Lenovo Yoga Tab Plus Review: Bendy in all the right ways

Introduction

Design in tablets, as elsewhere, is a fascinating interplay between the visions of engineers and the realities of public perception.

It’s the job of a designer, working from scratch, to anticipate the needs of the audience at the end of a production pipeline, maybe a year or more in advance. What will they value? What will they need most? It’s all ultimately a big guess. Sometimes, things work, and other times, they don’t.

Sometimes, you’ll get a swing for the benches, something really unusual. Then there’s Apple, pushing incremental changes year on year. Lenovo, typically, is not the latter. This is a firm that pumps out device after device, not afraid to chop and change year on year, looking to find something that will stick.

Its Yoga line has typically produced some of the most experimental tablets on the market, with a weird and wonderful assortment of inclusions over the years. However, this year, things are a little different. The experimentation has been toned down, but the ambition hasn’t.

With the Yoga Tab Plus, we see concepts similar to those of previous years, but here, the focus is on polish, something quite unusual for Lenovo. That isn’t to say its devices aren’t well made or thought out, but they haven’t had quite the ‘mature’ feel of offerings from Samsung and Apple.

Sporting a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, a 3K LCD display, six speakers and a fancy blue colourway, it’s a statement of intent from a manufacturer in its pomp.

But the tablet market has done anything but stand still over the last year, and it takes more than ever to stand out. Is it enough to try and play it safe, even with something a bit more ‘out there’?

Read on for our full review.

Design

• Magnetic rear kickstand
• Six speakers
• Additional keyboard

The emphasis on the Yoga tablet series has always been on one thing – flexibility.

Key to their appeal for a long time was the inclusion of a physical kickstand and a ‘folded magazine design’. That meant that the battery, internals, and everything of note were embedded in a ‘tube’ towards the rear of any given device. It was a hallmark for several years, before it, and the kickstand, were jettisoned.

Presumably, to reduce manufacturing costs, the Yoga Tab Plus has no built-in kickstand; instead, it is a ‘standard’ tablet (read a glass and metal rectangle). However, it does come with a magnetic stand that can easily be attached to the rear and performs the same function.

There’s one incontrovertible truth about the Yoga Tab Plus: It looks good. That is, it’s polished, premium, and stands out – in a positive way.

This tablet isn’t content to blend in; it wants to announce its presence. It has something of the Surface line about it, with sharp angles and bold colours. The review unit I was sent came in a very fetching Tidal Blue, a flash of personality that remains office-appropriate.

Thankfully, there are themed accessories, too. To burnish the Surface credentials, it comes with a keyboard bound with the signature ‘Alcantara’ faux-fabric that Microsoft first championed years ago.

The keyboard itself, typical for a Lenovo machine, is well-spaced and satisfying to type on, even if there isn’t a great deal of travel. At £669/$669 it’s a little steep price-wise, but the same is true for most keyboard attachments.

At 8.5mm thin and weighing 640g, the machine itself is slender and highly suitable for travel.

And here’s the rub: It suits that role better than a great many laptops, MacBook Air aside. Here’s a machine that can be thrown in a bag and forgotten, and that exists as a great dedicated media device as well as a work machine – which is at least what the marketing hopes to convey.

From a design perspective, it achieves a great deal of that, though in copying the Surface line, it has also come up against the same flaws.

Many have tried the 2-in-1 approach, and the general issue remains: competence in two areas, excellence in either one or neither. The Yoga Tab Plus is a great tablet, however the wobbly keyboard attachment and relatively flimsy stand make using it in your lap, or less secure areas (like a train) a tricky proposition.

As a pure content machine, it works very well as the proverbial perfect tablet, however it fumbles the ask of being a work machine somewhat. Though it is designed to be taken anywhere, actually using it in a range of circumstances can be somewhat challenging.

Screen

• 12.7-inch panel
• 3K resolution
• LCD screen tech

Any tablet is only as good as its display, and happily, the Yoga Tab Plus doesn’t disappoint in this area. 

From the off, its 12.7-inch size is truly capacious without being ridiculous. It’s enough to be immersive when watching video and for getting work done, though there is an aspect ratio trade-off. The widescreen approach works well for video content, but the lack of vertical display space means that working with text documents can feel a little cramped.

This relatively minor gripe aside, there’s astonishingly little to complain about. The resolution, at 3K, is enough to make content pin sharp, and reading is a treat in particular. In a world where 1080p is the norm, it makes a noticeable difference to have some extra sharpness while reading.  

Another break from the norm is the LCD panel tech. In a world where OLED is increasingly becoming the norm, it’s easy to assume that LCD is simply inferior, but that’s just not the case. At any rate, the panel in the Plus shows that it still has legs. Colours have suitable pop, and even if blacks aren’t infinite, they still have plenty of contrast.

Brightness, at up to 900 nits, was exemplary, even if not enough to fully combat bright sunshine, though the panel does get dim enough to read at night without searing your eyeballs. At up to 144Hz it is one of the faster panels around, making it feel nippy in general usage, and as it supports HDR, with the correct content it looks great. 

