A couple years ago, I got back into mobile gaming once I had my Fold 4. But
as you can see, I went back to a candy bar phone, meaning I'm missing the big
screen. But
thankfully, this is the Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 3, an 8.8 in
screen, an 8.8 in screen tablet that of
course is centered around gaming. I don't even get to see what it actually
looks like because the at Dbrand sponsored this. So, this is what
it looks like with our glow circuit skin. Maybe I'll peel it off later. But, let's see what else is in the box here.
Yeah, type-C to type- C cable. This is like average length, like 3 ft. Yes, an
actual charging brick. Thankfully, tablets have not gone the route of
getting rid of them yet. How fast is this? It's 65 watt. Oh, I guess there
was actually Never mind this big box that was over top. I don't know what's
in here. Oh, it looks like some accessories. Oh,
is this like a case with a kickstand? In most cases, a kickstand case I've always
found seems kind of irrelevant, but if you pair a controller to your gaming
tablet, you could set this down and be hands-free and it can just sit there on
a plane or something. So, I don't necessarily mind it, unless that's not
what this is. Okay. Oh, there's screen protectors.
Well, what the heck is this blue plastic? Oh my goodness. Oh, is this
just to help you apply the screen protector? Okay, never mind. I was
wrong. There's no kickstand, but this little case that has a cover on it can
fold around. What the There we
go. That took a little bit. Or kickstand
with, you know, you need some skill to apply it, but there we go. That works. And you can sit down with your
controller and then Oh, that's slick.
It's really like 8.8 in seems small in
your head for a tablet, but I don't know. This would be good gaming real
estate. I'll have to try it out later. Let me just clean off the desk here. I'm
actually going to remove our case here just so we can see all of the external
ports on the tablet itself. On this side, you've got a bottom charge USBC.
On here, you've got a second USBC port, which is fantastic because depending on
your orientation, you could have the cable coming out the bottom or the side,
whatever is most comfortable for you. On this side, you've got your power and your volume rocker. And then on the top,
it looks like those are just speaker holes. I want to talk about the rest of
the design, but I need to go over the Dbrand talking points before I'm allowed to rip this skin off. Dbrand sponsored
this video. Like you, we were pretty surprised that they actually make skins
for the Legion Tab 3. I mean, they basically make skins for anything. The W
show desk, Linus' car, probably his coffin at some point. But for tablets,
it's only been the iPad so far. When we as I decided to branch out to the Legion
Tab 3, they said that the glitter bomb case was so atrocious, they decided to
make this out of spite. What? It's glitter bomb? Oh my gosh, they're right.
It's very hard to see. So, I guess if you're full of spite and don't want to
carry your Legion Tab 3 around in its glitter bomb case, don't worry. Dbrand's
got you covered. We're currently rocking the LT Cross Glow Circuit skin, but they
have a variety of skins. Head to shortlinus.com to check it out. Beat the
tariffs with the Shiptorm sale event at ltstore.com. We are offering free
shipping on any order worldwide over
$150. So, it's a great time to pick up a commuter backpack, a precision
screwdriver, or a stylish framework hoodie. Oh, I took it off to put on this
jacket. The point is, we've also got never-before-seen pricing on our MCM
Essentials bundle. Don't miss it. We'll have it linked down below. Okay, now
that we've gotten paid, let's take this skin off cuz I want to see the actual
design. Oh my goodness. Oh, is it just
Uhoh. Okay, maybe their skin is better. Yep, that's the back of it.
Legion. It really doesn't have much else to say, man. This I can already tell.
Fingerprint magnet. Holy cow. Okay,
maybe you do actually want a skin or a case or something. Well, if you're able
to overlook the kind of boring back. The processor in here is flipping awesome.
It is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3,
so very similar to some flagship phones, meaning I'm expecting the gaming
performance on this thing to be mint. And with 256 GB of storage, plenty of
room to install all your games or I guess take your photos with your tablet.
