Lenovo Tab Plus Gen 2 Review: A Bluetooth Speaker With A Screen?

Lenovo’s Tab Plus Gen 2 is the direct successor to the original Tab Plus, a tablet that put all of its points to the speakers. And the Gen 2 follows the same design. It’s heavy, looks weird from behind, and manages to squeeze 9 JBL speakers inside. And you get those for just $399. Of course that piqued our curiosity.

We’ve spent the last 3 weeks subjecting this tablet to every test imaginable; we’ve streamed music and YouTube, played Fortnite, and even found and tested the optional stylus so that we can give it a fair review. And there’s one massive, massive caveat that will make the Tab Plus Gen 2 completely worthless for a massive group of people. So, let’s get started.

 Display and Speakers

This tablet is about one thing, and one thing only. That’s the speakers. The 9 JBL stereo speakers, to be exact. It’s hard to miss the massive bass speaker growing out the back of the tablet, and the 4 speaker openings on the left and right sides. But without beating around the bush, these are the best tablet speakers on the market.

In comparison with the OnePlus Pad 4 and Huawei MatePad Pro Max, both of which tied the position for best speakers before, the Lenovo Tab Plus Gen 2 sounds a lot richer. There’s actually audible sub-bass, voices come through clearly and it gets ridiculously loud. It’s definitely the loudest tablet on the market. If the default sound isn’t fully to your taste, you can play around with the equalizer settings in Dolby Atmos. Though it’ll never be as bassy as real, roomy standalone speakers. 

One truly unique feature is that you can connect any device to the Tab Plus via Bluetooth and use it as a normal bluetooth speaker. And it’s loud enough to blast some tunes at the beach or a party. Still, you should keep expectations in check; compared to the Soundcore Motion 300, a reasonably priced bluetooth speaker, there’s still a large gap in bass quantity, audio clarity and peak volume. 

Display

Of course, a good speaker system isn’t worth much without a great display. Lenovo packs an excellent, 12,1’’ LCD display into the Tab Plus Gen 2. It’s a decently sharp panel with a 2560x1600p resolution, and it’s bright too, topping out at 800 nits. HDR is of course supported, and it even has a 120Hz refresh rate so that animations and games run super smooth. The viewing angles are very stable too. 

It’s just a shame that Lenovo didn’t go with an OLED panel for the display. OLED tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 or Honor MagicPad 4 have better contrast and no backlight, so they look much better in a dim room when streaming shows. Right now, those might be the better choice for a video streaming tablet. But those tend to cost twice as much. 

Design

Unlike most tablets nowadays, which are just a glass slab with flat sides and 2 buttons, the Tab Plus Gen 2 stands out with its clearly purpose-oriented design. First of all, you have the enormous woofer speaker jutting out the middle of the back. And for the best viewing comfort, Lenovo added a ring-shaped kickstand attached to the rear woofer which can be rotated 360 degrees. So you can lay the tablet flat, at an angle, in portrait mode or hang it on the wall if you need to. It’s a great feature. 

The weight will immediately stand out once you pick it up, though. At 760g, the Tab Plus is quite hefty, and you will feel the strain on your fingers if you try to game for an hour or so. It’s also not the thinnest tablet with 6,8mm, without counting the rear speaker bump, of course. 

Lenovo also moved the power and volume control buttons to the back of the tablet, so you now have to reach around the top right side of the display to turn the thing on and adjust the speaker volume. But after getting used to it, it’s quite intuitive and far less clumsy than trying to reach a faraway power button when you’re holding the tablet in your hand. It’s a real quality-of-life improvement that honestly would be great in other tablets too.

So with the buttons gone, the sides of the tablet feel pretty empty. Thankfully there’s still a Micro-SD card reader slot.  The USB-C port hides on the bottom right corner, and is responsible for charging and wired file transfer. Unfortunately, it’s a USB 2.0 port, so display output isn’t supported at all, which feels like a major oversight. What if you want to stream something on a display/TV? 

Performance and Specs

Here’s the massive caveat: performance. 

The Tab Plus Gen 2 gets the Mediatek Dimensity 7400 chipset, a midrange, 4nm SoC. That comes coupled with 8GB of RAM and 128 or 256GB of UFS storage. It’s actually a solid setup for most everyday things like multitasking, reading, browsing and streaming movies. And you can even do some heavy multitasking with multiple open windows in the desktop mode without too much lag. But playing any modern-ish game shows the gap between this tablet and actual flagships. 

