Lenovo Idea Tab Pro Tablet Review: It Gets the Job Done

7.5 / 10

Score

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Lenovo Idea Tab Pro

$400 at Best Buy

$400 at Lenovo

Pros

• Modest price
• Expandable storage
• Sharp and smooth display

Cons

• Performance is modest
• Bland looks

The Lenovo Idea Tab Pro isn’t a tablet to get terribly excited about. Fortunately, it doesn’t need to be.

It fits into a reasonable budget, offering respectable qualities, though not stunning ones. Its performance isn’t showstopping, but it holds up to everyday operation with ease. The display could be brighter and punchier, but it’s bright enough and plenty sharp. The design doesn’t catch the eye, but it doesn’t look outright cheap either.

A lot hinges on the price, though. As Lenovo suggests, the Idea Tab Pro could be as much as $419. At that price, it might start to feel a little overpriced when something like the RedMagic Astra is just $160 more and offers leaps and bounds in quality and performance.

Lenovo’s pricing is rarely stationary, though, and the fact that I’ve seen the Tab Pro as low as $289 during my time with it suggests you might be able to find it for far less than MSRP. At $289, the Lenovo Idea Tab Pro is a proper steal, offering plenty of utility as a light productivity and media consumption device.

The Lenovo Idea Tab Pro starts at $389 with 128GB of storage. That bumps up to $419 for 256GB. At the time of writing, the smaller storage version had a $100 discount that wasn’t available for the larger storage model. Both versions include the Tab Pen Plus stylus, but they don’t include a keyboard folio cover — a $119 accessory for this tablet. (Get a slim Bluetooth keyboard instead.)

One feature the Idea Tab Pro has that many of its competitors don’t is a microSD card slot, letting you cheaply expand the storage if you start to run out of space in the future.

No speedster, but not slow

The Lenovo Idea Tab Pro is no performance beast. Some MediaTek chipsets do just fine, keeping pace with the best Qualcomm has to offer. The MediaTek Dimensity 8300 inside the Lenovo Idea Tab Pro isn’t one of them. It falls well behind the CPU and GPU performance of the Snapdragon 8 Elite and even the earlier Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 that still finds its way into devices like Lenovo’s own Yoga Plus.

That said, the Idea Tab Pro isn’t some total laggard either. It vastly outpaces a cheaper tablet like the Amazon Fire HD 10 (2023). The Pixel Tablet is a little older, but it’s still floating around with the same obscene $499 price tag it started with. Compared to the Pixel and its Tensor G2 SoC, the Idea Tab Pro actually stacks up really well. The Lenovo came out ahead in Geekbench 6 single- and multicore CPU performance as well as 3DMark Wild Life Unlimited, albeit more narrowly. In the graphically demanding MotionMark test, it doubled the Pixel Tablet’s score.

All that is to say that the Lenovo Idea Tab Pro has more than enough power to handle casual use without many hiccups. Heavy games are not in the cards for this tablet, for instance, unless you’re willing to dial back the settings significantly.

I did find one issue watching YouTube at 2x playback speed, which saw the video frame rate drop considerably, becoming choppy. This came and went for a minute or so and then seemed to completely rectify itself.

On the other hand, battery life is strong. It ran for 741 minutes (12.35 hours) in our video streaming test with the display set to 50% brightness. That 50% wasn’t dim either, putting out a reasonable 141.5 nits. So it’s not an exceptional marathon machine, but it can hold up under extended use.

Plain and utilitarian

The Lenovo Idea Tab Pro is on the plain side, lookswise, but it’s not ugly. It has a gray, aluminum case that wraps around the sides and back. A small clear bump holds the rear camera and flash. A section along the top rear edge has diagonal accent lines. It’s in this region that the stylus can magically (OK, magnetically) latch onto the tablet.

The stylus, unfortunately, isn’t too impressive. It needs to charge separately via USB-C, not by drawing power from the tablet itself, and it lacks any haptics. These are two points that made the Yoga Tab Plus’ stylus more appealing. Latching the stylus on the back also makes it prone to getting knocked off when sliding in and out of bags.

The 12.7-inch LCD has even bezels all the way around for a tidy look, even if those bezels aren’t impressively thin. The display is satisfying, offering a sharp-for-the-size 2,944×1,840-pixel resolution and a smooth 144Hz refresh rate.

It’s not insanely bright, peaking at 411 nits in my testing, but it’s reasonable. It’s just a shame it doesn’t have the same antiglare coating found on the Yoga Tab Plus.

Each side of the display has a pair of JBL speakers that pump out a good deal of sound. While the sound can sometimes have some audible resonances, overall it’s a largely agreeable quality for a tablet.

The USB-C charging port is between two of these speakers, and nearby is the little microSD card tray.

Along the bottom edge, the Tab Pro includes a wide set of pogo pins and two little slots that help it latch onto and communicate with a keyboard accessory. Again, that keyboard isn’t included with the tablet.

Lenovo offers facial recognition using the front-facing camera and has a fingerprint scanner built into the power button. Both have worked quickly and effectively, though the facial recognition stopped working after I shaved a very short beard.

So, in all, the Lenovo Idea Tab Pro is a solid, if not world-shattering, performer, especially if you can find it for less than its MSRP.