2GB of RAM. This zippy Bay Trail processor helped the ThinkPad 8 to pull ahead of other handheld competitors in PCMark 7, scoring 2,629 points, as opposed to the Dell Venue 8 Pro (2,303 points) or the Toshiba Encore (2,506 points). In Cinebench, the ThinkPad 8 again pulled ahead, scoring 1.31 points, ahead of the Dell Venue 8 Pro's 1.25 points and the Toshiba Encore's 1.23 points.

However, for even better productivity, no Atom CPU can match the power of an Intel Core processor—the Core i5-equipped Microsoft Surface Pro 2 nearly doubled both scores, with 5,248 points in PCMark 7 and 2.83 points in Cinebench. The difference was even more pronounced in multimedia tests, where the ThinkPad 8 completed Handbrake in a respectable 2 minutes 25 seconds, but was unable to complete Photoshop, while the Surface Pro 2 finished Handbrake in 1:13 and Photoshop in 4 minutes 24 seconds.

For graphics rendering, the ThinkPad 8 relies on Intel's integrated graphics solution. While this is suitable for streaming video or video conferencing, it's not suited to more demanding applications. As with the rest of the Atom-powered tablets, the ThinkPad 8 was unable to run most of our gaming and graphics tests.

The energy-efficient processor does offer very long battery life from the slim two-cell, 20.5Wh battery inside. In our battery rundown test, the ThinkPad 8 lasted 7 hours 56 minutes, just long enough to take you through your regular 9-to-5 workday. However, it's not the longest lived of the bunch—the Toshiba Encore actually leads the pack with 8:51, with the Lenovo Miix 2 8 coming just behind (8:37), while the Asus Transformer Book T100TA (64GB) stretches even longer (11:20), thanks to a secondary battery.

Conclusion
The Lenovo ThinkPad 8 is Lenovo's first 8-inch tablet in the business-oriented ThinkPad line, and probably the best business tablet we've seen in this size. However, while Atom-powered tablets continue to get better, they still aren't quite ready for the big time, and this is only the second of the 8-inch Windows tablets we've seen for the workplace (the other is the Dell Venue 8 Pro). Neither one offers the useful flexibility of the Asus Transformer T100TA and its included keyboard dock, and they all fall short of the Editors' Choice Microsoft Surface Pro 2, which is hands-down the best slate tablet of any size we've seen for the workplace. That said, if you want a portable tablet you can use on the go in conjunction with your existing work PC, the Lenovo ThinkPad 8 is worth serious consideration.