We'll have to see how that camera actually performs. 12 GB of RAM, 165 Hz
refresh rate screen, and again 8.8 in, which I don't know, it feels like a
weird size for a tablet. In my mind, I'm always thinking of tablets as kind of
being these bigger, bulkier items, and phones are usually smaller. This is kind
of that weird middle ground where it's too big to be a phone, not big enough to
be a tablet. But maybe that'll make, you know, holding on and actually gaming a
lot easier. Yep, that's a tablet that runs Android. Android 14 is what it
comes with out of the box. And then they've promised three versions of Android as updates. Now that I've got it
in my hand though, you know what? 8.8 in is going to be comfortable for gaming. I
think you can reach the center if you need to any buttons, but most of your buttons for controls are going to be
over here or something. And I think the resolution of 2560 x600 is lower than
you know OnePlus but that tablet is also 4 in bigger diagonally. So you end up
like this while holding it and that's more uncomfortable for something like
gaming which again also uses the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. The advertised
500 nits though is pretty low by phone standards. So I'm curious to see how it
looks with some content. Let's just start playing a video here. That is max
brightness. Yeah, that is uh not very bright. It's
fine for indoor use. I also have two bright studio lights shining directly at
my face. And they do claim that it'll go up to 900 nits if it detects you're
outdoors or something. But they also gave a warning if you do actually go to
that max brightness. Things like it'll start to heat up a lot and you might
even risk burn-in, which honestly really nice that they give that warning. I
think that's really fair that they kind of know their limitations. And
realistically, I don't think you're going to be walking around outside gaming on it anyways. this is probably
fine. And reading the lab notes here, it does seem that it was around that 500
nits mark, sometimes slightly below. And in the high brightness mode, it was kind
of the same story. I think it's fair to say though that the 40 or so points that
it's off from the claimed brightness is probably not noticeable for most people,
but it didn't quite reach what they claimed. Wo, those are really loud.
Whoops, I hit the power button. I meant to turn it down. Those were very loud.
And overall, I don't think I noticed any sort of weird crackling like I have on
some other phones when they go to max volume. Kind of want to hear it on 50%
volume, though. Oh, wow. 50% is a lot
quieter, but I can't tell if that's just cuz 100% was so loud.
These are good sounding speakers for a
tablet. Maybe I just have my expectations so low with mobile devices
and their speakers cuz quite often they never sound that great. But I guess
being a slightly bigger device, maybe you're able to fit slightly bigger or
better quality speakers in it. I think gaming on that would be awesome. Dude,
do they have a waifu as well? No way. Bypass charging. When bypass charging is
neighbor, the motherboard will draw power directly from the charger. Oh, okay. That's great. I think a lot of
modern devices do have this. It's nice that they let the user know though that
it is okay to keep your device plugged in while you're gaming because there's
kind of a common misconception with a lot of people that if you're using your
phone while it's plugged in, it degrades the battery. But in this case, they let
you know, hey, you're good to go. You can play with it plugged in. Let's take
a look at the camera. I quite often have my doubts with these tablet
cameras. O, that's uh that is rough. I
don't really have anything positive to say about it other than it can take a
photo. I would definitely never use this to capture a moment of importance. Oh, I
don't even want to take a picture with this. Jeez, man. I look like a ghost,
dude. Holy cow. I I do not look happy
here. Same positive. It can take a photo. I wonder how the video does cuz
it already looks like not 60 FPS video
even though I haven't started it yet. I'm at 1080p. Can I change my frame
rate? Oh, okay. It defaulted to 30 FPS. That's Wait, can it not go to 60 FPS?
Again, it ah this is this is where it gets weird because like this is marketed
as a gaming tablet, so I don't necessarily blame them for not investing
in the camera quality, but I also feel like you're going to give this to a kid
probably. It's my guess. A kid's going
to want to take photos of their dog or video and like, wouldn't you want them
to be able to capture some kind of cool moments? One thing I noticed as we're compiling things and once I've booted a
game, there's a tiny little tab here which if I slide out or move. There it
is. Ah, it gives me a bunch of stats for
gaming here. Clean
RAM. I cleaned my RAM. You can have volume, brightness control. This is kind
of a This is a really sleek just quick access menu. I actually kind of like it.
