This dirt-cheap Lenovo tablet has LTE, a metal design, and great battery life but also a big flaw
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Do you believe in unicorns? Fairy tales? Bigfoot? Extraterrestrial creatures roaming the earth in search for unsuspecting humans to kidnap and probe? If your answer is no to all of those questions (perhaps with the exception of the last one after the latest public claims on that topic), you probably already know that there's no such thing as a perfect tech deal, especially in the wake of events like Amazon's Prime Day 2023 sale.
If you're the least bit familiar with the current state of the tablet market and the tech industry as a whole, it should also be easy to understand that a $99 Android-based device with an 8-inch touchscreen cannot be perfect... or even very good by most 2023 user standards.
But the Lenovo Tab M8 HD LTE can be and arguably is in fact surprisingly good for that incredibly low price point, currently marked down from an original MSRP of $209.99. Yes, you can get an HD display (with an exact resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels), standalone 4G LTE support, a battery life (officially) rated at a reasonable 12 hours on a single charge (in continuous web browsing), and even a premium metal back cover for just one Benjamin for a presumably limited time.
Of course, you will have to make certain compromises and learn to live with a few not-very-impressive features (even by $99 standards), but if you think you can do that, you'll find the specifications mentioned above and the metal design are truly unrivaled in this price bracket.
The software is by far the most important corner the Lenovo Tab M8 HD LTE appears to cut, with Android 9 Pie listed under this section on the company's official product webpage and only an Android 10 update seemingly delivered since the slate made its commercial debut all the way back in 2019.
As far as we can tell, the tablet doesn't have security patches guaranteed going forward either, which is... pretty bad. It's also not great that you'll get a modest 2GB RAM and 32GB internal storage space from your "new" 8-inch device, but at least there's a microSD card slot allowing you to "fix" the latter inconvenience.
At the end of the day, you'll need to decide for yourself if the admittedly major flaws of the Lenovo Tab M8 HD LTE outweigh its equally big affordability, connectivity, build quality, and battery life advantages. You may have to make your decision fast, though, as this totally unique and unprecedented deal is unlikely to last long.
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