Lenovo’s Yoga Tab Plus is a gorgeous Android tablet, but that’s not nearly enough

Lenovo Yoga Tab Plus The Lenovo Yoga Tab Plus is a gorgeous tablet that's big enough to compete with the likes of the iPad Air and Galaxy Tab S11, but its beauty isn't much more than skin deep. With underwhelming AI features, a two-year-old chipset, and no broader mobile ecosystem features to speak of, it's tough to justify spending around $700 MSRP on an Android tablet that's behind from the start and won't get enough updates to stay current in the long term. I’m constantly on the lookout for ways to replace my laptop. It’s not that I don’t like my 15-inch MacBook Air (I really do), I just don’t love toting it with me while I travel. Along the way, I’ve tried a rotating cast of Android tablets, foldable phones, and Chromebooks, but nothing has quite stuck. So, when Lenovo announced its first AI-powered tablet, the Yoga Tab Plus ($519 at Lenovo), I figured I had to give it a try. After all, with a long summer of travel ahead of me, I thought that features like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, dual cameras, and a suite of included accessories would cover me for everything from a camping trip away from reliable Wi-Fi to a marathon in the most remote corner of my home state. And, now that my long summer is winding down, it’s time to see how the Yoga Tab Plus handled its task. Now that’s a good-looking tablet (with all the extras) Ryan Haines / Android Authority Above all else, the Yoga Tab Plus is gorgeous. The singular finish, dubbed Seashell, is a kind of white, yet a kind of silver, and I’ve yet to find an angle from which it looks bad — either from the front or the back. In fact, despite accompanying me through several months of travel across campsites, beaches, and hotels in the far-flung corners of Pennsylvania, I’ve yet to find a blemish on Lenovo’s metal body or glass display despite the light-colored finish. Perhaps some of that reassurance comes from the slate’s decent IP53 rating, which beats the unprotected OnePlus Pad 3 but doesn’t quite crack the lofty IP68 standards of the Galaxy Tab S11. Either way, I’m happy with the durability so far. However, as I mentioned, the Yoga Tab Plus is designed to look good from almost every angle, and that certainly includes its display. Lenovo equipped its top-end tablet with a 12.7-inch, 3K LCD panel, and it has impressed me in almost every aspect I’ve tested. Would I have liked an OLED panel at this price point? Sure, I’d have liked to see more than 900 nits of peak brightness, too, but there’s enough sharpness here to make up for it. Lenovo's LCD panel is big, bright, and sharp enough for all my streaming needs. See, what the Yoga Tab Plus lacks in deep, dark blacks and blistering whites, it covers up with a smooth 144Hz refresh rate and the sharp resolution I’ve already mentioned. I’m not usually the type to watch dark, moody movies on a tablet, so the LCD hasn’t felt like I’m missing out. Instead, I’ve been turning to the Yoga Tab Plus for lighter scenes, such as the first few weeks of the college football season, and streaming my friends taking on the Sydney and Berlin marathons, both of which came out crisp and bright. That’s not to say I haven’t put the Yoga Tab Plus through any serious tests, though — reserving a tablet with Harmon/Kardon speakers and Dolby Atmos tuning for sports and livestreams hardly seems fair. So, I also sat down to watch James Gunn’s Superman on HBO HBO Max Max HBO Max on a rainy fall day in Baltimore and was more than impressed. The movie sounded as good as it looked, perhaps because it’s mainly set during the day, and I never came close to maxing out the tablet’s six total speakers. Of course, I’ve mostly focused on my casual usage of the Yoga Tab Plus so far, but this tablet is also equipped for productivity. Yes, the nearly 13-inch display is more than large enough for wordsmithing and keeping my inbox clean, but I’m actually referring to the fact that Lenovo still offers a lot of goodies in the box. Unlike every other premium tablet on the market, my Yoga Tab Plus arrived with a Tab Pen Pro, a keyboard pack, a folding kickstand, and a 45W wired charger all wrapped up in the box, and I’ve made them all regular parts of my travel setup. The Tab Pen Pro has been a go-to for making the big screen feel just a little bit smaller, and the keyboard pack has a credit card-sized trackpad that’s just about big enough to replace what I’d get on a Chromebook. White accessories are a bold choice for a tablet that should last years. There is, however, one minor issue with Lenovo’s treasure chest of accessories: they all come in white. Well, the kickstand and the keyboard do, but they’re the tablet’s main protectors, and they’ve had to bear most of the brunt of the elements. Luckily, my vegan leather accessories have only picked up minor smudges, but if you’re going to keep this tablet through the end of its update cycle, yours might not be so lucky by the end. I thought I’d be okay with a previous-generation chipset… Ryan Haines / Android Authority Good looks are, of course, only half of the battle when it comes to launching a premium Android tablet — but at least we know the Yoga Tab Plus has those. The other key component of a