The current Android tablet market seems like a two-extreme-corners space. On one side, we see the ultra-premium powerhouses that cost as much as a decent ultrabook, packing top-tier processors and gorgeous OLED screens that make you feel like you are working in a futuristic sci-fi movie. On the other side, we find a sea of incredibly cheap, plasticky slates that lag if you dare to open more than two browser tabs. Finding a comfortable, realistic middle ground is surprisingly tough, especially for students who just need a reliable study tool that won’t require them to survive on instant noodles for the next six months. During our review we found that Lenovo wants to fill that exact gap with the Idea Tab Plus.
This tablet sits comfortably in the entry-level segment. It aims directly at people who care about real-world utility over flashy tech buzzwords. After spending three weeks putting this device through its paces as a study aid, media machine, and casual gaming screen, I found a tablet defined by interesting contrasts. The hardware team built a solid, durable companion that can easily survive the daily commute, and the software team kept things clean and respectful. However, the chipset choice reminds us that compromises are inevitable when you are shopping on a budget. Is the Idea Tab Plus the tablet you are looking for? Keep reading to find out.
The Lenovo Idea Tab Plus is a tablet designed entirely around the idea of offering maximum versatility at the lowest possible price, targeting students and users looking for a practical device for multimedia consumption. It’s not without compromises, though.
Pros
- Premium-like build with aluminum casing
- Large battery capacity with fast charging
- There’s a slot for MicroSD
- Pretty clean software experience
- Advanced multitasking with floating windows, “Side by Side” mode, or both at once.
- Support for keyboard cover and stylus
Cons
- Kind of sluggish performance, there’s room for optimization
The manufacturer provided us with a review unit of the Lenovo Idea Tab Plus. We used it as our primary device for two weeks before writing this review, which was not sponsored.
Lenovo Idea Tab Plus: Specs
Lenovo Idea Tab Plus: Specs
| Display | IPS LCD, 12.1, inches, 90Hz, 2560 x 1600 px |
| Processor | Dimensity 6400 |
| RAM | 8GB LPDDR4X |
| Storage | 128GB/256GB UFS 2.2 |
| Battery | 10,200mAh, 45W wired charging |
| Cameras | 13MP main with AF |
| Colors | Cloud grey, Luna grey, Sand rose |
Lenovo Idea Tab Plus Review: Hardware and Design
First impressions matter, and when I first picked up the Lenovo Idea Tab Plus, I was pleasantly surprised by its physical build. Lenovo did not cheap out on the materials here. Instead of the flimsy plastic shells we often find in budget tablets, you get a mostly aluminum body that gives the device a reassuringly solid structure. It feels cool to the touch and offers a rigid, dense feel that immediately makes you think it costs more than its actual price tag. When you apply pressure or try to twist the chassis, you do not hear any creaks or feel any alarming flex. It feels like a reliable piece of metal that can easily handle being tossed into a messy backpack alongside heavy textbooks and keys.
The colorway of our unit, Cloud Grey, is a very safe and professional choice. It is a soft, matte grey that does not scream for attention but looks perfectly respectable on a library table or in a corporate meeting room. Lenovo decided to break up the flat matte texture of the back panel by placing its logo right in the middle with a shiny, reflective finish. When you tilt the tablet under the light, that logo catches the reflections in a very clean way, adding a touch of class to an otherwise minimalist rear design.
In contrast to the metal body, the single rear camera lens sits on a small, rectangular camera island made of glossy plastic. It protrudes slightly, although the tablet’s dimensions prevent the “wobble” effect when you place it completely flat on a desk and try to type on the screen.
If you are the type of user who likes to keep a massive collection of offline PDF textbooks, downloaded video lectures, or heavy music playlists, you will love the side edge of this tablet. Lenovo has retained a physical slot for a MicroSD card. This is great for students because it means you do not have to pay a massive premium for higher internal storage tiers. You can simply buy a cheap card, slide it in, and instantly expand your digital library.
