Lenovo’ Yoga Tablet 2 Pro road tested

Lenovo's Yoga Tablet 2 Pro is an entertaining chunk of silicon with a great screen, snappy performance and a built-in projector for showing movies on the go.

The Lenovo bristles with features compared to your average Android tablet, but then it should. At $799, this Lenovo sits in the premium tablet category.

For this money you get some up-market features.

The touch screen is a beauty. It's big at 13.3 inches with 2K resolution at 2560 by 1440 pixels and adept at displaying anything from selfies to Hollywood movies through a wide variety of viewing angles.

I reckon the Lenovo's screen rivals the excellent displays on Microsoft's Surface Pro 3 and Apple's iPad Air 2.

Watching movies or anything else on the Lenovo is aided by the built-in stand, which pops out from the back of the case via a push button and props up the tablet. There's a hole in the stand so you can hang the tablet on a hook on the wall, if you wish.

The catch for the stand on the review unit had the annoying habit of unlatching at random. Also, with the stand deployed, the unit will topple over once the screen is pushed past a certain angle.

Despite the large screen, ­projector and stand, the whole plot weighs 950g.

The main event feature with the Yoga Tablet 2 Pro is the built-in projector that lives inside the tubular section at the base of the tablet — the tube also makes a handy carry grip.

Hold a button on the right side of the case down for a few seconds and the projector activates and can be focused via a slider bar on the back of the case.

It won't throw a massive image and requires a degree of darkness to work well, but I found it would produce a very watcheable screen out to about 42 inches diagonal.

Take the Lenovo camping, hang a white sheet over a tent side and you have an instant outdoor movie theatre.

The big 9600mAh battery helps with movie projection ­duties. I had the projector going for well over four hours from a full charge and still had about 15 per cent of juice left in the tank.

I reckon Lenovo should do a Windows version of this tablet for the business market where you could load up Microsoft Office and the projector could be employed in showing PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets on the go. Then again, the new Office Mobile app for ­Android may be enough for some business users.

Performance under Android KitKat version 4.4 was brisk by virtue of the Lenovo's Intel Atom processor and 2GB of system memory, while there's 32GB of storage memory.

Browsing and app multi-tasking was fluid and the big screen makes gaming more fun.

While you can buy a much cheaper Android tablet with decent performance, the Lenovo does offer a unique set of features in one unit.

This story was first published in The Australian.