Lenovo’s latest Android tablet may seem obvious for its price, but it also looks like something I’d want to travel with this summer. The Lenovo Tab Plus has eight great speakers for playing music and movies everywhere. The speakers are specifically tuned to work with Dolby Atmos, which is a great trade-off for the rest of the mid-range specs that make up the device.
Lenovo Tab Plus is an Android tablet with an 11.5-inch LCD display. It offers a 90Hz refresh rate, which is smoother than a regular computer monitor. It is powered by a mid-range MediaTek Helio G99 processor with 8GB of RAM, which is enough for watching movies, streaming music and playing mobile games occasionally. The Tab Plus also has an expandable Micro SD card slot, which has recently become more difficult to find on an Android device. It is available in up to 256GB storage capacity.
The main reason I’d buy this Android tablet over all others is the number of speakers Lenovo crams into its chassis for less than two pounds. As mentioned earlier, the Lenovo Tab Plus features eight JBL-branded speakers tuned with Dolby Atmos: four array speakers and four power-balanced woofers. There’s also a kickstand on the back that rotates 175 degrees, so you can find your location whether you’re listening to podcasts from afar or want to listen to music quietly.
There is an 8,600 mAh battery in the Lenovo Tab Plus, which is standard for a tablet in this category. Lenovo says it can fully charge in 90 minutes, which bodes well for travelers who rely on this for entertainment during a long plane ride. It’s also IP52 water and dust resistant, so you can take it into a humid environment – like the bathroom – without fear of it warping.
I spoiled the Lenovo Tab Plus at a meeting with the company a few months ago. I was impressed by the range of presence enabled by the tablet’s external speakers and the color saturation of the LCD screen.
If you want additional functionality, Lenovo sells the Tab Pen Plus and a wireless keyboard for the Tab Plus tablet. At $280, the Lenovo Tab Plus doesn’t have the specs to help you get your work done on the go. But it does have storage for your proprietary ripped DVD library for watching on the go.