tablet, any tablet that costs more than $500, is solid performance. Not just reliable, but solid. And, with a mix of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage under the hood, it seems like the Yoga Tab Plus has the goods to succeed. Or, at least, it definitely would have had the goods to succeed if it had launched when the chosen chipset was a bit newer. Instead, it’s packing two-year-old silicon, which we last saw in devices like the OnePlus Pad 2. Two-year-old silicon is a bold choice at this price point — and by bold, I mean silly. If this were a flagship smartphone, I’d declare it dead on arrival, but it’s not. It’s a premium tablet that I mostly use for travel, so I haven’t had to ask too much of it — mostly web browsing, soccer streaming, and email management. And, for a while, I thought that would be enough for me to declare the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset good enough for most people. Now, though, I’ve come around to the fact that I’m actually pretty disappointed by the Yoga Tab Plus’ performance. But, before I can really dig into why I think Lenovo made a bad decision in grabbing a two-year-old chipset, I should talk about a couple of benchmarks. I put the tablet through our usual slate of tests and found that it’s… passable? Serviceable? Perhaps ‘just fine’ will suffice — which isn’t a ringing endorsement for a $700 tablet. The Yoga Tab Plus certainly won’t be winning any awards for power, but perhaps that’s okay when buying a tablet. I can at least give Lenovo some credit for pushing its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset a little further in the Geekbench 6 test than the OnePlus Pad 2 did, but I’d expect nothing less with an extra year of development on its side. It also matches Lenovo’s own Legion Tab Gen 3 almost perfectly — they share the same chipset, which I suppose is good news for gamers. Compared to OnePlus’s newer Pad 3, though, there’s no debate about which tablet is more powerful. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite outperforms the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 across both CPU- and GPU-intensive benchmarks, and is similarly smooth in day-to-day use. Now, I might be alright with this gap had the OnePlus Pad 3 cost significantly more than the Yoga Tab Plus, but it doesn’t — at least not at full price. While we haven’t fully benchmarked ourselves yet, it also won’t keep pace with the Galaxy Tab S11 series’ Dimensity 9400 Plus SoC on paper, and there’s absolutely no competition if you start comparing it to an equivalently priced iPad Air with its laptop-grade Apple Silicon, either. Thankfully, though, tablet performance is about more than just a few benchmarks. As I mentioned above, my needs from the Yoga Tab Plus have been pretty light and travel-focused, and it’s more than good enough for that. I’ve had no issues jumping between WordPress, Gmail, and Paramount Plus for the Champions League, and then back again, for quite a few hours on end. I tend to favor lighter puzzles for my tablet games, too, and I’ve been fine with the way the Yoga Tab Plus handles Railbound and Royal Match — not that I expected either of those titles to put too much stress on the slate. Thankfully, the Yoga Tab Plus packs enough battery life that a charger isn't a must-have for a day away. All told, I think I’m glad I settled on the Yoga Tab Plus as a part-time laptop replacement rather than a full-time upgrade. It’s been a champ for the day-to-day grind, but I think editing photos or videos would leave me just a little bit too stressed and worrying about the tablet’s battery life. Mentioning battery life, it’s important to remember that mileage will vary when it comes to a slate like this. Personally, I’ve only been charging my Yoga Tab Plus about once per week, but I certainly don’t use it every day. I’ll reach for it if I know I’ll be away from my desk for a few hours or if I’m traveling for the weekend, at which point I know I can trust it to stream several episodes of Peacemaker or Task before I even have to think about reaching for a charger. I do, however, notice that my battery life struggles a little when I’m using the Tab Pen Pro, but that’s probably because it draws a charge every time I put it back on the magnetic top edge. And hey, I can’t complain when Lenovo tosses a full-speed 45W charger in the box. A so-called AI tablet should have, well, decent AI features Ryan Haines / Android Authority Alright, so if the hardware is definitely good and the performance is okay-ish (I suppose), it’s time to discuss the Yoga Tab Plus’ highlight feature: its AI. Well, the AI that should be the highlight feature, anyway. In practice, though, I think Lenovo has dropped the ball and then kicked it at least a few yards backward. Maybe that’s harsh, but hear me out — the Yoga Tab Plus doesn’t really have that many AI features, nor does it seem like they’re coming in the future. Instead, it offers an assistant called Lenovo AI Now, which is basically a chatbot that you have to teach yourself. It’s somewhat context-aware, but only in the sense that it can search through the documents you feed it rather than searching through existing messages and emails. It's nice to search my own documents, but not exactly