Tablets Bought a Lenovo Tab M8 FHD: Better than Google Nexus 7 (2013)?

[bousozoku]

I bought a new 7 inch tablet from Lenovo, as I wanted to replace my long gone Google Nexus 7 tablet that was made by ASUS.

The performance is about the same, even though the new one has eight cores, instead of four. Adreno 320 GPU seems old, as in 2nd generation iPod touch old. Android 10 is much smoother than Android 6 on the Nexus 7.

It seemed easier to set up and add recent apps. Android still seems to get in the way sometimes, just like Windows does, though.

Waiting for 128 GB microSD card to supplement 32 GB of storage. Hopefully, they'll work together almost seamlessly.

Malwarebytes seems to work fine, as does LastPass.

Any thoughts?

 

[ian87w]

According to gsmarena, that table is running a mediatek P22. The octa-core is almost meaningless as they're all slow and old A53 cores. Coupled with eMMC storage, well, I would just be glad it runs. These mediatek chips are cheap but sloooow.

My dad had an Lenovo tablet before, quite old one. UI is almost stock Android, but I hated it as it literally lags even on fresh reset. But as long as it runs youtube, my dad was fine with it.

 

[bousozoku]

According to gsmarena, that table is running a mediatek P22. The octa-core is almost meaningless as they're all slow and old A53 cores. Coupled with eMMC storage, well, I would just be glad it runs. These mediatek chips are cheap but sloooow.

My dad had an Lenovo tablet before, quite old one. UI is almost stock Android, but I hated it as it literally lags even on fresh reset. But as long as it runs youtube, my dad was fine with it.

I was just running Galaxy on Fire 2 HD, which the Nexus 7 ran plenty. It didn't seem any different than I remember.

The tablet lags from time to time, but then, so did the 2013 Nexus 7. The 2012 Nexus 7 was viciously fast and horribly slow in cycles. I wasn't expecting iPad mini 5 performance.

I see that the Adreno 320 is from 2012/2013, which is newer than what I thought. It's enough to power 1920x1200 decently. It was apparently the same GPU that was included with the Snapdragon S4 Pro that was in the 2013 Nexus 7.

Obviously, no big, new games for me. My iPhone SE 2020 can handle those.

 

[mi7chy]

Should've taken advantage of the Galaxy S7 8GB/512GB deals for <$200. Current offer with any old iPad 9.7" trade-in including 1st and 2nd gen is $255 for Galaxy S7 6GB/128GB.

https://www.samsung.com/us/shop/discount-program/education/

Always good practice to look up the SoC specs. As mentioned, ARM A53 is low end (you want ARM A7x) along with 12nm and video decoding limited to 1080p30 are several red flags. Mediatek has good SoCs but this isn't one of them.

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/mediatek/helio/p22

 

[bousozoku]

Should've taken advantage of the Galaxy S7 8GB/512GB deals for <$200. Current offer with any old iPad 9.7" trade-in including 1st and 2nd gen is $255 for Galaxy S7 6GB/128GB.

https://www.samsung.com/us/shop/discount-program/education/

Always good practice to look up the SoC specs. As mentioned, ARM A53 is low end (you want ARM A7x) along with 12nm and video decoding limited to 1080p30 are several red flags. Mediatek has good SoCs but this isn't one of them.

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/mediatek/helio/p22

I really didn't want something huge. If I wanted something that big, I would have got one of the low-end iPad models that seems to be US$50 off at any time.

This one seems to be enough to do what the older tablet could do, and I can stop using BlueStacks.

It's interesting to me how many games still don't use Android Play Games to keep track of your progress. I haven't had the tablet since 2016 and a couple of games are still using Facebook to save the progress.

 

[ian87w]

I really didn't want something huge. If I wanted something that big, I would have got one of the low-end iPad models that seems to be US$50 off at any time.

This one seems to be enough to do what the older tablet could do, and I can stop using BlueStacks.

It's interesting to me how many games still don't use Android Play Games to keep track of your progress. I haven't had the tablet since 2016 and a couple of games are still using Facebook to save the progress.

Using Facebook allows them to have access to all your “Friends.”

 

[bousozoku]

Using Facebook allows them to have access to all your “Friends.”

I gave up on Facebook in early 2012, but apparently, they still have my information, even though they said that I would be removed in six months. They just don't care as long as they can sell you to someone else.

Google is not so good, but far ahead of Facebook. I'm glad that Apple isn't really that interested in what I have, as long as I spend it with them.

I'm still adjusting to the tablet, but it seems to be working reasonably well. Android has good stuff, but overall, the ecosystem seems to lack order or reason. One official app will have 12 clones and the clones will do better than the official app so that you never see it again.

I got both of my previous profiles working. It's good having multiple users again. I don't remember Apple getting this out of internal experimentation. At least, the 128 GB microSD card can be logically connected to the internal storage.