By Will Goodbody, Science & Technology Correspondent
In a world of tablets that increasingly look the same, the Yoga Tab 3 immediately has one stand out feature.
Its innovative design is pretty unique – curved edges, with an unusual barrel shaped spine down the left hand side which houses the battery, adjustable kickstand, camera and speakers.
It may look unusual, but the spine does actually provide quite an effective way of holding the device.
The stand is a little tricky to release, but once moving it rotates through a number of positions, giving a variety of view angles.
There’s also a notch in the stand so that the device can actually be hung from the wall.
Aside from that the funky side bar, there isn’t much else unusual on the outside of this tablet – the power button is set into the side of the spine, there’s a charging port, a volume switch and a headphone jack.
However, the design does seem to have an impact on the weight – and the device does feel a bit heavier than some competitors in the same price range.
Turn it on and the impressive quality of the 8.0" LCD IPS Multi-touch 1280x800 display immediately jumps out at you.
The colours are really vibrant and leap out of the screen.
Inside it is powered by a Qualcomm Quad-Core 1.3GHz processor with 1GB of RAM.
Not the most powerful of set ups, but it suffices nonetheless for the primary purpose of this tablet – watching video - and performance is on the whole pretty good.
It comes with 16GB of on board storage, but there is an SD card slot which enables it to be expanded up to 128GB.
There is only the one camera – an integrated 8MP unit with auto focus built into the side bar – but it rotates so that you can shoot pretty much any direction you want.
The quality is unlikely to win you any photo competitions, particularly if the light is low, but it does the job.
The 2 Cell 6200mAH battery is impressive, however, and will outlast most other similar sized tablets.
The speakers are also good for a device of this size and price range.
It runs on Android 5.1 – not the latest version – but it does what it needs to.
Overall, this is a good simple mid priced tablet, with a twist in the design that will appeal to some, but perhaps not everyone.
Comments welcome via Twitter to @willgoodbody