revolutionary. And yes, if you’re reading that and thinking that it doesn’t really sound like an AI assistant, you’d be right. It’s more like a slightly better search feature, which is decent if you know what you’re looking for, but not that helpful if you want to learn something new, which is usually the point of AI assistants. You can’t ask Lenovo AI Now to help plan a trip, help make a meal plan, or help with a new tactic for your five-a-side squad unless you already have an existing document that you feed into your database — a document you might have gotten from Gemini, ChatGPT, or any other full-power AI assistant. Speaking of other assistants, though, the good news is that the Yoga Tab Plus supports both Gemini and Circle to Search, so you can let Google pick up where Lenovo left off. Honestly, though, I would have liked to see Lenovo cross the aisle to incorporate a few of Motorola’s AI-powered features, such as Next Move or Catch Me Up, to create a truly AI-powered tablet. Unfortunately, Lenovo’s modest commitment to software updates doesn’t give me much hope that this AI-powered tablet will actually pick up much AI power in the long term. The Yoga Tab Plus launched with Android 14 and has since received Android 15, but it’s only going to get Android 17 before it hits retirement age (i.e., three years of platform updates). And, with Android 16 already landing on other devices (mostly from Google and Samsung), it means the clock is already ticking on this $700 tablet. Lenovo Yoga Tab Plus review verdict: It’s pretty, but not practical Ryan Haines / Android Authority When I sat down to write this review, I did so with many positive experiences in mind. After all, the Yoga Tab Plus has been with me for a wedding, a camping trip, a marathon, and a couple of dips down to the beach over the last few months. So, how could this tablet not be a positive part of those trips? Well, unfortunately, I think it comes down to the fact that the Yoga Tab Plus doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Have I enjoyed the tablet? Yes, but that doesn’t mean I think you should rush out and spend money on it. More specifically, I’m not really sure what element of the Lenovo Yoga Tab Plus would convince you to buy it over another rival tablet. If you’re looking for a rock-solid option for streaming, Samsung’s entire lineup of Galaxy Tabs is worth considering, with a model available for every budget. Something as cheap as the Galaxy Tab S10 FE ($499.99 at Amazon) gives you a nice 90Hz display with a slightly wider aspect ratio that works perfectly for most shows and movies, and, like Lenovo, it still comes with an S Pen in the box. And, if you go the Fan Edition route, you’ll still have some money left over for accessories. See, each of those tablets has a chipset strong enough to outpace the Yoga Tab Plus, each has software updates that will far outlast Lenovo’s commitment, and each has a much more robust ecosystem of accessories to link with it. If you spend your money with Samsung, it’s easy to grab wearables, earbuds, and a phone that can share health data and Galaxy AI features across your entire setup. Apple is the same way, perhaps with even better connectivity, and OnePlus is no slouch with the new OnePlus Buds 4 to check out. The Yoga Tab Plus isn't a bad tablet, but the lack of unique selling points and a mobile ecosystem is a tough sell at this price point. With Lenovo? Well, you’ll certainly have some PC-centric accessories, like headphones, to explore, but there isn’t really a natural Android counterpart. Like I said, Motorola doesn’t share its AI features with its parent company, and the Yoga Tab Plus doesn’t really do much else to encourage cross-platform connection as it is. If Lenovo made its own phone (sorry, ThinkPhone), smartwatch, or earbuds, I might give it a pass. However, the Yoga Tab Plus feels just a bit too standalone at the moment. And while that’s fine for Lenovo’s affordable tablets with more bespoke use cases, like the cheap and cheerful Idea Tab Pro ($379.99 at Amazon), or the smaller-sized, gaming-focused Legion Tab Gen 3 ($549.99 at Lenovo), making a fully premium, iPad and Galaxy Tab S competitor with no unique selling points, a limited update policy, mediocre specs, and a total lack of a mobile ecosystem is an extremely tough sell. If you can find it in a decent sale (it’s currently below $600 at the time of writing, which makes it far more appealing) then you might be able to get past the caveats. Personally, if my options are a standalone Android device or an open door into a broader ecosystem, I’m going to pick the ecosystem every time. Lenovo Yoga Tab Plus 3K, 144Hz display • 45W charging • Punchy speakers MSRP: $699.99 Big, beautiful Android tablet. The Lenovo Yoga Tab Plus is a gorgeous tablet that's big enough to compete with the likes of the iPad Air and Galaxy Tab S11. See price at Lenovo Positives Crisp 3K, 144Hz display Crisp 3K, 144Hz display Speedy 45W wired charging Speedy 45W wired charging Helpful accessories in the box Helpful accessories in the box Punchy speakers Punchy speakers Clean Android experience Cons Lame AI features Lame AI features Limited software support Limited software support Aging processor Aging processor A bit too expensive at MSRP Follow