LENOVO LEGION Y700 Gaming tablet
It’s been a while since we reviewed a high-performance Android tablet. Actually, we were pretty surprised by last year’s flagship tablets, all thanks to their refreshed software, upgraded performance powered by snapdragon 870 chip, and a decent display. The one that impressed me most was the Lenovo Tab P11 Pro, also called the Xiaoxin Pad Pro 2021, with a competitive price but still featuring a 90Hz OLED display.
It’s actually happy to see that the brand didn’t stop there and recently released the Legion Y700 gaming tablet. Before I start with this review, let me just say this — It’s the best device with complete tablet features for mobile gaming.
Display
The gaming-oriented Legion lineup is popular in the gaming market. The Y700 is the series’ first tablet that focuses on the gaming experience. At first glance, the Y700 is as compact as an Android tablet. And it’s probably the first Android tablet coming with an 8.8-inch display, which is very close to the latest iPad Mini. However, even with the more compact body, the Y700 doesn’t really downgrade the display configurations.
It’s a 2K-level LCD panel featuring a 120Hz refresh rate and supports Dolby Vision and HDR contents with a maximum brightness of 500nits. Thanks to the 8.8-inch body size, the Y700’s display accuracy is much closer to a mobile phone. In actual use, it offers a decent visual experience, especially in reading or web viewing.
For the color mode, either you can apply the vibrant mode to cover wide P3 Gamut, or just choose the Standard mode for sRGB gamut with better color accuracy. Although the display supports Dolby Vision and HDR content, as an LCD panel, unfortunately, it only features a 1000:1 color contrast. So if you are thinking about having a tablet for watching a lot of videos, I still recommend you to go for the Xiaoxin Pad Pro 2021. The OLED display is still better at presenting deeper and more natural contrast.
Design
But don’t make the decision yet, because we haven’t even talked about what the Y700 tablet is really good at. As you can see, the 8.8-inch size makes the tablet look like a big smartphone. So you can hold it firmly with a single hand, which offers a big difference in user experience from those bigger tablets.
And compared to those 10 or 11-inch models, it’s so portable that you won’t always think about carrying a large backpack for it. And more importantly, the Y700 weighs only 375g, which allows you to grip it for a long time without feeling tired.
Well, the Y700 doesn’t use a one-piece-metal design for its body. Instead, the Y700’s back cover is replaced with a matte-finish glass panel. It still looks good, but also brings a concern: how are the tablet’s cooling efficiency and performance strategies? We will show you the answer in the gaming test part.
Apart from the decent display, the Y700 tablet also comes with dual JBL speakers and brings a pretty impressive stereo sound, especially when playing Dolby Atmos audio. In FPS games like PUBG Mobile requiring strong stereo sounds, it’s even good enough to play the game without using earphones.
Software & Hardware for gaming
To improve the gaming experience on the Y700, Legion borrows the gaming-related software from their gaming phones, and obviously, the software has got optimized well for the tablet. For example, now we can have the Legion Realm app to access all the gaming settings. And during gaming, you can pull down the game assistant from the top of the display and check the phone’s running state and the customized shortcuts.
And you can switch the performance mode from balanced mode to power-saving or performance mode depending on your needs.
But over the hardware, the Y700 doesn’t carry most of the Legion phones’ features, neither the shoulder buttons nor the built-in cooling fans. But the Y700 still gets the upgraded cooling solution and dual X-axis linear vibration motors. The strong haptic feedback does feel good when typing, but unfortunately, there are limited applications for the powerful motors so far. Although the Legion developed a feature called Semi-real vibration for an immersive gaming experience, we only saw three games in the supported list.
And there’s still good news left for the Y700 — it comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack and MicroSD card expansion. It surprisingly supports up to 1TB expanded storage. The full-featured USB Type-C port not only supports up to 45W fast charge but also supports seamless projection as a video-out port.
The Legion Y700 tablet is powered by the widely acclaimed Snapdragon 870 chipset. In addition to the 8+128GB model in my hand, there’s another higher configuration variant of 12+256GB storage.
Performance: durability & stability
About its performance, we are mainly concerned about its durability and stability of high-performance outputs. As you can see, in the three benchmarks, the peak performance we accessed is pretty close to what we have on other Snapdragon 870 models. Then we brought it to the Wildlife extreme stress test in 3DMark. The Y700 achieved 99.4% stability during the 20-round test. And the surface temperature remained under 43℃, which makes us look forward to its gaming stability even more.
In PUBG Mobile, it’s extremely smooth. The performance result is also at the best level that you can have in the game. After playing for a couple of hours, I can say that the Y700 tablet is the best device for gaming. It achieved a balance between the bigger display and the acceptable holding for me. I would be happy to have the Xiaoxin Pad Pro 2021 to watch movies or videos, but to hold it for long-time gaming, it’s just difficult to tolerate the discomfort caused by the weight and size.
In another game Genshin Impact, the Y700 tablet also achieved one of the best results among all the Android models. It’s able to run stably at around 58 to 60fps with minor fluctuation, and the frame rate remained at 59.1 fps. During the 30-min test, no performance throttle occurred on the Y700 tablet and the surface temperature was still kept under 43.8℃. And note that Genshin Impact is one of the heaviest games on the Android platform, which means that the Y700 is very likely to handle most games well at this point, and can continuously run at high performance without serious heating issues.
Even so, we’re still not satisfied. We haven’t yet been exposed to its performance ceiling. So we started another test which is to run the game Nimian Legends under 2K resolution. In this test, the Snapdragon 870 has done the best it could, and eventually, the framerate remained at around 36fps. What surprised us is that its performance wasn’t affected by the temperature control throughout the test. There’s no obvious performance throttling either, although the surface temperature went up to 47℃ at one point.
Battery & charging
In terms of battery and charging, the Y700 is equipped with a 6550mAh battery that supports up to 45W fast charging, and it’s compatible with PD3.0 as well as QC4.0. And I have to show you the included 50W charger. It offers dual charging ports. The Type-C port could offer up to 50W charging efficiency, while the second one offers up to 20W, which makes it compatible with different devices. We all know that manufacturers are rarely this generous.
Coming back to the charging test. The tablet was charged to 40% in 15 minutes and 80% in 30 minutes, taking around 57 minutes to be fully charged. It’s still pretty fast for a tablet.
In addition, the Y700 also supports battery protection mode, where it would supply power directly to the tablet and no longer to the battery, which has the advantage of protecting the battery and reducing the overall heat of the tablet as well.
Verdict
Overall, the Legion Y700 is an excellent gaming tablet that offers a bigger display than a smartphone while having a much better-sustained performance output with a great cooling effect. More importantly, it offers a perfect size for mobile gaming.
In addition, the tablet also brings most software features that we’ve seen on other Lenovo tablets, such as split-screen mode, floating window, and even the PC mode. About these tablet features, you can check out our review video about the Xiaoxin Pad series.
So that’s all I want to say about the Y700 tablet. And the conclusion is still the same. It’s the best device for mobile gaming at this point.
If you play a lot of games on your phone but were never really satisfied, the Y700 could be the best alternative. With such competitive pricing, it won’t let you down.
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