Lenovo Tab Plus Review: The Best Tablet For Music Lovers?

The Lenovo Tab Plus is the latest 11-inch tablet from Lenovo, which is aimed at music lovers with its eight JBL speakers. I find the design with built-in folding stand particularly exciting, which reminds me a little of the good old Yoga series. However, it also offers a 90Hz display, is partially protected against water and dust, supports a stylus and can even serve as a Bluetooth speaker for other devices.

For my review of the sub $300 Tab Plus, I also compared the speakers with the iPad Pro. If the speakers are supposed to be amazing, it has to compete with the highest class despite the low price.

Design & Build Quality

Lenovo has released some interesting designs in the past, I always liked the Yoga series with its grip, large battery and kickstand.

The Lenovo Tab Plus reminds me a little of this, but it doesn’t have a round grip, but one side that is a good bit thicker than the other. This gives them space for the large speakers, but also for the kickstand. This allows you to set it up at any number of angles.

Both the kickstand and the entire back are made of metal. However, the frame is made of plastic. The thin side is 7.7 mm thick and the thicker side is 13.58 mm thick. At 650g, it’s quite heavy.

It’s protected against water and dust according to the IP52 standard. That’s not much compared to IP68, but it’s better than nothing. It’s able to withstand a little dust and water, but it’s not suitable for the bathtub.

On the sides, we get a total of eight speakers, but also a 3.5mm headphone jack, a USB C 2.0 port, a MicroSD card reader and, of course, a power button and the volume controls.

We get an 8-megapixel camera at the front and back and both take solid pictures. The front camera can also be used for unlocking via facial recognition.

Speakers from JBL

Let’s move on to the Lenovo Tab Plus’s unique selling point, the eight speakers, which are said to be from JBL. Lenovo calls them JBL Hi-Fi Matrix speakers with Dolby Atmos. This tablet is said to be able to fill a room with 26W stereo sound and has four speakers on the sides for high tones and four for low tones. Together they are 22cm long.

When I switched on the Tab Plus for the first time and listened to music, I was surprised at how good the sound quality was. At the time, I didn’t even know what kind of tablet Lenovo was going to market it as. At well under $300, it’s considered an entry-level tablet and for that price, it’s surprisingly loud and the bass is surprisingly deep.

I later compared it with direct competitors such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+, as well as the iPad Pro. The sound quality is much, much better than the A9+. The latter sounds more like a cheap toy in direct comparison.

So far, I think the 13-inch iPad Pro has the best speakers of any tablet to date. Even though it’s much more expensive, and the test almost doesn’t seem fair, I had to compare it to Apple’s flagshop. The speakers on the Lenovo Tab Plus are actually slightly louder than on the iPad Pro and the bass is stronger. Music also sounds better on the Lenovo compared to the expensive top-of-the-range device.

Based on my tests, it is therefore clear that the Lenovo Tab Plus is the tablet with the best speakers now. A great choice for music lovers.

As I said, it has a 3.5 mm audio port on the side and this supports 24 bit and 96 kHz.

Display: 11.5 inch with 90Hz

Let’s move on to the display. This is 11.5 inches in size and has a resolution of 2000 x 1200 pixels. It’s a classic LCD that supports up to 90Hz and is 400 nits bright. So the display specs are very typical for this price range.

I used to say that such a resolution on 10 inches is high-resolution enough. And just enough on 11 inches. But with the 11.5-inch here, the pixel density is getting pretty thin. When I hold it in front of me normally, everything is fine. But when writing with the pen, I tend to move my nose towards the screen, and then pixels quickly become visible.

Compared to direct competitors such as the Lenovo Tab M11, Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ and Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite 2024, it performs well, but not very well. Samsung’s tablets are a bit brighter, even the cheaper A9+.

Ultimately, it’s a pretty solid display, especially for home use, with which you can also play Netflix in HD resolution. This is actually not the case with all tablets. Together with the speakers, this, but also YouTube, Display+ and other streaming services are a lot of fun.

