Lenovo Yoga 11 MTK 8185 4/128

Excellent purchase

TL;DR: Look elsewhere for a good Android tablet. I know it's not readily available anymore, and kind of an old tablet, but I'm writing this in case folks are looking though these reviews for a used tablet. And also to vent a little. lolI bought this Yoga Tab 11 directly from Lenovo in mid-2022, so I've had it for about two years.I initially bought it because honestly, I thought the kickstand on would be pretty useful. The kickstand is pretty awesome; it's actually quite sturdy and you can adjust it to basically any angle you'd like. Additionally, it has good specifications. It's got a nice display, fast hardware, a decent amount of storage space (and an SD card slot to expand it!), good speakers... or, well...It didn't take long for this device to start showing its many problems. The first thing I noticed is that it would sometimes disconnect from Wi-Fi after a few days of running, and I couldn't turn it back on unless I restarted the tablet. That's pretty annoying, but hey- at least a restart fixes it.Next, though, I noticed while binge-watching some YouTube videos that the speakers would... lose quality after some time? It was a weird, but persistent issue. Not using the speakers for some time would fix it, but it would inevitably do this again.All of this isn't even mentioning how this thing would pester you about joining the "Lenovo User Experience Program" every time you went into the device settings with these stupid banners that you could close out, but they would Always. Come. Back.What else...? Oh, so I discovered custom Android launchers about a year ago, and I put KISS Launcher on this tablet. Thing is, every time I'd restart the tablet (which again, I'd have to do every three to four days because of the ridiculous Wi-Fi problem), KISS Launcher would crash whenever I'd pull up the app switcher. The only way to fix it was to go into the device settings, set my launcher back to the default Lenovo Smart Launcher for a second, then switch it back to my custom launcher. I don't know if this would happen with other custom launchers too, but I've never had this problem on other devices with KISS, so I doubt that KISS is the culprit.But what made me write this review was the final straw. So... I don't version update my Android devices super often. The reason is quite simple- sometimes a bad update comes out. If an update just says "security updates", yeah, I do it, but if it wants to update the OS to a new version of Android, I wait. I haven't been using this tablet except occasionally in the past year (because of all of the annoyances), but I wanted to do some minor tinkering with it that would be easiest to do with Android 12. This tablet comes with 11, so I went ahead and updated it to Android 12.A~aaannnd, it bricked itself.Yes. Seriously. When it rebooted and I unlocked it, it crashed every time it booted up- even in safe mode, indicating that this definitely wasn't something I did. There was a post on Reddit that explained that the update to Android 12 on this thing was borked. But what gets me... Said post is from 2022. In case you haven't looked at the date on this review, it's August 2024 as I write this.I got a borked update. That has not been fixed or pulled. In TWO YEARS.Ya'll, I picked this tablet not only for its specs, but it's also a Lenovo. Y'know- the folks who make those tough old ThinkPads? I own two T430 laptops and a T440p, and they're all awesome (though old) devices. I had heard that Lenovo's quality especially went downhill in recent years, but I was skeptical before buying this tablet. Now, though? I believe it. I paid good money for this thing, thinking I was getting good quality, but it's NEVER worked entirely right.I know the nerds out there are gonna say ThinkPads haven't been the same since IBM was bought out by Lenovo either, but I know they still had good products even after that. I'd like to see a return to form when it comes to quality one day with this company. But unless that happens, congratulations, Lenovo. I don't have brand loyalty to many things, but you just lost a loyal customer.