Let’s talk about the audio, because a tablet is only as good as its speakers when it comes to relaxing after a long day of study. The Idea Tab Plus features a quad-speaker setup, with two grilles on each of the short sides when you hold the tablet in landscape orientation. In general, these speakers do a decent job. They manage to create a nice sense of surround sound, separating the left and right audio channels well enough to make watching movies or listening to podcasts more immersive. However, don’t look for them to blow you away acoustically. I found the maximum volume level to be noticeably lower than what I expected from a four-speaker system. It is perfectly fine for a quiet bedroom or a study corner, but if you have a noisy fan running in the background, you might find yourself wishing for a bit more punch.
Lenovo Idea Tab Plus Review: Display
The display is your primary interface with any tablet, so it needs to perform well. Lenovo went with an LCD panel here, which is the standard choice for an entry-level device rather than the pricier OLED screens. The screen can reach about 800 nits of brightness (HBM). Indoors, this is absolutely plenty of light. Whether you are sitting under the bright fluorescent lights of a lecture hall or working in a sunny cafe, the screen remains clear, colorful, and perfectly readable. You can read small text in documents and see the fine details in images without having to squint or maximize the brightness slider.
However, if you take the tablet outdoors on a bright, cloudless day, you will quickly hit the limits of this LCD screen. The 800-nit peak brightness simply cannot compete with direct, harsh sunlight. If you try to study on a park bench, you will find yourself constantly tilting the screen to avoid reflections, turning your session into a search for a shady tree. If you plan to do most of your work outdoors, this is an important limitation to keep in mind.
Since this is an LCD screen and not an OLED, you do not get those infinitely deep blacks or the ultra-punchy contrast that make high-end tablet screens look so striking. When you watch a movie with many dark scenes, you will notice a slight grayish backlight glow in the black bars at the top and bottom of the video.
But let’s be fair: for a budget-friendly student tablet, this screen has plenty of quality to make your daily use enjoyable. The colors look natural and lively, the viewing angles are wide enough that you can share a video with a friend sitting next to you without them seeing a faded image, and the resolution is sharp enough to keep text looking clean and crisp. It is a highly competent display that does exactly what you need it to do for streaming your favorite shows, browsing websites, or reading digital books, without any unnecessary bells and whistles.
Lenovo Idea Tab Plus Review: Performance
Performance is where we get a very clear picture of the tablet’s entry-level, student-first identity. Inside, the Idea Tab Plus runs on the MediaTek Dimensity 6400 processor. This 6nm chip is designed to handle basic daily tasks while keeping power consumption low. This review was actually my very first encounter with this specific SoC, and to be completely honest, my overall impressions ended up being a bit “meh.”
On the positive side, the tablet can easily run almost all the daily applications you will need for your studies or casual entertainment. You can jump into your web browser, open up your online document editors, check your email, and stream a video in a floating window without the tablet crashing or giving up. The 8GB of RAM does a decent job of keeping those apps open in the background, so you do not have to wait for them to reload every single time you switch tasks.
However, using the interface isn’t quite as smooth as one would like. The tablet can feel a bit clunky and unresponsive at times. Even simple actions like pulling down the notification shade can lead to some visual stuttering and lag. The animations seem to drop frames, making the interface feel heavy and unoptimized.
This clunkiness is particularly interesting because I have tested other devices with the same combination of LPDDR4X RAM and older UFS 2.2 storage, and those devices felt significantly smoother in daily use. This suggests that the hardware might not be entirely to blame. There is some room for Lenovo to release software updates to optimize how the operating system talks to the Dimensity 6400 chip. As it stands right now, you can absolutely get your work done, but you have to accept that the tablet lacks that snappy, instantaneous feel we expect from modern mobile devices.
