Lenovo ThinkTab X11 Review: The Rugged Tablet Apple Won’t Build

If you want a rugged tablet that you can bring with you on a construction site, then Lenovo has got just the thing for you. 

The ThinkTab X11 is a rugged, unique tablet with a removable battery that looks as if a ThinkPad laptop and a Samsung Galaxy Tab Active tablet had a baby. And over the past 2 weeks, we’ve been testing it rigorously for work, studying and entertainment. It has plenty of exciting features, but also one thing that really bothers us. Let’s get into it. 

Design & Build

Lenovo spares you the difficulty of picking a nice colour for your tablet by only offering one: Eclipse black. It’s a nice, matte dark grey on the sides and back of the tablet. Although the look alludes to the magnesium alloy chassis of some high-end Thinkpad laptops, it’s actually a full plastic body. But it’s a high-quality feeling plastic, so we don’t think that’s a huge deal.

The back of the X11 rocks a dark Lenovo logo, and of course a ThinkTab logo with a red dot on the right bottom corner. The right-hand side also features a 3.5mm audio jack, a rarity these days. There’s a completely flush camera bump on the top, too.

It’s a nice design, but you won’t see it often with the official rugged case on. You can get the tablet as a bundle deal with the rugged case and stylus, or just by itself. We recommend getting the package deal since the case is a really high quality one that feels great and protects the tablet properly. 

There are 2 USB-C ports, one on the right of the tablet and one on the bottom. The right port is faster with USB 3.2 Gen 1 speeds and supports display output, and the bottom one is mostly useful for charging the tablet or keeping it docked. Although for some reason, display extension and the desktop mode only work if you enable “One Vision Controller” in the developer settings.

Obviously, the coolest part of the design is the hot-swappable battery. You can simply remove the rear cover using your hands and take the battery out, and either toss in a fully charged one or run the device plugged in.

It’s great for battery health, preventing overheating and you can rest assured that your tablet won’t swell and catch on fire if it’s chilling in the car in summer. And surprisingly, the ThinkTab X11 is still IP68 dust- and water resistant despite that feature.

The tablet weighs 650g with the battery inserted. Unfortunately, you only get a single battery included in the box. You’ll have to purchase another one if you need to swap between them.

Once you open up the back panel, there’s also a Micro-SD card storage expansion slot on the inside which supports up to a 2TB card, and even a nano-SIM slot for tossing in a SIM card in the 5G model. With that, you can use the tablet on a moving train, in a vehicle or just when you’re far away from civilization. That’s really nice.

Battery Life

The removable battery has a capacity of 10200mAh, and it charges at 45 Watts max. It’s a pretty big battery for an 11’’ tablet, so it’s also no surprise that the tablet lasts 9 hours and 22 minutes in our YouTube HD video streaming test with the display at max brightness. That’s a solid result, and of course you could double the battery life by carrying an extra battery on you. 

Display & Speakers

The ThinkTab has a pretty nice display. It’s a 10,95’’ LCD panel, so of course the contrast isn’t as good as something like an iPad Pro with an OLED display, but it’s still pretty bright at 800 nits, bright enough to use outdoors. The 90Hz refresh rate means that animations look smooth, and the viewing angles are stable too. Also, there’s no light bleeding issue when drawing with the stylus, which is a problem with many cheaper LCD tablets.

Since it’s got a 16:10 aspect ratio, video content scales perfectly, leaving no or only small black bars on the sides of the display. The colours also look nice, there aren’t many obvious weaknesses. Also, rest assured if your environment isn’t friendly to glass screens; the display is protected with Corning Gorilla Glass, which helps prevent scratching and is a bit more drop-resistant.

Coming to the speakers, you’ve got a dual driver, stereo setup with Dolby Atmos support. The speakers are pretty alright; not the best we’ve tested but good enough for enjoying some music, and they’re very loud as well. Of course, they could use a little more bass. One design flaw is that the left speaker is very quiet if you’re using the tablet inside the case with the stylus docked. The stylus ends up blocking the speaker opening and muffling the sound.

Biometrics

It’s crazy that most other tablet manufacturers don’t do this; the ThinkTab has a fingerprint reader on the power button, so you can unlock your tablet in the same movement as turning it on. It’s also a much less clumsy location for a fingerprint reader than under the display like on most modern Samsung tablets. Lenovo’s fingerprint reader works quickly and reliably, we really love it. And it’s a lot more secure than the basic face-unlock many tablets are limited to.

Hardware & Performance

Of course, not everything can be perfect, and the ThinkTab X11’s performance doesn’t look too great on paper. It’s using the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chipset, a lower-mid tier option. That comes coupled with 8GB of RAM and a base 128GB of storage. A 256GB version is also available, and might even be the only option depending on your region. But that costs a bit more.

Interestingly, the Samsung Galaxy Tab Active 5 Pro, another rugged tablet with a swappable battery, also comes with the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chipset. And that tablet was released in May of 2025.

Thankfully, the speed of this tablet isn’t lacking 90% of the time; launching apps, multitasking and browsing feel smooth. It’s only when you restart the tablet, or launch a demanding game where the performance drops a bit and you might feel some lag. Even scrolling through an 800 page textbook pdf doesn’t cause any issues. That’s great. 

