Dock
It’s difficult not to wait for the worst
coming from keyboard dock of a convertible tablet, especially when the size of
the screen is only 10 inch – even the 11-inch tablets normally provide more
keyboard room. In brief, this special dock is an interesting surprise. The same
to the tablet, it’s simple and functional, but at least the design language is
holistic, with the slotted plastic of the tablet’s back suitable with the
bottom face of the dock. At close look, you can easily mistake this one with a
hard netbook. The only clue showing that it’s not is the ledge that tightens
the tablet about 1-inch deep. Added with the optional connection array right on
S2110 are 2 ports for USB 2.0, one for micro-USB as well as a large-sized SD slot
on the front. Dock also packs an additional 2-cell battery (6,340mAh), doubling
the capacity to 20 hours.
We will start talking about the true
convenience in a short while, but first, we have a controversial problem with Lenovo.
As S2110 looks like a netbook when closing, logic will be that it should be
opened in such way. But it’s not. The depression under trackpad won’t leave enough
space for the finger to be easy to slide in, leading to clumsy 2-hand operation
to actually pry 2 halves up. And in fact it’s our main complaint with the
function of dock.
The keys are pretty hard and bounce to the
back with the softness we’re familiar with on laptop layout (especially of
Lenovo). There’re not many faults here – we continue to be wowed by how easy it
is to type with the dock. One field making us have several problems is the size
of the functional keys – they’re just too small and our fingers were trained
for a different arrangement. Over time and with single-minded use, you can
certainly be able to adapt to this cramped space, but it hinders fast typing.
The
keys are pretty hard and bounce to the back with the softness we’re familiar
with on laptop layout (especially of Lenovo).
Trackpad also works pretty well, but its
finish is a little too sticky for our hobbies and doesn’t allow the fingers to
slide as smooth as you expect. There’re several times, though not frequently,
when the pointer on the screen drops back or glides pass the screen too fast. For
most of traditional settings, you can adjust the speed of the pointer, but you
can’t do it here, so get used to it. Scrolling through the home screens can be
handled by taping left or right or by putting the pointer at the far edge of a
page and hitting the trackpad. Similarly, to access the capacitive navigators,
you can select them by using the pointer or using the dedicated keys available
on then physical layout.
Performance and battery life
We won’t consider S2110 as too slow – it’s
not. The tablet is actually pretty fast when opening and closing apps, but we
will stop calling it fast due to the weird transition animations which are
certainly slowing it somewhat. Besides that troublesome problem, the tablet
didn’t make any performance problems, running smoothly and not having any
bothersome force-to-close cases that we see so often on another minimized ICS tablet,
Xperia Tablet S. as you will notice on the table below, fast browsing
performance and scrolling continue to catch up with our quick swipes, but the
full background pages take about 30 for a complete load. Pinch-to-zoom feature
also works well, resizing text and selected images is fast despite having some
white spaces from time to time
Lenovo
IdeaTab S2110
·
Quadrant: 5,037
·
Vellamo: 2,222
·
AnTuTu: 6,762
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms): 1,675
·
GLBenchmark Egypt Offscreen (fps): 56
·
CF-Bench: 9,194
Lenovo
IdeaTab S2110
Sony
Xperia Tablet S
·
Quadrant: 4,349
·
Vellamo: 1,459
·
AnTuTu: 11,301
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms): 1,608
·
GLBenchmark Egypt Offscreen (fps): 68
·
CF-Bench: 12,625
Sony
Xperia Tablet S
Asus
Transformer Pad TF300
·
Quadrant: 3,695
·
Vellamo: 1,320
·
AnTuTu: N/A
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms): 2,120
·
GLBenchmark Egypt Offscreen (fps): N/A
·
CF-Bench: N/A
Asus
Transformer Pad TF300
SunSpider: lower score is better
As we have seen before, the processing
power is not necessarily equivalent to practical use. But here, the 1.5GHz quad-core
S4 of S2110 creates some points which put it in the position against the rival
Tegra 3. Raw performance, as verified by the Quadrant and Vellamotesting
results, is pretty stable, but the tablet of Lenovo is inferior in terms of
performance and browser, with average frame rate yielding to Xperia Tablet S of
Sony and SunSpider time is a little slower. However, facing apple-to-apple with
TF300, S2110 is an obvious winner.
S2110 has pretty good battery life… if you
add the dock. Separating it from the keyboard, the tablet lasts 8 hours 7 minutes,
staying at the bottom of our list – sitting somewhere between the 7-inch tablets
and 2 10-inch tablets based on Tegra of Acer. In combination with the
supplemental 6,340mAh battery in the dock, you will have about 15 hours of
consecutive use. Now, remember that these results are originated from our
standard test, including repeating a video continuously. With a role as a daily
use device, it will last for several days, and it bases on our tests with the Twitter
synchronization every 15 minutes, an active push email account, brightness setting
at 50%, as well as radio Wi-Fi and GPS.