When we loaded up demanding, resource-heavy games like Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Call of Duty Mobile, the tablet automatically set the graphical settings to “Low” or “Very Low.” This is a necessary trade-off to keep the frame rate at a playable level. If you try to push the graphics to medium or high, the game immediately becomes a choppy, unplayable slideshow with frustrating input delay.
By leaving the graphics at their lowest settings, you can actually get a decent, relatively stable gaming experience. You can run around the open world of Genshin Impact or engage in multiplayer matches in Call of Duty without constant stuttering. Of course, the games will not look pretty. You will notice jagged edges on character models, muddy textures on the ground, and very basic lighting effects.
Lenovo Idea Tab Plus Review: Benchmarks
Synthetic benchmark tools can give us a general idea of a processor’s raw power capabilities. The results clearly position the Idea Tab Plus as an entry-level device. The results from the Dimensity 6400 chip are more reminiscent of the older Helio chipsets than the more modern, capable Dimensity ones.
Geekbench
As usual, we started our battery of tests with Geekbench. This particular benchmark is focused on the CPU’s chipset capabilities. And, as expected, the results are quite modest.
| Device | Single-Core | Multi-Core | GPU |
| Lenovo Idea Tab Plus | 763 | 1,978 | 1,253 |
| OnePlus Pad Go 2 | 1,044 | 3,094 | 2,600 |
| Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE | 1,366 | 3,936 | 6,539 |
Antutu
Antutu reflects the reality of this tablet’s power even more clearly. The score of almost 560K indicates that this is by no means a device designed for the most demanding tasks and games. Still, it has enough power for most everyday apps, as well as educational tools.
| Device | Score |
|---|---|
| Lenovo Idea Tab Plus | 557,774 |
| OnePlus Pad Go 2 | 959,013 |
| Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE | 888,352 |
3DMark’s Wildlife Extreme Stress Test
Finally, there’s 3DMark’s Wildlife Extreme Stress Test, which pushes mobile device hardware to its limits. Again, the tablet’s raw power doesn’t stand out in the test. However, the device’s high stability rate indicates that it’s capable of delivering consistent and sustained performance over extended periods of use.
| Device | Best Loop | Lowest Loop | Stability |
| Lenovo Idea Tab Plus | 341 | 338 | 99,10% |
Lenovo Idea Tab Plus Review: Thermals
One benefit of this low-intensity rendering is that the tablet stays impressively cool. Since the processor is not being pushed to its absolute limits, it does not generate the massive heat that usually causes performance to drop over time. The aluminum back panel does an excellent job of spreading the warmth evenly across the surface, meaning you won’t feel any uncomfortable hot spots under your hands.
Below are the figures for the maximum temperature reached during the benchmarks:
| Benchmark | Temperature |
|---|---|
| Geekbench | 28.9 °C/84.02 °F |
| 3D Mark Extreme Stress Test | 27.6 °C/81.68 °F |
| Antutu | 28.9 °C/84.02 °F |
Lenovo Idea Tab Plus Review: Battery Life and Charging
Autonomy is a crucial pillar for any student companion, as a tablet that dies in the middle of an important afternoon lecture is nothing more than an expensive paperweight. Fortunately, the Lenovo Idea Tab Plus handles its power management quite well, relying on the efficiency of its 6nm MediaTek processor to squeeze every drop of energy out of the battery.
If you start your day with a full charge, you can confidently head to campus or the office without carrying your charger along. Under a typical study-focused workload—which involves typing notes, reading PDF documents, researching on the web, and occasionally checking your social feeds—the battery level drops at a very slow, predictable pace. The LCD screen and the efficient processor work together to ensure that you can easily get through a full eight-hour day of intermittent use with plenty of juice left over for some evening streaming.
However, if you decide to spend your afternoon streaming high-definition videos over Wi-Fi or playing those low-graphics games, you will watch the battery percentage decline much faster. Demanding tasks force the processor to work harder, which naturally demands more power from the battery. Even so, the overall endurance remains highly competitive for this class of device.
