Lenovo Tab P12 Pro review: Better than Samsung and Apple

Lenovo Tab P12 Pro Review: Better Than Samsung And Apple

The Lenovo Tab P12 Pro is an exciting and cheaper alternative to the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Plus and the 12.9-inch Apple iPad Pro. Lenovo’s premium tablet offers a 12.6-inch OLED display and a Snapdragon 870 processor, the pen is included, and you can get it with a keyboard. How good is the tablet for just over 700 euros? You can find out in this Lenovo Tab P12 Pro review.

Design And Processing

The design of the Lenovo Tab P12 Pro is just as high quality as that of the premium competitors from Apple and Samsung. We get a metal body that feels very premium and thin at just 6mm. It tips the scales at 565g, which is pleasantly light for such a large tablet.

A fingerprint reader is built into the power button, which works quickly and precisely. We get a microSD card slot and a USB C 3.1 Gen 2 port, to which you can also connect external monitors. A headphone jack is missing, but a USB C to 3.5mm jack adapter is included in the scope of delivery.

At the front, we get an 8-megapixel webcam and a TOF sensor, thanks to which you can also unlock the P12 Pro securely using face recognition. You can take good selfies with the front camera, which is also very suitable for video chats.

On the back is a 13-megapixel primary camera and a 5-megapixel wide-angle camera. You can take perfect pictures with the primary camera. The wide-angle camera is also suitable for snapshots, but details and sharpness are lacking since it only has a resolution of 5 megapixels.

Display: 12.6 Inch OLED

A big highlight of the Lenovo Tab P12 Pro is the 12.6-inch AMOLED display. It has a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels and is lovely and sharp. As is typical for an AMOLED, we get very high contrast, colors are nicely saturated, and overall the display looks very good.

I compared it to the 12.4-inch AMOLED Samsung Galaxy Tab S8+, and both displays look almost identical. It’s not possible to say which is better because both support 120Hz. Thus, animations and fast movements look just as smooth on the Lenovo as on Samsung and Apple.

The Tab P12 Pro supports HDR content, and since it has a Widevine level of L1, you can also watch films in HD and with HDR 10 with Netflix and Co.

It’s fantastic that you can easily use the tablet as an additional screen for your notebook. Lenovo calls this Project Unity, and you only have to install an additional app on your laptop. There is a slight lag compared to a wired monitor, but it still works surprisingly well. It’s also cool that the touchscreen also works.

Speaker

The tablet has a total of four speakers on your side. The sound quality is excellent and similar to the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Plus. In a direct comparison, only the sound of the 12.9-inch Apple iPad Pro seemed a bit more pleasant to me.

Lenovo Precision Pen 3

Let’s move on to the active stylus. You usually always have to buy the pens separately from Lenovo, but this time the Lenovo Precision Pen 3 is included in the scope of delivery. That’s great because Lenovo has a lot of pens that aren’t interchangeable.

The Precision Pen 3 is made of plastic, about the thickness of an average ballpoint pen, and has a button on the side. The pen on the back of the tablet is charged by induction – like with Apple and Samsung.

We get a hard tip here, just like the Apple Pencil. The tip of the Samsung S Pen and the original Microsoft Surface Pen is softer, which I find a bit more comfortable. But I know that opinions differ here.

The stylus is quite responsive and accurate. However, I noticed that it does not react as quickly as usual with other 120Hz tablets. If you draw quickly, what you write can lag behind the pen. It looks better with the 120Hz tablets from Samsung and Apple.

Lenovo has given the Precision Pen 3 some software features. With them, you can quickly create a note, take a screenshot and label it. It is also interesting that you can now write by hand in many regular text fields. This works similarly to Apple’s Scribble feature but isn’t quite as mature yet. You can’t use it like that in Gmail in the message window.

Hardware And Performance

The Lenovo Tab P12 Pro has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 processor with 6GB or 8GB RAM and 128GB or 256GB internal storage. There is also a version with built-in 5G.

Benchmarks like Geekbench 5 and 3D Mark Wild Life show that the Snapdragon 870 performs below the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 series’ Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. You can also clearly see that the Apple iPad Pro with the M1 chipset is not just a little bit more powerful, but a considerable amount. Regarding performance, Android tablets cannot keep up with iPads.

My gaming test shows that the Lenovo Tab P12 Pro is one of the top Android tablets. So you can play PUBG Mobile with UltraHD graphics, just like on the top models of other manufacturers. It is also exciting that you can set the graphics to “epic” and the frame rate to “60 FPS” in Fortnite. The game runs surprisingly smoothly with these graphics settings, and I only saw occasional stutters.

Other applications such as Chrome, YouTube, Adobe Lightroom, and demanding multitasking run without problems. The system itself also feels very fast. When using the P12 Pro, you immediately realize it is a premium tablet and pretty powerful.

Software: Android 11

Out of the box, the Lenovo Tab P12 Pro runs Android 11 with Lenovo’s interface. An update to Android 12L is already planned, and overall it should get updates by 2024. That sounds good, especially since Lenovo hasn’t been all that good with updates in the past. I also suspect that Samsung, and Apple, in particular, will be rolling out updates for a few more years.

Although the interface has been minimally modified, it runs pure Android on the tablet. Numerous apps from Google are preinstalled, including a children’s mode and the Google Entertainment Space. This gives you a quick overview of your entertainment content, but you can also turn it off in the settings.

As usual, you can open apps in a multi-window view. If you’re using the keyboard dock and need some more efficient multitasking, you can turn on Productivity Mode. This type of desktop mode makes it easier for you to use the tablet with a mouse and keyboard. Most importantly, apps will then open in floating windows that you can also overlay. An excellent and valuable feature.

Keyboard Covers

If you want to work with the Tab P12 Pro, you can buy an official keyboard cover that costs 150 euros and is significantly cheaper than the competition. Like the Book Cover Keyboard for the Galaxy Tab S8+, Lenovo’s keyboard cover consists of two parts. showtime anytime com activate A back with a built-in kickstand connects magnetically to the tablet and can also be used separately.

It is astounding that there is space for the Precision Pen 3 behind a flap so that it does not get lost in the backpack and is charged simultaneously. The magnets on the back are pretty strong, so you can move and carry the tablet on the folding stand without the tablet falling off.

The keyboard is then also magnetically connected to the tablet. Since we have a 12-inch display here, the keyboard can be nice and large, and it is much more comfortable to type on than on the typical ten or 11-inch keyboards. The keys are easy to depress, and I could type quickly and blindly.