Lenovo Tab P12 Review: 12-Inch Tablet With Tons Of Value

The Lenovo Tab P12 is a really exciting 12.7-inch mid-range tablet that offers a high-resolution display, solid performance, an active stylus, and an optional keyboard cover. Prices start at 399 Euro in Europe and under 400 Dollars in the US, which is pretty cheap for a 12-inch tablet. In this Lenovo Tab P12 review you learn how good it really is.

Before we start, let’s take a look at the prices and the competition. The Lenovo Tab P12 costs under 400 US Dollars which includes a pen and you can also get a bundle with a keyboard which is a bit more expensive. There is also the Lenovo Tab P12 Pro, which I tested last year. It is a better premium tablet, but that is also reflected in the price of currently around 700 Dollars.

As a competitor, there is the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE with stylus, which still costs a proud 489 US Dollars, and that despite it’s already two years old. In this review, I will also compare it every now and then to the Lenovo Tab P11 Gen 2, which is a bit smaller, but even cheaper at 265 US Dollars

Design & Build Quality

The design of the Lenovo Tab P12 is very similar to the P12 Pro and P11 Pro Gen 2. It has a high-quality look and feel thanks to the metal casing. At 6.9mm, it’s quite thin, and the large display makes it look even thinner than it is. It weighs 615g and that’s also pretty good for this size.

It does not have a headphone jack, but it does have a MicroSD card slot. I also like the fact that the power button has a built-in fingerprint reader. This is missing in rivals like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S7 FE. There is a USB C 2.0 port on the right, which unfortunately cannot be connected to an external screen.

Read: The Best Lenovo Tablets You Can Buy Today

It’s interesting that you can record Full HD videos with the main camera only, whereas 4K videos are also possible with the front-facing camera. This is unusual, but I think it makes more sense for a tablet. Accordingly, the main camera’s resolution of 13 megapixels is also higher than the camera on the back, which offers 8 megapixels. Both are pretty good for a tablet.

Display & Speakers

The display of the Lenovo Tab P12 is 12.7 inches, and it’s a regular LCD. At 2944 x 1840 pixels, the resolution is very high, so texts, photos and icons look very sharp. Much sharper than on the Honor Pad 8, the cheapest 12-inch tablet on the market, but also a little sharper than the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE.

The display is a bit too dark for direct sunlight, but if it’s cloudy outside, it’s bright enough. It’s fully laminated, the viewing angles are wide, and you can turn on a reading mode and blue light filter in the settings. You can also set the color temperature warmer or colder.

We get a normal 60Hz display here, and as with many screens of this type, I noticed a jelly or rolling shutter effect when holding the tablet in portrait orientation and scrolling. This effect disappears at 120 Hz and for that, you have to go for the Tab P12 Pro or the smaller Tab P11 G2. The latter has a brighter display and even more stable viewing angles.

On the other hand, the P12 has noticeably better speakers than the P11. We get a total of four here and the bass is even a bit stronger than on the Samsung S7 FE. So, it’s a really good entertainment tablet due to the large display and the good speakers. It also supports the necessary DRM standards, so you can watch Netflix and the like with HD resolution.

Lenovo Tab Pen Plus: The Stylus

Included is an active stylus called the Lenovo Tab Pen Plus. As usual, it is completely made of plastic. It has a button on the side and a USB C port, which is used for charging. Although it has a magnetic slot on the back of the tablet, it is not charged that way.

The stylus is significantly better than Lenovo’s Precision Pen 2, which works with the P11 Gen 2, and similar to the Precision Pen 3 on the P12 Pro. And that means the stylus comes pretty close to the S Pen. I think it#s very good for handwritten notes, and it’s okay for drawing as well. I gave the stylus to an artist and she noticed that it’s not as fast as a real pen – that’s because of the 60Hz display.

Lenovo has preloaded quite a bit of software for the stylus with Nebo, MyScript Calculator, and a note-taking app called Notepad. And the apps work well. However, they are not quite as excellent as the Samsung Notes app.

Nevertheless, I think it’s great how much Lenovo improves in this aspect from generation to generation. As I said, the stylus is much better than on the Tab P11 Gen 2 and works very well overall.

Read: The Best Tablets For Students

We are also getting more and more additional features for the pen. Besides the apps, there are pen features that let you use the stylus as a magnifying glass and laser pointer, as well as for taking and cutting screenshots. I also think it’s cool that you can use the stylus as a remote control in Microsoft PowerPoint and other apps like the camera.

