The good:
1. Solid build quality.
2. Vibrant, clear and sharp display.
3. MicroSD card support.
4. Amazing battery life.
5. Productivity Mode (PC Mode) is good for office tasks.
The bad:
1. Performance isn’t the best.
2. No fingerprint reader on the Tab P11.
Yes, Android tablet is still a thing in 2020, and we’ve seen a variety of slates being released this year. From solid entry-level slates like the Alldocube iPlay30, to versatile midrange devices like the Honor V6, then to the most cutting-edge powerhouses like the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 Plus, consumers with different budgets could all find the right tablet for themselves.
Lenovo released two Android tablets recently: Lenovo Tab P11 and Tab P11 Pro. The Pro Edition was clearly more celebrated because of its fabulous 11.5-inch OLED display, quad JBL speakers and Snapdragon 730G processor. But both of them come with decent specs for their price tags, and have the potential of being real contenders.
Before we start, I have to say that I bought both tablets, one for myself, and the other for my partner, as they are extremely cheap here in China: the P11 Pro retails for RMB1,999.00 ($305), and the P11 is as cheap as RMB1,299.00($198). So, this review is NOT paid or sponsored in any way, and everything I have written here is based on my real experience.
Impressive design
Both the Tab P11 and Tab P11 pro look neat and elegant. The metallic rear and slim build give the slates an air of luxury.
The P11 has bigger bezels, and is also thicker than the P11 Pro does, but both still look like 2020 tablets which could easily blow the Huawei Matepad 10.8 out of the water in terms of aesthetics.
The Tab P11 Pro has a frosted aluminum back, which makes it feel much more premium than its tag would suggest. Apart from the Dolby Atomos Logo, the camera lens and LED are the only distractions. It’s incredibly clean, simple, and stylish. The P11’s back side looks a little bit more interesting, as half of it is actually plastic. According to Lenovo, the main goal of this design is to allow better WiFi reception, rather than saving cost.
Both tablets have 3 physical buttons: power/standby, volume+, volume-. The power key of the Tab P11 Pro also serves as a fingerprint reader, which makes unlocking the screen a lot easier. Both tablets support 2D face unlock, which is almost as fast as fingerprint recognition, although definitely less secure. The P11 Pro has an infrared camera, which works like a charm in low light conditions. The standard P11 doesn’t have one and, as a result, its front camera often struggles to recognize my partner’s face in low light, and he constantly has to turn to PIN to unlock the screen.
Both tablets have a multi-function USB-C port, which can be used for charging, data transmission, video and audio output. The P11 Pro’s Type-C port is of USB3.1 standard, which allows faster data transfer than the USB2.0 Type-C port on the P11. Also, both of them have a MicroSD card slot which supports cards up to 512GB. Neither tablet has a 3.5mm audio jack, if you intend on using wired headphones on them, you will need an adapter. Fortunately, the Tab P11 Pro comes with one, while the cheaper Tab P11 does not.
The P11 and P11 Pro each has a pogo pin port on its bottom side, which can be connected to their respective official keyboard case. The tablets also support stylus with 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity. I haven’t got one yet because both the official pen and keyboards are out of stock in China.
The build quality of the Tab P11 Pro is extremely solid, and could even rival much more expensive slates such as the iPad Air 4, the Galaxy Tab S7, and the Huawei MatePad Pro. The P11 does feel less premium than the Pro edition, due to its bigger bezels and slightly thicker body, but it still feels a lot studier than other tablets in the same price range, such as the Honor Pad 6 and Teclast M40.
Screen and Sound
Both tablets have wonderful displays.
The Tab P11 Pro sports a gorgeous 11.5-inch OLED display with Dolby Vision and HDR10. Resolution clocks in at 2,560 by 1,600, for 214 pixels per inch (PenTile). With deep, inky blacks and rich colors, the display is really a joy to look at, and the screen has a brightness level of up to 500nit.
The Tab P11’s 11-inch, 2000*1200px IPS LCD panel is undoubtedly less impressive when compared to the Pro edition, but it’s still a good-enough display for almost any scenario. Somehow I even find the P11’s display better suited for reading.
Both tablets come with quad speakers, but the P11 Pro’s JBL certified speakers are not only louder, but offer deeper bass, fuller and more layered midrange, and brighter treble. With that said, even the built-in speakers of the standard P11 can easily beat average laptops in terms of volume and overall sound quality. Even my HP Elitebook 745G, which sported a Bang&Olufsen speaker, delivers smaller and tinnier sound than the Tab P11.
System & UI
I bought both the Tab P11 and Tab P11 Pro in China, so they both came with Lenovo’s very own ZUI, a heavily customized skin on top of Android 10. The international editions of these slates will ship with stock Android OS, with only a few twists here and there. I installed the international firmware on the Lenovo Tab P11 Pro for better support for Google apps, but kept ZUI on the standard P11 as it is a gift for my partner, who can’t care less about YouTube or Netflix as he finds enough joy with Chinese counterparts such as bilibili and Watermelon Video.