Balance mode, performance mode, but it'll tell you Yeah. how fast your CPU
is actually clocked to. Now, so there's performance, energy saving, and
balance. Interesting. That's kind of cool. And we actually got some numbers
and results from Labs on those different modes there. And the difference between
the two modes was actually pretty significant. In Geekbench, which is more
of a single core CPU test, it went from about 1,300 to 2200 in the score between
the default and performance mode. In multi-core, we also saw roughly a 2,000
score increase. in 3D Mark, which is more of a GPU intensive test, it also
went up by like 400 points or so, which
means that performance mode is actually doing something, which is kind of cool
to see the result of. So, you can know confidently when you turn it on, you're
getting the best performance possible, which if you're going to do long gaming
sessions and you want the best performance, how does this thing do? Cuz sometimes smaller devices can overheat
and you'll actually see your performance get worse. Well, our Labs results showed
that it was within 10% of the very first
run to the very worst run after a long period of time, which honestly could be
quite a good advantage over some phones which can thermal throttle pretty
easily. Can get long game sessions in and then with that bypass charging, you
could probably sit here for a long period of time and game long enough to
wait for your freaking shaders to compile. God Call of Duty. In the
battery discharge test, it actually lasted the longest out of the three
tablets we tested between the Google Pixel and the OnePlus. It gave us like
14 hours of battery playback. And as for charging the device, it actually charged
the fastest out of our three tests as well. On a 45 watt charger, it was 60
minutes to go from 0 to 100%. Fastest charging and the longest lasting out of
the devices. Dude, that is a huge W for this thing. Can I get some W's in the
chat? Sorry, I forgot to start streaming from my Lenovo Legion broadcast center.
Once the game loads, I'm actually going to try toggling between the three modes here. I want to see if I could notice a
difference because you might be better off playing in one of the lower performance modes if it means it gives
you longer battery life if you're away from a charger. And I think there's
probably going to be select games that will benefit more or
less. Dude, I'm ready for war. Oh yeah, dude. This is very high
refresh rate. We are in the performance mode
right now. So, I kind of want to get to the front of the ship after we've run around a little bit. Now, let's turn it
down to the lowest mode, the energy saving
mode. Oh my gosh, it is immediately
unplayable. Like, this would be a terrible mobile
experience. Okay, let's turn it to the
balance mode. Hey, you know what? This feels
pretty good. It's not bad.
Oh, die. Hey, I got a kill. No, I'm testing the game modes, please. And then
we go back up to performance mode. Yeah, and you can absolutely notice a
difference between these two. Okay, that's pretty sick. That's really good
to know that it is actually doing something. But again, depending on the
game you're playing, if you're playing something like Bellatro, you could probably get away with being in the
energy saving modes and not have to worry about your battery life. Then the
big screen is kind of awesome, dude. It's a little awkward for this game cuz
reaching to the center to tap any of your, you know, buttons in the middle
weird, but for some other games, this bigger screen is freaking awesome. Now
that we've played and loaded for a couple minutes, the back center is warmer than
where my hands are, but it's not uncomfortable. Like, I would not say
that is hot. You could absolutely hold that. I've been gaming for like 3 or 4
minutes. If you gave it a long time, maybe it would be too hot. But no, it's
not warm at all right now. Honestly, I'm kind of impressed with this little
thing. Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4. So again, you could use a controller or something
with it. It's got kind of everything that you would expect a modern mobile
device to have. And coming in at $550, you honestly get quite a lot. But I
mean, you're getting dangerously close to some other mobile devices at that
price, like the Steam Deck or the ROG Ally. So, you got to really like Android
specific mobile games if you wanted to get this over that. Well, I died. But
you guys can let me know down below. What do you guys think about a Android gaming tablet? I think it's actually
pretty cool. But if you want to see a gaming phone, go check out the Red Magic
10 Pro that I did.