The ThinkTab also comes with GPS, a gyroscope and even an NFC chip. So it really does most things your smartphone does, besides fitting into a pocket. The NFC function means that you could use it as a Cash register, or use tap-to-pay with a linked bank account.

By the way, if you’re enjoying this video so far, please give us a like and a “hype”. It’s a new feature from YouTube to support smaller channels like ours. It’s free for you, and helps us make more in-depth reviews like this one.

Now, back to performance: We can compare the ThinkTab against other similar compelling options at this price using benchmark tests. In the Geekbench 6 CPU test, the ThinkTab X11 is significantly slower than similarly priced or even cheaper tablets like the iPad 11, Galaxy Tab S11 and even Lenovo’s own Yoga Tab, both in CPU single-core and multi-core. In fact, the Galaxy Tab S11 is 170% faster than it in CPU multi-core, making it much better suited for tasks like video editing and heavy gaming. 

Using 3DMark, we can measure the GPU performance. Here, the ThinkTab isn’t too impressive either. The Galaxy Tab S11 gets nearly 6x the score, and the Lenovo Yoga Tab gets 4,5x the score. Only Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S10 FE is similar in performance, and that tablet is much, much cheaper. Clearly, price-to-performance isn’t a strength of the ThinkTab.

Gaming Performance

With those weak benchmark scores, you’d expect games to be nearly unplayable. But in our testing, the ThinkTab performs a lot better than you’d expect for heavy games.

We start off in Fortnite. With maxed out settings and full resolution, the game runs at about 40FPS. Drop the settings to low and you get a smooth, constant 60FPS experience that we find very playable. That’s the same as on the iPad 11, despite that tablet being a lot faster in benchmarks.

By the way, the ThinkTab features a haptics engine, another unique feature for a tablet. It can vibrate for notifications, or even provide haptic feedback in games like Fortnite. It’s just very loud and sounds a bit like a motorcycle engine.

Delta Force is another demanding game where you need a high FPS experience. With the outstanding graphics preset, the game runs at between 40-50 FPS. On “low” you’re looking at smooth 60FPS gameplay.

Minecraft with fancy graphics is the only title we really found unplayable on the ThinkTab. Even on performance mode, the game chugs at 40FPS, and at max settings it isn’t playable at all. Now, you can just drop down to simple graphics for a perfect, 60FPS experience.

Overall, you’re gonna be fine running most games on this tablet. Just don’t expect to be hitting 120FPS in competitive shooter games the entire time.

Read: Best Gaming Tablets For Playing Games Reviewed | 2026 Edition

Stylus: Great For Notetaking?

The included Lenovo Tab Pen XE is a strange, industrial looking, thick and heavy stylus that tucks snugly into the case when not used. It uses a battery, so there’s no fancy magnetic charging either.

Unexpectedly, the Tab Pen XE feels really good to write with. Good enough for markups, notetaking and even drawing. It’s a far superior stylus compared to the Lenovo Tab M11’s, and we would say it’s close to the S-Pen from Samsung. That’s seriously impressive, and since it’s a robust, thick pen, you don’t have to worry about damaging it or dropping it when wearing gloves or something. We noticed that it tends to lag using the preinstalled Squid notetaking app, but works perfectly everywhere else.

We weren’t able to test it, but the S-Pen stylus of the Galaxy Tab Active 5 Pro looks suspiciously similar to Lenovo’s stylus. Actually, even the rugged case looks similar. We suspect the tablets might be made by the same factory, or the accessories at the very least. Of course, Samsung’s S-Pen has the advantage of not needing a battery at all, which makes it a slightly better stylus tablet if that’s an important factor.

Camera Test

Somewhat surprising is that the ThinkTab’s cameras are actually really good. The main 13MP on the back takes solid photos and sharp, 4k 30p videos. The front 8MP camera can only record FHD 30p, but the quality is good and selfies look surprisingly detailed. This selfie camera will easily beat your coworker or classmate’s webcam during an online meeting. 

Software: Android 16 ZUI

Lenovo ships the ThinkTab with the Android 16 based ZUI 18. It’s a basic, clean and bloatware-free user interface. But there’s a big issue. Lenovo is only going to offer 2 Android upgrades and 4 years of security updates for the X11.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab Active 5 Pro, in contrast, will receive 7 years of security updates. At least the enterprise edition of it. That’s a big advantage for going with the Samsung. 

Lenovo ThinkTab X11 Review: Final Verdict

So should you get the Lenovo ThinkTab X11?

By itself, the Lenovo ThinkTab X11 is a super exciting product. The swappable battery is useful and well implemented. It’s robust with the case, has optional 5G and SIM support and is IP68 dust and water resistant. However, it’s nearly the same, exact tablet as the Samsung Galaxy Tab Active 5 Pro, which even has the advantage of an official software support pledge. So if you’re looking for a rugged tablet with a stylus, it’s a hard pick between the two.

If the price of the ThinkTab is much lower than the Samsung, then it’s a good choice for a rugged 5g tablet.