Let’s compare the Tab Plus against similarly priced competitors in benchmarks to see how it matches up: In Geekbench 6, the Tab Plus Gen 2 is 46% slower than the Xiaomi Pad 8 in CPU single core and multi-core. But sure, that’s basically a gaming tablet. But the 2025 Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE+, which we criticized for its weak performance when it was released, is actually 24% faster in CPU single core and 16% faster in multi-core. 

3DMark gives us a better look at potential gaming performance, as it’s much more taxing on the GPU. In 3DMark’s Wildlife Extreme test, the performance difference is even bigger. The Xiaomi Pad 8 is now 209% faster, and even the S10FE+ is 26% faster. It’s overall a pretty weak showing from the Tab Plus. 

Gaming 

Gaming is practically the worst-case scenario for this tablet. We started off by playing Fortnite, which lets you select up to an ambitious 60FPS limit at Epic settings. But with maxed out settings, the game runs at an unplayable 6FPS. Dropping everything to its lowest possible setting results in a rough 33FPS average. Which still isn’t very playable.

Thankfully, Delta Force has a “smooth” preset that allows you to enjoy playing with 60FPS. You can turn settings all the way up to “high”, but the game runs at just 15 FPS, so we’d recommend sticking with the lowest settings. The game is just about playable at the minimum settings. 

Roblox is one of the few games the lethargic Dimensity 7400 can handle. We started up the “Chameleon” minigame, and managed to squeeze out a solid 60FPS average with the maximum graphics! So you’re mostly limited to lighter or older titles on this tablet. So, tablet gamers looking for solid speakers should rather go for the OnePlus Pad 4, which performs magnitudes better. 

Battery Life

In our standardised YouTube HD video streaming battery test, the Tab Plus Gen 2 lasts 6 hours and 43 minutes at max brightness. That’s a good result considering its large display. If you’re not streaming at max brightness, you can expect a much longer runtime. 

The battery has a capacity of 10200mAh, and it charges at a peak of 45W. The EU rates the battery for 1000 full charge cycles before the capacity drops below 80%, which is good.

Camera and Face Unlock 

With the uniquely placed rear power button, it would’ve been a perfect location for an integrated fingerprint reader, but sadly, there isn’t one. So you’ll either need to use a password or rely on the basic face unlock feature. It works quickly and reliably, but isn’t secure enough to be used in banking or passkey apps. 

Speaking of the cameras, the new Tab Plus includes an 8MP selfie camera and 13MP rear camera, both of which do a solid job of taking the odd selfie or scanning a document. The front camera is limited to FHD videos, but the quality is quite good. Colours are authentic, the image is sharp and everything looks smooth. The rear camera is able to record with up to 4k resolution. However, the recorded videos are slightly choppy and quite noisy. Still, the cameras are overall decent for a tablet. 

Software

While Samsung is offering 7 years of support for their cheapest tablets, Lenovo’s Tab Plus is only going to receive 2 Android upgrades and security updates until 2030. Since the tablet will probably stay home streaming videos most of the time, there’s a good chance it will last much longer than the officially supported period. It would be great to see Lenovo stepping up their game in this regard. 

The tablet setup experience could also be a lot better. Even after avoiding every prompt to install suggested apps, the Idea Tab still comes loaded with 21 sponsored, preinstalled apps that you’ll likely never use. Other tablet manufacturers like Apple or OnePlus just ship their tablets with the basic system apps and let you choose what you want to install. 

Stylus 

The supported Lenovo Tab Pen Plus stylus works fine. It’s affordable, pressure sensitive, but overall not the best stylus for writing. There are a couple quirks: If you apply very light pressure, the tablet often doesn’t register the input properly. The build also feels quite cheap and it’s overall not the best feeling pen. 

But the biggest issue by far is that the rear kickstand of the tablet means that you can never write with the tablet flat on a tablet, since it will wobble when you’re writing on the left or right sides where the tablet is practically floating. For that reason, you really only want to be using the Tab Plus Gen 2 for marking up or signing a document and little else; students who want a notetaking tablet should consider getting a Samsung S series tablet with the S-Pen, or an iPad. 

Conclusion

At $399, the Lenovo Tab Plus Gen 2 beats everything close in price for video streaming and listening to music. The speakers really are the best in the market, and the display is great for an LCD. But as we said, the performance is incredibly weak for gaming, and you’re only getting 2 Android upgrades. 

If you’re looking for a tablet that’s just going to sit in the living room or bedroom and be used for watching videos, playing music and listening to podcasts, we sincerely recommend getting this tablet. But we don’t recommend it for students who are after something to take notes with, gamers, or if you’re going to be doing productive work on it. If that sounds like something you’re interested in, you have to check out our review of the Lenovo Idea Tab Pro Gen 2. It’s a slightly more pricey tablet that has a great keyboard, a better writing experience and much, much better performance.