Lenovo Idea Tab Pro Review: Nearly grazing greatness

Introduction

When tablets as a category first winked into existence as Steve Jobs introduced the inaugural iPad so many years ago, the verdict was unanimous: these devices would be revolutionary. 

The laptop? It was to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Smartphones? Who would want a smaller screen? With the tablet, you had something big enough to work on, but thin enough to carry around. Better battery life than a smartphone, with a more defined use case. 

They were to replace almost everything, a true hallmark of the future. So what happened? 

Marketers’ dreams outstripped reality, and in the present, tablets exist in a muted form, for the sofa, for TV, not the do-it-all vision of a generation before. 

There are a few manufacturers, of which Lenovo stands near the fore, which continue to push the form factor to be something more.

Where ‘tablet things’ in the minds of many might mean vegetating on the sofa with a good TV show, Lenovo is among those who still hold hope that they might replace the laptop, and that Android will be the operating system to carry them there.

Its newest device, the Idea Tab Pro is a significant shot fired at the budget laptop. While those often carry mediocre screens, sport poor battery life and paltry RAM allocations, for £379.99, the Tab Pro claims to fly through any task, last all day and look good in the process. 

The name alone tells of Lenovo’s ambitions here; the ‘IdeaPad’ line of laptops is its workhorse budget tier option for students and families alike. By including a tablet here, it says that this is a similarly valid option for someone looking for a work device. 

But hyperbole and marketing aside, it’s the feel of a device, the user experience, which decides all. So, can the Tab Pro beat the best budget laptops around? Read on for our full review.

Design

• All metal build
• Weighs 620g
• Comes with a Lenovo Pen

It’s sad to say, but ‘pretty’ or ‘interesting’ are not adjectives commonly included in the same sentence as ‘budget’, and that maxim holds true with the Idea Tab Pro.

Those looking for a cheap tablet will be treated to a sea of grey or black rectangles that look roughly identical. The Tab Pro looks a little like an AI-generated image from a prompt that simply read ‘tablet’. It is indeed a ‘tablet’, a grey rectangle with metal on the rear and glass on the front, with some sober ‘Lenovo’ livery included.

The tablet isn’t meant to wow, nor to draw any kind of gaze. Here, the intention is to be generic, inoffensive, and above all, office-appropriate. And on those metrics, it can be considered a success. It is a device you can take almost anywhere without attracting attention.

Looks aren’t everything of course; feel in the hand is very important too, and luckily Lenovo played a blinder here. At 6.9mm the Tab Pro is thin, and although it tips the scales at 620g, that slimline design and good weighting mean that it feels light in the hand.

Despite being nearly as big as the screen on some laptops, the Tab Pro is easy to use around the house, and thanks to its light weight, is easy to cart around.

Included with the tablet is the Tab Pen Plus, which charges conveniently over USB-C (take note Apple), and which connects over Bluetooth. Though it doesn’t quite showcase the same convenient levels of sensitivity as the very best styluses out there, it will be of great use to any budding artist.

A keyboard pack for the Tab Pro is sold (which at under £90 is relatively well priced), however as it wasn’t supplied for the review, no verdict on its prowess can be rendered.

There are four speakers too, which can provide good volume and help TV shows come alive, even if they are no match for a low-end dedicated Bluetooth speaker.

Overall, from a design perspective, the Tab Pro is a win. It is a modern, utilitarian tablet which achieves all it sets out for, and which fits equally well in either the boardroom or the living room.

Screen

• Sizeable 12.7-inch screen
• Sports a 3K resolution
• Underlying panel tech is LCD

Given that it occupies such a large portion of the device, there’s a lot resting on the qualities of the display on the Tab Pro. Thankfully those are present in abundance, especially for the price.

To begin, at 12.7 inches, the screen (for a tablet) is truly capacious. Where some sacrifice screen size in the name of portability, there’s no such drive here. Instead, this is a panel where content can spread out, where you can theoretically conduct any kind of ‘work’. 

A criticism to be levelled is the choice of aspect ratio, which at 16:9 much benefits video, but something slightly taller, like 3:2, would have been a preferred choice for text editing.

Relatively minor gripes aside, the size hits a sweet spot between work and play. At 3K, the  resolution is more than many offer, in a world where 1080p has become the norm. It means that whether you are reading or watching a movie, content is pin-sharp. It also means that icons on the included ‘desktop mode’ can be a little smaller while remaining legible.

Unlike some of the more premium competition, the Tab Pro has ‘only’ an LCD screen, however colours retain lots of pop, while contrast remains plenty, if not infinite. 

HDR is supported, and watching the likes of a nature documentary remains a treat, where the content can really shine. It gets bright enough to combat sunlight, though it loses the match when the sun is strongest. Conversely, it can get quite dim in the dark, if not quite as dim as the likes of an iPad 11 can offer.

Lastly, at 144Hz, the screen is fast enough to keep the device feeling fast and smooth in everyday usage.

