Known for building some powerful computing systems as its legacy devices, Lenovo has been keeping pace with competition when it comes to tablets as well! One of the most power-packed launches this year was the Lenovo Tab P12 Pro, and here’s how it fared.
Build & Design
The Lenovo Tab P12 Pro offers a 12.6-inch AMOLED touchscreen with up to 600 nits brightness. Aesthetically, I wish there was something about the tablet that really stood out, but it’s your basic plain-grey all over.
A lot of what I enjoyed doing on the Lenovo Tab P12 Pro was ruined a bit by the weight. The tab is a smidge over 560 grams, and after gaming or watching media on it for more than 30-45 minutes, my palm would start feeling stiff. At night, catching up on my reading, the thought of the tablet falling on my face, as I got drowsier, would make me wrap things up sooner than I wanted to. Given that the weight is typical of a tablet this size, using it with a propped up, seems to be the best way to go.
On the device, there are physical buttons - the recessed Power button on the left bezel, and the Volume Rockers on top. Along the left bezel is also the microSD card slot, where you can amp up the storage by another whopping 1 TB.
Multimedia
Swiping left from the Home Screen lets me step in to ‘Google Entertainment Space’ which turns out to be a veritable blackhole for whatever little free time I have left. I have a one-screen access to watch titles from Google TV, Netflix and YouTube, play games, read e-books and listen to music and podcasts. If there’s something a secondary media consumption device should necessarily include, it’s a dedicated page like this.
I started watching the Extraordinary Attorney Woo,a new K-drama series about an brilliant young lawyer with autism. The viewing experience is pretty immersive - rich colours and stark contrast, considering it’s an AMOLED display. The sound quality on the quad JBL speakers is fairly impressive, given there’s Dolby Atmos support. However, because I was holding the tablet while gaming or watching media, the sound ended up getting muffled, with my palms covering a bit of the speakers grilles on each side. There isn’t a headphone jack, but Lenovo has thoughtfully enough packed in a USB-C to 3.5 mm headphone jack adapter in the box.
I indulged in some casual gaming, with Swamp Attack, where I had to defend my home in the bog from deceptively cute crocodiles, fairly eager to chomp on my limbs as they get closer. The graphics rendered smoothly across games, including Stickman Archer and Asphalt 9: Legends, and there were no stutters or heating issues ever, no matter how long I used the tablet for at a stretch!
The tablet ships with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 Octa-Core processor with a massive 8 GB RAM. Coupled with a 120 Hz display refresh rate, the tablet is ideal for gaming. Browsing and multitasking were lag-free, as expected. On the AnTuTu benchmarking test, the Lenovo Tab P12 Pro scored 7,10,349, and ranked in the top five most powerful tablets. This review unit shipped with 256 GB of internal storage and has been upgraded to Android 12. It’s unfortunate that it doesn’t come with Android 12L which is actually the OS version optimised for tablets. If this was included, some niggles could have been easily avoided - for example, currently when I swipe down to expand the notification bar, the notifications takes up a small corner of the massive screen, and the rest lies unused, for no good reason.
Camera
The front 8-megapixel camera is decent enough for logging in to work meetings, and the photos taken on the rear cam - 13MP autofocus with a 5MP wide angle - are annoyingly grainy even in well-lit indoor spaces. While snapping photos isn’t something I’d be doing with this tab anytime soon, I wouldn’t mind using it for online meetings.
Stylus
Using the tablet is thankfully much easier with the Lenovo Precision Pen 3, packed in the box. Pairing with the Lenovo Precision Pen 3 is easy - just snap it to the magnetic panel at the back and it shows the current battery level and pairs the Pen immediately. Propped up vertically, on my desk, it’s easy to navigate, play games and even watch Netflix, while using the stylus to control the interface.
There’s an exclusive Productivity Mode, which lets me multitask across windows, but the experience is a bit awkward overall. Very few apps work effectively in this mode and there’s landscape/portrait orientation issues with some. The usual left swipe that takes me back a browser page, ends up closing windows in this mode! Hence, the gestures I use to navigate aren’t of much use here. With a bunch of counter-intuitive functions like these, the productivity mode, needs a major overhaul.
Battery
The Lenovo Tab P12 Pro is powered by a massive 10,200mAh battery. With an hour or two of playing games and watching a series on this each day, the tablet easily went about 3-4 days without draining fully. It comes with a 30W charger and that takes about 2.5 hours to get to full charge from zero. It’s also damn impressive that the tablet is as thin as it is - just under 6 mm - given the battery it packs in!
Verdict
The Lenovo Tab P12 Pro is built with some attributes that technically would make it a great tablet - a powerful processor, a fluid and vivid display and great battery life. However, the lack of an optimised software experience - that would make the user experience more seamless and snag-free - keeps it from being one of more alluring options right now. The price tag doesn’t help matters either!
Price - INR 69,999
Pros - Vivid display, long battery life, stylus included
Cons - Software issues, expensive