Android tablets are a dime a dozen these days, particularly in the budget segment where you can often find them for $100 or less. Often you won’t get much more than a terrible screen and a bargain-basement processor that’s barely powerful enough for your toddler to watch Bluey.

However, every so often, an affordable tablet comes along that offers much more than its low price might suggest, with a good design, decent specs, and unique features that help it punch well above its weight. While it may not rival the best tablets out there, Lenovo’s new Tab Plus offers quite a lot for not a lot of money.

Pricing and availability

It’s hard to believe it’s this affordable

Lenovo and Newegg are offering the Tab Plus for $245, which is a really good price for this tablet. Best Buy has it for $289 (then an extra $100 off for Black Friday) and Amazon for $299 at the time of writing.

The sales for Black Friday and throughout the holidays will vary, but even aside from any sales, $245 for everything that you get in the Tab Plus is a great price. There are many Android tablets that are much pricier and have a worse experience.

What’s good about the Lenovo Tab Plus?

There’s a lot to like in this little tablet

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating here: the specs of a device never tell you the whole story. Especially in today’s tech landscape, you really have to look at devices holistically, not just what they look like on paper.

The Tab Plus delivers a great user experience without running the latest specs. For me, Lenovo got most of the important things right. The 2000 x 1200 LCD display is much better than it should be at this price. It’s not an OLED, but it gets up to 400 nits of brightness with very pleasant colors and has a 90Hz refresh rate, which is nearly unheard of on a device this affordable.

There's a lot to like in this affordable tablet.

It also feels great to hold. The casing is a hybrid of metal and plastic, it doesn’t feel cheap or flimsy at all, and it weighs less than 1.5 lbs. It’s not completely flat on the back due to the enlarged speaker housing for four of the eight speakers, and it also sports a built-in kickstand for watching stuff or working when you need to.

Those eight speakers are split, four in the top half and four in the bottom half. All of them are turned with Dolby Atmos, and the bottom four are built with extra room in their chambers to deliver full, rich, audio that has no business sounding this good on a $250 tablet. It gets loud enough to fill a room, so it’s perfect for hosting. Plus, as a full-fledged tablet, it’s so much easier for you and your guests to manage the music with a big display to work with.

full, rich, audio that has no business sounding this good on a $250 tablet

I only mention the 8MP camera (front and back) because it’s actually worth mentioning. Not that it’s all that good, but simply that it’s not disappointing. It’s much more useful than most budget tablet cameras. I was pleasantly surprised by the performance, considering it’s running a two-year-old MediaTek Helio G99 and only 8GB of RAM. It handled everything I did, and while certainly not as smooth as the OnePlus Pad 2 or Galaxy Tab S10, it was much more usable than other tablets I’ve tested at this price point. I actually wrote the entirety of this review on the Tab Plus which is never something I’d thought I’d say of a sub-$300 tablet.

A big enabler of my productivity was Lenovo’s built-in desktop mode. You can enable this manually or set it to turn on automatically when connecting a Bluetooth mouse or keyboard, and it works a lot like Samsung Dex. There’s a taskbar at the bottom with navigation buttons and an app drawer button, along with many device controls. Apps automatically open into floating windows that are completely adjustable, and you can even snap them into split screen windows for greater multitasking.

A big enabler of my productivity was Lenovo’s built-in desktop mode

Lenovo claims they’ll support the Tab Plus up to Android 16 and offer four years of security updates, but they’ve been hit-or-miss with their updates, so we’ll have to wait and see.

What’s not good about the Lenovo Tab Plus?

Its biggest weakness is also not entirely Lenovo’s fault

As useful as Lenovo’s software is, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. I noticed a few bugs, especially with an external mouse connected. Sometimes my mouse clicks wouldn’t register, so I’d have to touch it, or tabs would mysteriously disappear in Chrome. They wouldn’t close, I just couldn’t see them at the top of the browser until I resized or minimized the app.

Sadly, Lenovo also loaded a ton of bloatware onto this thing. Most of them were games, but a few were apps that made me a little nervous, like TikTok. That’s likely part of the reason they were able to keep the price so low, but it’s still not okay with me at any price. You can delete most of them, but I shouldn’t have to.

The biggest issue with the Tab Plus is still the main issue plaguing all Android tablets: the lack of full-fledged support from Google. The Android-maker doesn’t seem to know (or care) what they want to do with Android on tablets, and until that changes, we won’t see anywhere near the robust app support that the iPad gets. It may happen one day, but don’t hold your breath.

One silver lining is that Google is supposed to have some sort of native desktop mode in Android 15 so that part might get better, but considering the Tab Plus just launched with Android 14, I wouldn’t expect to see Android 15 on it until well into next year.

Should you buy the Lenovo Tab Plus?

If you’re looking for an Android tablet, this is a great option

Aside from the software annoyances, which aren’t insurmountable in my opinion, there’s a lot to like about the Tab Plus. The hardware is great, the display more than usable, and the speakers are unmatched on almost any other tablet. Plus, the added features like a built-in kickstand and Lenovo’s desktop mode make the Tab Plus a versatile option.

I’d even be willing to bet that, for some, it could become their primary computing device. It’s portable, durable, and powerful enough to do most everything most people might need it for. The price certainly makes it even easier to recommend.