Camera

• 13MP autofocus sensor on the rear
• 8MP fixed focus snapper on the front
• Video capture limited to 1080p @ 30fps

It’s a line which by now has been repeated a million times: no one buys a tablet to use as their main photographic device. 

Perhaps from a statistical standpoint, that might not be true – if you are the one person in eight billion who eagerly awaits the truly camera-centric tablet, then may all your wishes come true. But for most, the maxim remains valid.

As such, it is of no surprise that there are no surprises in the Idea Tab Pro. It has a single rear-facing 13MP sensor with autofocus, and an 8MP effort with fixed focus on the front. What defines it is a lack of ambition, and that shines through with its performance. 

For a tablet, the resulting images are not bad, they’re just not ones you’ll want to frame, and even in 2025, that is still fine. They’re lacking in detail, showcase limited dynamic range and colour is a bit washed out, performance that would be expected of a budget smartphone in 2015. 

However, for the intended use cases of scanning documents and taking video calls, it’s nonetheless sufficient. The included flash makes achieving the former even easier than might otherwise be the case.

It is a little baffling that the front-facing effort is quite so laid-back for a machine that’s clearly intended to be used for video conferencing. Video is limited to 1080p at 30fps on the front and the rear, which is a bare minimum for what might be considered acceptable. Though it is superior to a lot of webcams on laptops, that isn’t saying a great deal. 

While the video produced is of acceptable quality, it isn’t wildly better than what one might find on a laptop of a similar price, which is unfortunate. Smartphones at the same price often sport detailed and lively capture, sometimes in 4K. The lack of any pizazz here just feels regressive.

Performance

• MediaTek 8300 processor
• 8GB of RAM by default
• Can come with 128 or 256GB of storage

The IdeaPad line of laptops, despite being Lenovo’s budget workhorse brand, isn’t known for its performance, and that proves to be true with the Tab Pro. 

Included within is the Mediatek 8300, a modern octa-core 4nm chip set which promises upper mid-tier performance levels, backed up with a standard 8GB of RAM and either 128 or 256GB of storage in tow. 

Given the ‘AI’ claims surrounding the tablet, the relatively paltry RAM allocation is interesting, as the various models currently available are notoriously RAM hungry. 

It remains plenty for a tablet and certainly enough to smoothly run Android, though it might count against the Tab Pro in the long term. Nonetheless, support for new versions of Android is offered for four years.

For most tasks, the chip and RAM combo is more than sufficient, and certainly fits the kind of workload that would be achieved on a tablet. For text editing, email, video calls and the kind it shines and never misses a beat. 

If you want to edit multiple streams of 4K footage simultaneously, to the iPad Pro line you must look, but for a great many people, this will be enough. 

I found that it could keep up with gaming too, although don’t expect miracles. You’ll be able to get passable framerates at medium details on the likes of PUBG, but you won’t be competing in eSports tournaments. For a machine that puts work first and foremost, that’s a nice win. 

This is borne out in benchmarks, where it achieved a single-core score of 1365 and a multi-core score of 4290 in Geekbench 6, putting it slightly ahead of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 in terms of power. 

The Tab Pro isn’t the most powerful tablet on the market, but for most users, it will be enough. 

Software

• Ships with Android 14
• Four years of software support
• Comes with a ‘desktop’ mode

As is always the case, with the Tab Pro, Lenovo has taken a laid-back approach to modifying the core Android experience. 

There’s little in the way of interface innovation or new features there to beat you over the head with their presence. Instead, it’s plain old Android with a bit of design flair and a “desktop” mode thrown in for good measure. 

With the supported keyboard case, that transforms the Tab Pro into something that far more closely resembles a laptop, and which makes working with multiple documents far easier. It does a great job of streamlining the Android tablet experience, even if it didn’t iron out all the quirks. 

The main obstacle to work is the apps, or lack thereof. On iPad there’s a rich creative ecosystem of native professional applications, but with Android, there’s no equivalent. And even where there are apps, some are meant only for phones and only work in portrait and with weird, blown-up text. Despite tablets on Android persisting since at least 2011, progress is yet to be made. 

That aside, Lenovo does have some small inclusions. There’s Smart Connect, which allows a host of clever connectivity options if you have a Lenovo laptop, and Lenovo Vantage. Neither is essential, but Smart Connect is helpful. 

Battery life

• 10,200mAh battery
• 45W charging

As it possesses a modern chipset along with a large 10,200mAh battery, I had high hopes with regards to the battery life of the Ideapad Tab Pro. Thankfully, those were mostly warranted. 

With ‘normal’ usage, that being a blend of video calls, word processing, watching video and sending emails, I was able to coax around 12 hours of use without too much issue. That means you’ll be able to make it through a full work day, with some time for fun before and after. 

Should you have a lighter use case, that will obviously extend significantly, and expect battery life to plummet if you are playing games. That’s pretty standard across tablets, phones and even laptops.

When the time comes to charge up, you can do so at up to 45W, though thanks to the large cell inside, it took just under two hours for a full refill.

Should you buy it?

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