Lenovo’s latest Android tablet might seem overt for its price point, but it also sounds like something I want to travel with this summer. The Lenovo Tab Plus has eight boomy speakers to blast music and movies everywhere. The speakers are specially tuned to work with Dolby Atmos, which is a nice trade-off for the rest of the mid-range specifications that make up the device.
The Lenovo Tab Plus is an Android tablet with an 11.5-inch LCD. It offers a 90hz refresh rate, smoother than your average computer monitor. It runs on a decidedly mid-range MediaTek Helio G99 processor with 8GB of RAM, sufficient for watching movies, streaming music, and playing the occasional mobile game. The Tab Plus also has an expandable Micro SD card slot, which has recently become more challenging to find available on an Android device. It’s available with up to 256GB of onboard storage.
The main reason you’d buy this Android tablet over all others is because of how many speakers Lenovo crams into its chassis at under two pounds. As mentioned, the Lenovo Tab Plus features eight JBL-brand speakers tuned with Dolby Atmos: four matrix tweeters and four force-balanced woofers. There’s also a kickstand on the back that pivots 175 degrees, so you can find your positioning whether you’re tuning in to a podcast from far away or want to listen to music softly.
There’s an 8,600mAh battery in the Lenovo Tab Plus, which is standard for a tablet in this class. Lenovo says it can charge fully in 90 minutes, which bodes well for travelers relying on this for entertainment during the long plane ride. It’s also IP52 water and dust-resistant, so you can take it into a moist environment—like the bathroom—without fear of warping it.
I got to mess with the Lenovo Tab Plus in a meeting with the company a few months ago. I was impressed with the range of presence enabled by the tablet’s outer speakers and the color saturation of the LCD.
If you want additional functionality, Lenovo sells the Tab Pen Plus and a wireless keyboard for the Tab Plus tablet. At $549, the Lenovo Tab Plus doesn’t have the specs to help you finish your work on the go. But it does have the storage space for a library of owned, ripped DVDs to watch on the go.