Lenovo IdeaTab A2109

The Google Nexus 7 ?and the New Apple iPad ?are our two top-rated tablets, representing the best combinations of price, performance, and features in small- and large-screen sizes. The Lenovo IdeaTab A2109, with an uncommon 9-inch display but a fair $299 (16GB) list price, falls somewhere in the middle. Its solid aluminum build and capable quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor are all well and good, but a chunky form and mediocre screen hold this middle-of-the-road tablet back.

Design and Features
The IdeaTab A2109 is attractively designed, with a brushed aluminum body and distinctive concave edges. But at 9.3 by 6.5 by 0.46 inches (HWD) and 1.26 pounds, it's not exactly sleek. Along the left edge is a 3.5mm headphone jack, a tough-to-slide Orientation Lock switch, and Volume buttons. The bottom panel is bare, while the right side is home to micro USB and micro HDMI ports. Up top is a Power button, and a long plastic strip along the top of the aluminum back houses two speaker grilles and the rear-facing camera. The plastic strip is removable, revealing a microSD card slot, but the flap is very difficult to remove?so much so that it required a small flat head screwdriver to pry open. Once I accessed the slot, my 64GB SanDisk card worked fine to ratchet up the 16GB of onboard storage.?

The 9-inch size is uncommon, with most Android tablets using 7- or 10-inch displays?the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9?is one of the few tablets with a similar sized screen. With a 1,280-by-800-pixel resolution, on paper, the screen is on par with competitors using the same resolution on slightly larger displays. ?It's sharp and bright, but looks like a lower-quality display than the one found on the Asus Transformer Pad TF300, which shares the same resolution, but looks brighter with more vibrant colors.?Also, the screen has a very poor viewing angle, which makes anything off-center look washed out.

For pictures and video, you get a 3-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera.?While the cameras will suffice for stills in a pinch,?producing poor images that suffer from considerable noise and general lack of sharpness,?video is almost unuseable.?The rear-facing camera is capable of 1080p, but the resulting video is about as bad as I've seen on a tablet. Frame rates top out at 12 fps outdoors and drop below 10 indoors, with blurry, out of focus, and choppy video.

As far as connectivity, the IdeaTab A2109 is a?Wi-Fi-only tablet that hooks into 802.11b/g/n networks on the 2.4GHz band. There's also Bluetooth 3.0 and GPS on board, both of which worked fine in my tests.?

Performance and Software
Powering the A2109 is Nvidia's quad-core Tegra 3 processor clocked at 1.2GHz with 1GB RAM. This seems to be the new standard for mid- to high-end Android tablets, which is good, since the chip generally produces fast and responsive performance in all of the devices it powers. The A2109 scored on par with the Nexus 7 in every benchmark, and the tablet felt fast in actual use. Gaming is also solid, and unlike its Qualcomm-powered sibling, the IdeaTab S2110A, it has access to all the exclusive Nvidia gaming titles. It's also much smoother than the S2110A in general, with more polished animations and app transitions. ?

The tablet runs Android 4.0.4 "Ice Cream Sandwich" with the same modifications found on the S2110A. You get the somewhat-gimmicky 3D cube animations, but they're a lot smoother on the A2109. The home screen is populated by various Lenovo widgets, ranging from local weather to calendars and notepads. Preloaded apps include Norton Security, Evernote, Docs To Go, and some games like Cut the Rope HD. And there's a shortcut on the system bar that brings up five options for tweaking the tablet's settings.?

For video, the A2109 supports Xvid, DivX, MPEG4, H.264, and AVI videos at up to 1080p resolution. For audio, MP3, AAC, FLAC, OGG, WAV, and WMA files all played fine. The speakers, while branded with an SRS WOW HD tag, sound weak and lack any substantial bass response.

In our battery rundown test, which loops a video with the screen brightness set to maximum and Wi-Fi switched on, the A2109 lasted an underwhelming 6 hours and 46 minutes. For comparison, the 7-inch Nexus 7 lasted 10 hours, 37 minutes, while the larger screen TF300 lasted 7 hours, 53 minutes on the same test.

Conclusions
The Lenovo IdeaTab A2109 doesn't do enough to stand out. Its unconventional screen size may appeal to those torn between the 7-inch and 10-inch form factors, but the low-quality screen should be a concern. And while it's buoyed by a Tegra 3 chip, its overly thick build makes it less appealing. The $299 price point puts it between the $200 Nexus 7 and the $380 Transformer Pad TF300, both of which I'd recommend over the A2109. Both the Nexus 7 and TF300 offer better screens, thinner designs, and the newest version of Android, 4.1 "Jelly Bean." The A2109 isn't a bad choice per se, but there's really no reason to settle for mediocrity when better options abound.

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