Unfortunately, the Android ecosystem is going towards a direction which is less and less tablet-friendly. Many of the customized tablet applications in Play Store were released years ago and haven’t been updated for a long time. As a result, most of the apps I ran on these tablets were just phone apps blown up to fill tablet screens, and many of these apps only support vertical mode.
However, Lenovo has designed ”PC Mode” for its ZUI, and “Productivity Mode” for its international interface, These desktop modes work very much like Samsung’s DeX mode. You will get a taskbar similar to the one on Chrome OS and Windows 10. On the left side of the taskbar are the three classic Android keys: Back, Home and Multi-tasking, you can use them to control the running applications. You will also get a shortcut to open the application drawer. What really makes Productivity Mode/PC Mode so special is their ability to run multiple apps in windows. You can browse through Emails, chat on Skype and watch a movie simultaneously. You will almost feel like you are using Windows instead of Android.
Thanks to the keyboard shortcuts and right-click menus, the Tab P11 and P11 Pro feel much more productive than average smartphones and tablets. For instance, you can copy texts from a webpage and instantly paste them into office apps or social networking apps.
Performance
At the core of the Tab P11 Pro is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 730G chipset, which is built on 8nm process, has an octa-core CPU (4 Cores of Cortex-A76 clocked at 2.2GHz and 4 cores of Cortex-A55 clocked at 1.8GHz) and Adreno 618 GPU. The Tab P11, on the other hand, is powered by an older, and relatively weaker Snapdragon 662 chipset, which is built on 11nm process and also has an octa-core CPU (4 Cores of Cortex-A72 clocked at 2.0GHz and 4 cores of Cortex-A53 clocked at 1.8GHz) and Adreno 610 GPU. Neither of these two processors are real powerhouses, and benchmarks tell the story.
To help you better understand the performance of these slates, I also listed the benchmark scores of other midrange and entry-level tablets for comparison.
As can be told in the sheets above, the Lenovo Tab P11 Pro’s is in the same ballpark with the Kirin 810 powered Huawei Matepad 10.4 when it comes to overall performance, while the Tab P11’s horsepower is on par with other tablets in the same price range.
Both the Tab P11 and Tab P11 Pro features the same 128GB UFS2.1 storage, which should be much faster than eMMc drives in terms of speed. In the Androbench test, the P11 and P11 Pro handily beats the Huawei MatePad 10.4 and Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite in terms of Sequential Read Speed, but slightly fall short in Sequential Write Speed.
In the real-world use, both tablets can easily handle everyday tablet tasks with ease. I experienced no issues watching videos in the YouTube App, and editing photos in Snapseed at the same time. With that said, the Tab P11 Pro does feel a bit faster opening bigger applications and loading heavier webpages, but differences can only be perceived when I am running the same tasks on them side by side. Each of them feels fast enough for the tasks it is designed for.
Intense gaming should not be your main reason to buy an Android tablet, as most games are designed for phones and will be difficult to control on a 10+ inch screen. With that said, both tablets can run most games installed from Play Store without issues, but in order to have a smooth visual experience, you need to use moderate settings in some of the big titles. The Tab P11 has a weaker GPU of the two, but it is still able to run “Arena of Valor” and “PUBG” in mid settings smoothly.
Cameras
Cameras are not something I would be concerned about when choosing a tablet, with that said, I still want them to be as high-quality as possible. Both the P11 and P11 Pro come with a very decent 8MP selfie camera, but only the latter has an infrared camera by the side. The P11 Pro rocks dual rear-facing cameras: a 13MP main sensor and a 5MP ultra-wide lens, while the P11 only has a 13MP main shooter on the back.
The quality of their selfie cameras is more than enough for video chatting, and both tablets have the capability of taking clear and color-rich photos with their main camera setup in decent lighting conditions. However, as smartphone cameras are getting so good these days, who really need a 11-inch tablet for photography?
Battery Life and Charging
The Tab P11 features a 7,700mAh Li-Po battery, while the P11 Pro has a larger 8,250mAh battery under the hood. With display brightness and speaker volume both set at 50%, the P11 and P11 Pro lasted 11 hours, 37 minutes and 13 hours, 5 minutes respectively in our battery rundown test in which we played a 1080P local video on loop.
Both the P11 and P11 Pro support Qualcomm’s QC3.0 quick charge, and they both come with a 20W wall charger, but only the Snapdragon 730G powered P11 Pro can take full advantage of charging in 20W, the standard P11 only supports 18W charging at maximum.
Both tablets can be fully charged (from 0?100%) in around 3 hours.
Verdict
With Snapdragon 730G and Snapdragon 662 inside their respective shells, neither the P11 Pro nor the P11 is a powerhouse, but they are not really designed to be the best-performing tablets or break any new grounds. With that said, both tablets get a lot of essential things right. They each comes with a wonderful display, amazing speakers, and offers decent performance and perfect software optimization for everyday entertainment and productivity tasks. For me, they are easy recommendations for anyone who needs a new and affordable Android tablet.
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