Hardware & Performance

The Lenovo Tab P12 is powered by a MediaTek MT8791V processor with a total of 8 cores. Along with that, we get 4GB or 8GB of RAM and 128GB or 256GB of internal storage. A version with LTE or 5G does not seem to be available yet. I have the version with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage.

Quite exciting is my Geekbench 5 benchmark comparison. Here, the CPU performance of the P12 is about on par with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE. However, Lenovo’s compute performance is a good deal better. It’s also vastly superior to the Honor Pad 8, and it’s clearly better than the Lenovo Tab P11 Gen 2. The P11 Pro Gen 2 and the P12 Pro are more powerful, though.

In the 3D Mark Wild Life test, the P12 is almost twice as strong as the Galaxy Tab S7 FE and Lenovo P11 Gen 2. At the same time, it’s weaker than the P11 Pro Gen 2 and P12 Pro, and weaker than all current iPads anyway.

Thus, it’s not a high-end gaming tablet. Nevertheless, you can play almost every game with the tablet, but not always with the highest graphics settings. I could play PUBG Mobile with HD and HDR graphics, but not with UltraHD. It’s nice and smooth with these settings, which is great. But sure, UltraHD would be nicer with such a large display.

Simple games like Mighty Doom or Rise of Empires run very smoothly. But I could also play Asphalt 9 well, it just does not look quite as fancy as on premium tablets.

I did not notice at all that it’s more of a mid-range tablet in terms of performance when doing office work, and I think that is due to the very large 8GB RAM. Multitasking works very nicely, even if you quickly switch between several apps or have several apps open at the same time.

Keyboard Cover

Lenovo offers an official keyboard cover as an optional accessory. As usual, this consists of two parts. There is a back with a built-in folding stand, which you can also use without the keyboard. This allows you to place the tablet on a table, for example to watch Netflix. You can also connect the keyboard via a magnetic connector.

I like the fact that not only the front and back are protected from scratches, but also the edges. That should be useful in case you drop it.

Since we have a large-sized 12.7-inch display, the keyboard can also be large. It’s significantly larger than it would be on a 10 or 11 inch device, and as a result I was able to write on it almost as comfortably as on my laptop. The keyboard works pretty well and I enjoyed writing with it. It’s just a shame that you can’t angle it and there’s no backlight either.

Below the keyboard sits a touchpad, which is also quite large for a tablet. The trackpad also works well. The mouse is especially useful when you use the multi-window mode and floating windows or write texts and switch between lines.

Software: Android 13

Out of the box, the Lenovo Tab P12 runs Android 13. In the past, Lenovo has been steadily improving how it handles updates, especially for the slightly higher-end devices like this one. And indeed, they promise two major version updates and four years of security updates. That’s great.

We get the tablet-optimized interface of Android 13 here, which Google introduced with Android 12L. Of particular note here is the taskbar, which you can now see at the bottom within each app. This makes sense for a tablet, and it also means that a desktop mode is already built into Android. And because of that, Lenovo’s own productivity mode no longer exists.

Well, I think Android 13 on the P12 is great. The taskbar is very useful and you can quickly open two apps next to each other or even put a third and even a fourth one on top in a floating window.

We get almost pure Google Android here including all apps from Google and also including the Entertainment Space. There are a few more features, the one for the pen I already mentioned. Another interesting feature is Lenovo Freestyle, which allows you to use the tablet as an external screen for your laptop.

Battery Life

The P12 was a bit disappointing in my battery test. It only managed a runtime of 5.5 hours. For this test, I always run an HD YouTube video at maximum brightness in an endless loop. I think the runtime is comparatively short because the display is so large and high-resolution while being quite bright too.

Lenovo Tab P12 Review: Final Words

So, is the Lenovo Tab P12 a perfect tablet? No, of course it isn’t. But in fact, I think the price/performance ratio is surprisingly good. Very good actually. Due to the good speakers and the large and high-resolution display, I consider it a great entertainment tablet. At the same time, the performance is good enough to play many games not at the highest, but at medium graphics settings.

We also get almost pure Android, two version updates, a good stylus and keyboard, and features like a fingerprint reader. The only pity is that the battery life is quite short.

It’s very well positioned against the competition. There is currently only one cheaper 12-inch tablet out there with the Honor Pad 8, but it’s also a good deal weaker in every aspect. Another competitor is the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE, which is already two years old and is slightly inferior to the Lenovo in most points except for battery life and S Pen.

A pretty exciting alternative to the Lenovo Tab P12 is the Lenovo Tab P11 Pro Gen 2, which I also reviewed, of course. It’s slightly more expensive and has a smaller display, but it offers an OLED panel, a 120 Hz display, a noticeably better performance and you can also get it with a good pen and keyboard.