UPLIFT Height-Adjustable Ping-Pong Conference Table Review

A Standing Conference Table? Really?

We have a plethora of articles and reviews that extol the valuable benefits of having an adjustable height desk that you can use throughout your workday, whether at the corporate campus or in the increasingly commonplace home office. That being the case, managers and bosses might wonder why they would need an adjustable-height conference table that can accommodate both sitting and standing positions when they get those benefits at their own desks.

With more people working in a hybrid situation from home and in the office, the reason many have any time in the office at all is because it makes it easier to conduct important meetings in person, so that is likely what they will be spending a good chunk of their office time doing. And if they don’t have a standing option for those meetings, it will cut into the benefits they would be getting from their own standing desk.

Even if large collaborative meetings aren’t an aspect of your business, and aside from the health and productivity benefits associated with standing, another commonly cited reason for switching to standing meetings is that they’re quicker. Employees frequently complain about long or unproductive meetings, and standing helps people stay on task so everyone can get back to work sooner. The “scrum” meeting, which is popular in tech companies, is gaining widespread corporate acceptance. By definition, scrum meetings last no more than 15 minutes and are best conducted standing. From a logistical standpoint, height-adjustable conference tables make the most sense so that organizations can conduct both longer sitting and shorter standing meetings in the same space.

How Big Should Your Conference Table Be?

Usually the answer to this question is a contest between the constraints of the size of the room and the number of people you’d like to accommodate. Note that you can usually get two more people around a table if they’re standing versus sitting in armchairs. 

Most conference table manufacturers make a wide array of sizes for this reason. When it comes to height-adjustable conference tables you can buy online, they tend to run anywhere from 30” – 44” in width to 72” – 110” in length. Tables larger than that tend to be custom made. 

Because a standard ping-pong table is 108” x 60”, that’s the one and only size that Uplift is offering in this product line, though you can remove the center leaf to reduce it to 94” long (see our reviews of the Uplift 2-Leg and 4-Leg Conference Tables for its greater range of sizes). 

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The number of people the Uplift ping-pong conference table can accommodate is up to 12, so if you really want a convertible ping-pong table you’re going to naturally have to settle for this size table. You’ll want to make sure you have at least 5’ of free space around all edges of the table, and more than that if you need to roll chairs out of the way.

See also our review of the Uplift 4-leg Conference Table, which uses the same lifting base as the Ping Pong Table.

A Sizable Meeting Table Base

Uplift claims to use the same base as the V2 base on their standing desk line, just doubled up to make four legs. This isn’t actually the case, and a lot of the specs they use on this product listing are inaccurate as a result. 

While the base is made by Jiecang, same as on the Uplift V2 standing desk, having four legs makes it so they don’t each need to be as powerful as when lifting everything with just two legs. Still, the lift capacity with four of these lighter-lifting legs is 535 lbs, which seems like overkill for a conference table. While no one ever complained of having too much lift capacity, the downside of using four separate motors is how noisy this table is when moving up or down. 

The frame is a rectangle instead of just a crossbar between the left and right lifting columns as on an Uplift V2 standing desk, which gives the base enough rigidity to hold up the 60” x 108” tabletop without tipping over. 

Conference tables aren’t used like regular standing desks, so they typically aren’t set very high or very low. Sitting height is usually around 30” (which happens to be ping-pong standard height), so anything below that is wasted range, and the standing height is usually set by consensus between all the attendees. So, unless you’re holding a meeting with an NBA team, you’re not likely to raise the table above about 42”. 

One thing Uplift includes in the technology of their standing desks that many manufacturers overlook is anti-collision safety features. This helps ensure that the table won’t damage itself, other furniture, or users when it encounters resistance during movement.

Choosing Your Optimal Controller

Normally, when you buy a standing desk or table, the handset that comes with the table to control the height comes as a set part of that furniture. Uplift decided to make that a customizable feature in their standing conference tables. You can choose from a selection of handsets to fit the needs of your office, including a wireless foot switch (although anything on the floor is likely to get rolled over and bumped into by chair legs). 

Remember, if you want to ensure you are playing ping-pong at the correct height and stay fair to all players, you’ll want to make 30” a saved height in your controller. And you’d want to make sure to choose a handset that allows you to access that saved height easily.

Typical Bamboo Top from Uplift, Just Bigger

Since the surface of this ping-pong conference table is so big, 60” wide with a length of either 94” or 108”, it won’t be shipped as a single piece of wood (much easier and cheaper to transport). So, assembly will be a bit more complex than regular standing desks, especially since you’ll want to ensure that the seams line up perfectly, particularly with the installed leaf if you want to avoid balls bouncing off in unpredictable directions.

We harp on bamboo tops in many of our reviews and articles about how it isn’t really an environmentally friendly material to use in most cases, no matter what marketing materials might claim. Read our full article on how companies greenwash bamboo that actually hurts the environment. Uplift is no exception to this practice, exaggerating their claims of the quality and benefits of their bamboo.

Sadly, bamboo is the only top available for this ping-pong standing conference table. You can get it with or without the center leaf, but remember that using it to get 108” is the only way to have a regulation-size ping-pong surface. This makes financial sense since producing even more versions of something so large can be expensive, but it is disappointing that you are so limited in style choices.

Since it is a ping-pong table, you need to have nearly perfect 90-degree edges for proper play. The downside of having such hard edges versus a conference table dedicated for office meetings is there’s no ergo-contouring, so sitting in long meetings with your forearms resting on these edges will not be comfortable. It’s a compromise, as making a good ping-pong table detracts from making a good meeting table, and vice versa. But if you think you’ll be playing ping-pong more than meeting, it would be a fine choice.

Conference Table Quality

We have reviewed many Uplift Desk products in the past, as they are one of the leading sellers of standing desks and accessories online. In general, they rank right around the middle with around 3 stars. You can see all these reviews on our roundup of their products. This standing ping-pong conference table stays right on track with their typical quality.

The warranty is an impressive 15 years, matching the coverage of manufacturers of industry leading quality products like iMovR. However, with the experience we have gathered with their products in the past, this seems a bit long given the actual quality of the components of their standing table bases and tops, especially the bamboo tops. It is likely that they are playing a numbers game and counting on people either forgetting that they have a warranty or not wanting to deal with it after 5 years or so.

There are no outside reviews on this conference table that we could find at the time of writing our own. There are only a very few on their own site. But even with that small of a sample, customers did point out that it can be difficult to align the tabletops correctly, especially with the center insert. Granted, this will be a natural difficulty when assembling something so large. So, unless you need a table that large or specifically want one that can double as a ping-pong table, we would recommend getting one with a tabletop in a single piece.

Takeaway

Interestingly, Uplift used to sell a different ping-pong standing conference table that had a real wood top and a more traditional ping-pong style leg. We don’t know exactly why they discontinued this model, but we can speculate that people didn’t want to invest in a super pretty tabletop that they would then beat up by smacking it constantly with balls and paddles.

This bamboo top version is functional and basically is what it purports to be. So if you don’t care about using environmentally harmful bamboo, hard edges, and just OK frame, it is an adequate standing conference table/ping-pong table that you can enjoy in your office.

The price at the time of this review seems just about right considering the general quality we have found in Uplift products and the sheer size of the conference table. But it is just plain hard to find many standing meeting tables with the ping-pong functionality as well, so if that is what someone wants, Uplift can pretty much slap on any price they want.

However, there are plenty of other standing conference tables out there. Take a look at our roundup of all standing meeting tables we have reviewed to see if there any other option will fit your office’s needs.

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