Lenovo Smart Tab M8 8 Inch HD Tablet with Google Smart Dock

Used my Google login and set to childrens mode. Installed amazon kids, BBC kids and YouTube kids. Works really well. Quicker than the ‘very popular tablet’ for kids we had before. Bought a case and screen cover from amazon and both fit well. Not sure it would do for gaming as we’ve never tried.

Excellent value for the money paid. Ticks all the boxes. On hindsight wish I’d bought the bigger screen size.

I like the size and that it is light weight and fits in my handbag like a kindle. The screen is clear, but I don’t seem to be able to zoom in and out of pages with fine adjustment as I could with my Samsung so sometimes pages and print are too big or small. It is hard to find information about how to do things with it, little information is supplied about setting it up and using and there isn’t always something on the internet. Eg moving apps and data to an SD card. The camera and sound are ok, I wasn’t expecting high quality as this is a cheaper tablet. So far the batter life is excellent, often lasting a couple of days. Generally it works quickly, but it seems to freeze sometimes for no reason and I end up having to close the app. It seems to come with a lot of pre loaded. Stuff. I’ve removed some I don’t want but can’t remove others and they use a lot of space on it. I was quickly up to 70% full so had to buy an SD card.

I wanted a tablet again, mainly to play games on and watch videos. And for that it is very useful. However be aware the camera is not top quality so if you are getting this tablet based on photography you will be disappointed. But for genuine use and the price I’d say its good. The screen saver part is awkward though, I clicked i didn’t want Google assistance now there’s a black screen when it’s charging not pictures, at the moment. But I’d say the battery is very good. The speakers for its size are definitely great quality. 🙂

My experience with this tablet was both good and bad. The good is very good, excellent screen, responsive to touch, the sound for a tablet this small is very good because it has two side speakers. If you only want to check email and watch YouTube, Netflix and listen to paid for music etc. you won’t have any problems.

And the bad (Considering I have been in IT since the 1980s) and still had difficult to overcome problems:

I wanted to put my own music onto an Micro SD card and there my troubles started. My Windows computer could see the Smart Tab M8 but could not see any files or folders on the M8. So it was not a case of “drag and Drop” unfortunately. I tried using a Micro SD Adapter in Windows and putting my music on it and then putting said SD card into the M8. Then connecting the M8 to the computer only to find nothing had changed. Windows still could not see any of my music files on the tablet. The manual that came with the tablet was absolutely useless. I went online and downloaded a larger manual from Lenovo and that was also useless and did not address my problem. In the meantime, the tablet kept wanting to download updates. I believe it was 3 separate update sessions which took hours and I didn’t have a clue as to what was being updated. Considering I have Fibre broadband I don’t understand why it took so long. I looked online and tried everything that looked like it applied to my problem and still nothing worked. Windows kept trying to install drivers for the tablet but always failed.

In the end I sort of found the solution here:
https://support.lenovo.com/gb/en/solutions/ht504610-connecting-your-android-tablet-to-pc-using-the-usb-cable

The instructions didn’t exactly apply in my case but it gave me food for thought. I had not seen any settings for “Storage” before the 3 time consuming Lenovo updates so I went looking for them. I found them but not as shown in the link above. (My instructions are: Swipe down and select Settings and then Storage. I then selected the micro SD card to be used as “Storage” and hey presto, everything worked as it should).

So, I would advise new owners of this tablet to get all the updates installed before setting up your new tablet. Perhaps I was unlucky and mine had not been updated at all by Lenovo before I received it. I think Lenovo should make a point of telling you to update it first in their terrible manual. But I suppose that’s after Google has finished making all its demands on you of course. They do like to take over our property don’t they!

As an afterthought, and as we are not in the EU anymore, I think it would be nice to be able to cancel the volume limiter brought in by the EU. My 78 year-old ears would be grateful.