This is big display with big aspirations that it mostly lives up to, and a pleasure all round to use. 

Camera

• 13MP selfie sensor
• 13MP rear-facing sensor
• Front camera capable of 4K@30fps

Although much of the Yoga Tab Plus is designed to impress, that has certainly not been the case with the cameras. 

Instead of big sensors and high megapixel counts you’ll find on your smartphone, there are two snappers with entirely average specifications. On the rear, you’ll find a 13MP wide-angle sensor with autofocus, accompanied by an entirely superfluous 2MP macro sensor. There’s a flash too, and on the front, there’s a fixed-focus 13MP sensor.

What’s on the rear is sufficient to scan documents, while the setup on the front will be enough for video calls, though it is disappointing that the selfie sensor in particular doesn’t come with any pizazz attached.

Essentially, it would have been nice for autofocus or some implementation to have been included. There is a ‘face tracking’ feature which attempts to focus on your face, but which proves to be haphazard in execution.

It does the job, but on a tablet which is supposed to be ‘Plus’, it seems more like a minus.

Images produced from the main sensor do actually punch above their weight, thanks to the Image Signal Processor included in the chipset. They showcase decent detail, good dynamic range, and nice colour. That’s with the proviso that any mid-range smartphone will do a better job.

The front-facing sensor can record footage in up to 4K resolution at 30 frames per second, and the results are sharp and colourful – it works well as a video-conferencing machine as might be expected.

Performance

• 16GB of RAM
• 256GB of storage
• Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor

Typically, there are different expectations for a tablet than one would find with a smartphone. Where cameras would normally be a big concern, with tablets, not so much. The same is often true with performance. Where phones are endlessly scrutinised for the most infinitesimal differences in benchmark performance, with tablets, this just isn’t the case.

That isn’t to say that performance isn’t important within a tablet context; it certainly is. If you plan to complete any task that’s even vaguely work-adjacent, you’ll notice whenever extra seconds waiting begin to accumulate. At the start of a day, it doesn’t matter; by the end, you’ll know.

So it’s a pleasure to say that the Lenovo Yoga Tab Plus has all the power you’ll likely need, handling nearly everything with aplomb. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 inside is a modern chip, a previous flagship effort, and does a great job with everything from games to work. No matter what I threw at it, it never even began to work up a sweat.

That’s borne out in benchmarks too, with the chip achieving a single-core score of 2186 and a multi-core score of 6518 in Geekbench 6, putting it just ahead of the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra in terms of power, no mean feat. With 16GB of RAM, it can keep a host of apps in memory, and moreover has enough to take advantage of any ‘AI’ tasks you might want to accomplish.

Though the included 256GB of storage might seem like a lot, for a machine that is intended to compete with baseline laptops, it would have been nice to see 512GB as an option. It will be enough for most, regardless.

Software

• Android 15 by default
• Four years of software support
• Minimal additions

If there is a persistent criticism that can be levelled each year at Lenovo, it is its lack of attention to detail in its software.

Typically there are a few attempts at useful extras, but the follow-through has often left a lot to be desired. A very good example is the ‘desktop’ modes included on its various tablets. Commonly these are slow, trigger erratically and can sometimes cause display issues.

Thankfully, with the Yoga Tab Plus, these issues have proven to be a thing of the past. When the included keyboard case is attached, the tablet springs into a desktop configuration, which is genuinely useful and well thought out – if best used with a mouse.

It makes the experience of working a little more manageable, and is definitely a positive inclusion. Otherwise, this is your standard Android proposition; the same as it has always been, though with the odd value add here and there. That mostly boils down to battery care software, a note-taking app for use with the included pen and an AI app that requires a Lenovo account to use.

Not exactly welcome, but not egregious either. There’s no great fanfare over the software here for a reason – it hasn’t been a major investment. Paradoxically, that laid-back approach works well, and the Tab Plus becomes an example from which others could learn.

The lack of focus has had something of a negative effect on the ‘AI’ inclusions.

These include live transcriptions, circle to highlight, and other similar features. While they work as advertised for the most part, they require a Lenovo account. There are vanishingly few workloads in the present that are AI-heavy, so the utility of this as a work-focused inclusion is dubious, to say the least.

Battery life

• 10,200mAh battery
• 45W charging

With a large, high-res display and a powerful processor, it’s no surprise that the Yoga Tab Plus has a massive 10,200mAh battery to keep things chugging along. Thankfully, that proves to be enough to make for some highly respectable battery life.

Over a full workday, which is to say taking a few Teams calls, working on shared documents, and listening to music at the same time, it lost 55% of its charge over eight hours. That left plenty of juice for watching a couple of shows at the end of the day.

If you are a heavy user, you’ll get a day’s worth of use out of the Yoga Tab Plus. Those who have lighter use cases will see that extend significantly.

Recharging is relatively fast at up to 45W, but due to the large battery, charging to full took around two hours in total.

Should you buy it?

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