Lenovo Tab Pen Plus stylus

You can write on the touchscreen of the Tab Plus with the Lenovo Tab Pen Plus. This is the same pen that works with the Lenovo Tab P12 and Lenovo Legion Tab. It supports over 4000 pressure levels, is charged using a USB C port and is made entirely of plastic.

The pen actually works quite well, especially for this price range. Inexpensive tablets from Lenovo often have the problem that they are simply not precise enough. Like with the Tab M11 and P11 Gen 2, but that’s different here.

Read: The Best Note Taking Apps For Android

You can take handwritten notes with the Tab Plus almost as well as with the Tab P12.

Compared to the Samsung S6 Lite series with S Pen, the pen is sometimes not quite as fast here. But it’s definitely good enough to take serious handwritten notes for school or university.

Hardware & Performance

The Lenovo Tab Plus is equipped with a MediaTek G99 octa-core processor and 8 GB of RAM. The internal memory is 128GB or 256GB depending on the version. It’s nice that we get 128GB as standard. A version with 5G has not yet been announced.

My Geekbench 5 benchmark comparison shows that the compute graphics performance is a good bit above the Amazon Fire Max 11, Lenovo Tab M11 and also slightly above the Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+. The latter has slightly better multi-core performance. The Galaxy Tab S6 Lite 2024, which is also slightly more expensive, is significantly better.

The 3D Mark Wild Life test roughly confirms this. The graphics performance is significantly better than the Lenovo Tab M11 and roughly on par with the Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+. However, tablets like the Lenovo Tab P12 or Samsung S6 Lite 2024 are more powerful.

In fact, I think the Tab Plus is a solid gaming tablet thanks to its good speakers. After all, the soundtrack of a good game is an important part of the experience. But it’s not suitable for graphically demanding games like Fortnite due to the weaker processor.

This changes with less graphically demanding games, which can still be pretty. This includes Leo’s Fortune, which also has a wonderful soundtrack. The good speakers are worthwhile here and this game is a lot of fun on the tablet.

But you can also play PUBG Mobile smoothly, even if only with HD graphics. Higher settings cannot be selected.

Software: Android 14

The Lenovo Tab Plus comes with Android 14 and the manufacturer promises OS updates for 2 years and security updates until June 2028, which is decent and has been a weak point of Lenovo in the past, so it’s nice to see them improving noticeably here.

As always, the interface is only slightly customized. Ultimately, we get normal Google Android here, including many apps from Google and the taskbar. They have also built in some features for the stylus, which you can use to take screenshots and write on them, for example. With Nebo and MyScript Calculator, two good apps for the pen are also pre-installed.

All Lenovo tablets also support Freestyle, which allows you to extend the screen of your Windows PC to the tablet. This is done via WiFi, so it’s not the fastest connection, but is sufficient as a display for Twitter or Spotify.

The Bluetooth speaker mode is quite unique. This is switched on automatically when you pair it with a device that plays music. This allows you to play music from your smartphone or other devices via the tablet. You can also control the volume of the tablet with your phone. Pretty cool.

Battery Life

In my battery test, it had a battery life of 9 hours. That’s a pretty good result. For this test, I always run an HD YouTube video at maximum brightness and in this case at 90Hz in an endless loop.

Lenovo Tab Plus Review: My Conclusion

My conclusion is clear: despite its low price, the Lenovo Tab Plus currently has the best speakers in a tablet. And by a good margin, even better than the expensive iPad Pro. If you like listening to music or audio books on your tablet, it’s perfect for this. It’s also great for voice assistants and if you’re looking for a cheap tablet for watching movies, then it’s just as good.

The other features are good for the price of 299 euros, but not as good as the speakers. In any case, the performance is sufficient and it’s roughly in the same league as the Galaxy Tab A9+. It’s powerful enough for most applications, but you can’t play every game on the highest graphics settings. The display is solid, but could be brighter.

I also think it’s great that we get 128GB of storage as standard. Many competitors in this price range only offer 64GB. I was also surprised by the stylus, which is actually pretty good. This is very rare for tablets costing under 300 Dollars.