Overall, you can expect the tablet to consistently offer between 8 and 10 hours of on-screen time.
When it comes to recharging, the experience is very traditional for an entry-level tablet. The charging speed is not the worst, neither the best. It focuses on keeping the battery cool and healthy over long-term use rather than rushing to fill it up. On the bright side, the 45W fast charging allows you to fill 50% of the cell in around 30 minutes. However, from there the charging speed drops drastically to protect battery health. A full charge from zero to 100% will take a couple of hours, which is fine for a budget device.
Lenovo Idea Tab Plus Review: Software
The Android tablet software space has improved dramatically over the last few years. We have finally moved past the era when tablet software was just a stretched-out smartphone interface that wasted massive amounts of screen space. Today, Android includes genuine productivity tools designed to make the most of larger displays. Lenovo has implemented these features quite well on the Idea Tab Plus.
The standout feature of the interface is the permanent taskbar at the bottom of the screen. This single addition makes multitasking feel incredibly natural. It lets you quickly launch your favorite apps, jump back into programs you recently closed, or switch between tasks with a single tap, bringing the user experience much closer to a traditional laptop or desktop computer.
To help you get work done, the software supports robust split-screen and floating window capabilities. You can easily slide two apps side-by-side—for example, keeping your note-taking app open on the left while reading a textbook PDF on the right. You can also have a small utility app, like a calculator or a quick messaging thread, hovering over your main workspace as a floating window, letting you handle quick tasks without interrupting your flow. There’s even the option to use apps in floating windows while having two apps set side by side.
One of the most refreshing aspects of Lenovo’s software approach is the lack of third-party bloatware. When you boot up the tablet for the first time, your app drawer is remarkably clean. You won’t find pre-installed shopping apps, random mobile games, or annoying promotional software. Lenovo includes its own suite of tools, but these are actually useful applications designed for drawing, writing, and organizing your notes. There’s not much default app redundancy either, as Lenovo turns to Google’s own apps for services like gallery or file management. For a budget, entry-level device, this is commendable.
During the initial setup, the tablet will show a screen asking if you want to download a few popular third-party apps, but it leaves the choice entirely up to you. If you say no, the system respects your decision and leaves your tablet clean. This is a level of software respect that we rarely see in the affordable space, where many brands install unwanted software anyway, even after you explicitly decline it during setup.
The software also offers native support for optional stylus and keyboard accessories. If you plan to use this tablet as your main study device, investing in these tools is highly recommended.
Should You Buy the Lenovo Idea Tab Plus?
The Lenovo Idea Tab Plus is a highly pragmatic device that knows exactly what it wants to be. It is a durable, affordable study tool built to survive the daily grind of student life without breaking the bank. The solid aluminum body offers a level of physical durability that is not that common at this price. Plus, the clean, bloatware-free software experience is a breath of fresh air. The helpful multitasking features like the bottom taskbar, split-screen support, and active stylus compatibility are the cherry on top.
However, you must accept some very clear performance compromises. The MediaTek Dimensity 6400 processor, paired with older storage speeds, results in a user interface that feels noticeably clunky and prone to stuttering during simple navigation tasks. The quad-speaker system, while offering a nice surround sound effect, lacks raw volume, and gaming is strictly limited to the lowest graphical settings if you want to maintain a playable frame rate.
You should buy the Lenovo Idea Tab Plus if:
- You’re looking for a versatile and affordable tablet for students or media consumption
- You’re looking for a tablet that supports accessories like a stylus and keyboard.
- You’re looking for a tablet with premium-quality construction materials without breaking the bank.
You should not buy the Lenovo Idea Tab Plus if:
- You’re looking for a buttery-smooth, ultra-responsive user interface.
- You want to play graphically demanding games at high settings.
- You plan to use your tablet frequently in direct outdoor sunlight.
The post Lenovo Idea Tab Plus Review: A Solid Student Tablet Companion with a Catch appeared first on Android Headlines.
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