1 star might be unfair, given the tablet's supposedly other great qualities, but those other things don't matter too much if you can't even interact with it reasonably.

EDIT (2 weeks): The unresponsive touchscreen is at its worst when first using it for the day, but then seems to "warm up" and become much more responsive.It's still not great - there's a noticeable difference depending on whether you use the pad of your fingertip vs. the tip.But my son is now happily Minecrafting away on it.In the support forums where lots of users are complaining about the touchscreen, Lenovo claims that they have released an OTA software update that fixes the problem, but my device doesn't have it, and doesn't report any updates available either (which lots of users are also complaining about).

Anyway, due to the touchscreen somehow becoming usable, and finding the rest of its features to be perfectly adequate, I've updated my review to 3 stars.It's definitely of better quality than similarly priced tablets but with much cheaper specs.

This is a Lenovo A7-30F tablet.It features a MediaTek MT8127 SoC with a Cortex A7 1.3GHz quad core processor.The 1GB Ram is kinda smallish by today's standards, but at a sub-$100 price point, who am I to complain.At least it has an SD card slot so it's got that going for it.The 600x1024 screen leaves a little to be desired.Would make a big difference if I could keep the Home, back and recents button bar on the right while in landscape orientation, instead of eating up a portion of the precious 600 rows of pixels by sitting at the bottom.The KitKat install is lightly skinned with a white/green kind of interface, and there is only a small amount of bloat on the tablet.I like that the Security HD app lets me block apps like Facebook from having certain permissions on my phone, (i.e. read contacts, sms, mms, etc.)the port placement seems pretty decent too.The USB and headphone jacks are both on the same side, on the top, but the screen orient in all 4 directions, so it can be "bottom" if desired.

It's not without it's shortcomings though.The most frustrating thing about this tablet, has been mentioned in some other reviews.The screen seems to have some touch sensitivity issues, which mostly appear to be software based.I ran the Lenovo companion diagnostic tool to test the touch input and the screen was plenty sensitive.Using the actual tablet user interface however, seems like the developers may have been overly obsessed with preventing accidental touches.There is supposed to be a software patch available via OTA that improves touch response, but for the life of me, my tablet doesn't see it.(It keeps telling me I'm already on the latest version.)

Front and rear camera is nice, but don't expect a lot out of them.these are good enough for skype/hangouts, but you're not going to take this tablet to the arboretum with you unless you're just planning to read there.

Battery life is pretty solid.you can probably get 2+ days or so out of it before you need to charge it again.

Wouldn't be my first choice though, if you were looking for a development tablet though.Getting it rooted or installing custom firmware is not so easy.I was able to get mine rooted and get TWRP installed on it, but I don't know about rolling with a CyanogenMod or anything like that.The Lollipop update is supposed to be out in the next 2-3 months, so I'll wait at least until that comes before I investigate changing the firmware.

I recently bought one of the $50 Kindle fires 7 tablets and slowly learned to hate the product, until I put the google play store on it. I then only had a mild dislike of the product, mostly stemming from the ridiculous restrictions imposed by Amazon (no live wallpaper, can't change the the lock screen wallpaper) and the lack of consistent app updates.

So I wanted to try a less restrictive cheapo tablet and went with the Lenovo Tab 2 A7 because at least it had a name I recognized. At $70 bucks this thing fills in the gaps of the Kindle Fire but is every bit as sluggish and unresponsive. The default interface is pure ugliness. I thought I was looking at Honeycomb on my old Motorola tablet for a second. Thankfully, I was able to quickly install the Google Now Launcher after the initial setup. While this took care of the Home screen and app drawer, the pull down menu containing settings, wi fi etc, still looks like someone made the icons in MS Paint.

Other than aesthetics I only have two complaints. While the device performance is serviceable, there are times when the touch screen calibration seems to go out of sync, and I end up tapping the same area trying to hit the target correctly. And why is this thing still running KitKat? Lenovo's upgrade chart has this device listed to receive a Lollipop update with an estimated date of TBD. I'm guessing adoption will determine whether it gets the update or not. Or maybe they can''t get it to work well with the 1GB of ram. Who knows.

Overall, this tablet is still better than a Kindle Fire 7, which is only slightly better than those crap tablets you get from CVS. If you know this going in then it is worth getting for less than $80 bucks.