it had been days….weeks perhaps. Time escapes you when you’ve gotten hooked. When you’re away from it, it gnaws at you like a rabid wilder beast or perhaps is more like those people who feel quite happy running each other over in the US when Black Friday comes around every year. A cold sweat decends the brow and all the while, you know it’s waiting. The hunger, the endless hunger…for just one more go on that annoying birds thingy before you finally sleep.

Yes, I finally have a tablet device.

It’s taken a long time to actually relent on this, and join the Ipad crowd in terms of rubbing a finger all over a screen to leave smeer marks and look at various things on the youtubes, as for the longest time, I honestly saw no real reason to own one. I’d always been in the mindset that if you have a computer, then you’re pretty much done in terms of needing things which you can stream endless amounts of filth on.

Blatant advertising found here….but for what?

But having been looking on the market for for something portable to potentially work from and well, watch endless amounts of filth on, I stumbled across an offer for a tablet that no-one would really buy. The Lenovo Yoga 10. Not the new HD version that came out recently which costs about £300 ish, but the one that started it all, which if you were to read up about it afterwards, suffers from a good number of problems.

Of course, at the asking price of £170 plus £25 for a 64GB memory card from that evil empire of Amazon, and you suddenly stop asking questions. Until you use the thing.

There were a great number of issues in terms of performance and applications with the device in the beginning, such as remarkably the interface changes Lenovo forces on you to make it act like an Ipoo, but then the text for the applications magically gets truncated, leaving wondering if the application name at the end actually had a warning, like do not use or you will die a painful death. There’s quite a number of those actually on Google Play….hmm…

Random Application crashes are a given with pretty much everything, including our beloved phones with a battery life of three seconds, but bloody hell these were getting frequent. Remarkably it appears that half the icons you would expect to see for using the thing correctly weren’t there, leaving you wondering what the hell to press! But overall it’s still been a very good buy, for the battery life alone. That has been nothing short of impressive for a device of its type and for what I was using it for (filth…mmm) it was more than fine to the task at hand of using my hand to….never mind.

It took a major update of the firmware to Android 4.4 to finally get the device to a point of being amazing. More so considering the cost of the device to begin with.

Now with added things!

But this update has not been without problems for a number of things, as the rabid dogs that haunt the Lenovo forums will attest to; https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Idea-Android-based-Tablets/bd-p/Idea_Slate including the issue where over the air updating doesn’t work and you have to find a spare memory card to download the update to and then maybe figure out how to reach the boot menu for the device, including appeasing the gods by slaying a virgin and unleashing the dogs of war to get the thing to work.

It seems that there are problems with displaying content from the likes of Netflix a lot of the time, which then means that you have to go back to the front room to enjoy your dose of Breaking Bad, instead of watching it while having a s**t.

Application crashes remain, as does some performance problems, but that will be down to the cheaper hardware at play so can’t really dwell on that too much, and to be honest, that was fixed in the later version of the tablet, the Levovo Yoga 10 HD+ Ultra Super Deluxe Championship Edition. Which of course is a lot more money and itself has problems too, such as bad display issues.

Where’s the tasteful foreign porn?

Luckly, I’ve missed the majority of problems that was reported, but occasionally, Netflix did have a problem with an episode of Prison Break which then corrected itself, so no ideas why that occurred. Google Maps is broken for sure, so for now, it remains in the hands of the evil overlords at Lenovo to resolve.

But the update made a massive difference to the device and now, it’s a lot better just by updating the software and a lot of issues which were there, have no gone, and certain applications actually now just work, including showing the missing icons etc. It’s just what the doctor ordered. If he were to order tablets for a tablet….or whatever.

The main thing to take away from Tablet devices I suspect is that you do have a touch based computer and therefore you should expect the same levels of crap that you do with computers in general. Maybe of course if you spend for too much money, you will get the better experience, but that is the thing. You cannot say that is always the case of course.

For my first dip in the world of tablet ownership, the fact that I can use Teamviewer to connect to the Evilbeast (the Uber Beast of Leisure for the Lord of Leisure naturally) to play Hearthstone while taking a dump, priceless.

Perhaps considering the state of the tablet, I would entertain a better model in future and perhaps not from Lenovo too considering their current level of support, but for now; The Yoga is a goer. Much like some people I’ve seen in a cocktail bar in Hammersmith, just with less vomit stains.