Lenovo Tab P12 – review of a 12.7-inch tablet

Android tablets are gradually coming out of oblivion and growing in size, offering more and more solutions with 12-inch displays. Lenovo has just introduced such a novelty in its lineup, and it’s a mid-range one with a price starting at 15 thousand hryvnias. This is the 12.7-inch Lenovo Tab P12 tablet. Let’s take a closer look at its capabilities in this review.

Lenovo Tab P12 specifications

Package contents

By modern standards, the tablet’s package is quite extensive. In the box you can find a 20 W power supply, a charging cable and even a Tab Pen Plus with an additional tip. In general, it’s a pretty good set for this price category.

Design

Design is not Lenovo Tab P12’s strong point, but in the sense that there is nothing to catch the eye. The body of the tablet is a rectangle with slightly rounded corners, the front panel of which is occupied by a screen with relatively small bezels and Gorilla Glass 3. It’s not the latest version, but it does its job and is easy to wipe off fingerprints.

The back cover is a bit more interesting. It is made of metal, but visually divided into two parts. One of them has a more matte finish, which makes it stand out a bit. Here you can find the Lenovo logo, a dedicated place for attaching a pen with a magnet, and a small glass block with a single camera and flash.

On the edges of the Lenovo Tab P12 case we have four speakers, a volume button and a power button, which has a fairly fast fingerprint scanner.

At the bottom you can also find a keyboard connector, which I’ll mention later.

The case itself is only 6.9 mm thick and weighs 615 grams. This is a good figure for a 12-inch model. The materials and build quality also leave a pleasant impression, with all elements fitting perfectly.

Display and pen

The 12.7-inch display of Lenovo Tab P12 has an LTPS matrix with a resolution of 2944×1840 dots, but a refresh rate of 60 Hz. LTPS is a type of IPS matrix, so it has generally good viewing angles and color reproduction, but lags behind OLED screens in terms of black depth.

The tablet’s display has two display modes: standard and rich. But it is interesting that the colors in the “standard” mode are brighter, with it the screen has a wider color gamut and is generally “warmer”. Moreover, the color temperature can be changed manually, making it “colder” or vice versa even warmer with a yellow tint. So I settled on the standard setting, with which the display is quite well calibrated.

It’s also interesting that in the screen options there is a switch to automatically adjust the color temperature according to the environment, but in practice it has little effect.

But the bigger problem with the display is its relatively low brightness. Its maximum brightness is 400 nits, which is enough for indoor use, but if you want to go to the park to read a book in the summer, you won’t see much on the screen.

The tablet comes with a Tab Pen Plus. It connects to the tablet via Bluetooth and supports 4096 degrees of pressure, so the harder you press on the pen, the thicker the line when writing or drawing, and vice versa.

The pen weighs only 14 grams and is the same size as a regular ballpoint pen. When using it, there is a slight lag between the movement of the tip and the appearance of the drawing on the screen. But overall, the pen’s accuracy is quite high, and it’s convenient for writing and sketching.

The pen needs to be charged separately, and there is a USB-C port on its body for this purpose. The built-in battery has a capacity of 80 mAh and lasts up to 35 hours of use. If you forget to recharge it, the battery will replenish up to 25% in 15 minutes, so after a short pause, you can draw again for several hours.

Platform and performance

The Lenovo Tab P12 uses an 8-core MediaTek Dimensity 7050 processor with Mali-G68 graphics. Formally, this is a new chip, but in fact it is a “reissue” of the older Dimensity 1080 processor. It is considered to be a fairly successful solution for the mid-range segment and competes in terms of speed with Snapdragon 860, which is not very popular among manufacturers. This also says a lot about the success of the Dimensity 7050, which is installed in a lot of smartphones.

The processor doesn’t really “grab stars from the sky,” but it provides adequate speed for everyday tasks. Moreover, the tablet itself has 8 GB of RAM, which is enough for multitasking and even for switching to “PC mode” when the Android interface becomes similar to Windows with a desktop and programs in separate windows. In both “tablet” and “computer” modes, the speed is quite enough. At least I didn’t notice any annoying slowdowns.

The interface itself is Lenovo’s own shell that runs on Android 13, and it is not yet known when the tablet will receive an update to Android 14. Unfortunately, in this regard, the manufacturer does not like to share plans.

Lenovo’s framework doesn’t differ much from standard Android, but it has an interesting feature for managing application windows called One Vision. In each application window, three dots appear at the top, and by clicking on them, you can move the program to a separate “floating” window, expand it to full screen, or open another program window next to it. This is quite convenient and improves the multitasking capabilities of the device.

The built-in memory of the Tab P12 reaches 128 GB, this is the only option for the tablet, there are no other versions for it. One could be upset here, but the situation is saved by a microSD card slot that allows you to increase storage.

Given the not-so-fast platform, Lenovo Tab P12 doesn’t seem like a gaming solution. But in practice, it allows you to play both casual games and more complex ones like Northgard or Titan Quest. If you buy a tablet for a child, it will also run Brawl Stars, Roblox, and Minecraft.

The advantage of the Tab P12’s not-so-fast platform is that it doesn’t heat up much. We can even say that its body does not heat up at all. This, in particular, allowed it to get a stability score of 99.5% in the 3DMark stress test. That is, its processor does not actually drop frequencies under load.

To connect to the Internet, Lenovo Tab P12 has Wi-Fi 6, accessories and headphones can be connected via Bluetooth 5.1, and GPS support is available for navigation.

Lenovo Keyboard Pack keyboard case

The Lenovo Keyboard Pack is sold separately from the Tab P12 for 6 thousand hryvnias. It’s quite an interesting offer for a 12-inch tablet, which can be used for work, writing letters or editing documents, among other things. But this is in theory, in practice it is more complicated.

Despite the fact that the case is very well made, and the keyboard has a typically convenient layout for Lenovo laptops, a pleasant keystroke, and even a built-in touchpad, it has a number of flaws. One of them cannot be fixed: the keyboard buttons are not backlit, and the symbols on it are not very well visible against the background of the keys.

That is, in good light, typing is very convenient, but where there is less light, discomfort already appears. After all, even if you’re used to typing without looking at the keyboard, it’s still more convenient to have a backlight and the ability to see a certain character.

On the other hand, the lack of a backlight also means that the keyboard doesn’t need to be charged separately, it takes power from the tablet. However, I would easily swap one for the other.

Another downside of the keyboard is language switching. The fact is that it has a separate key to switch from one language to another, but it doesn’t work! And it’s funny that when you press it, you see the interface switching languages, but the keyboard itself doesn’t change it. And no settings have any effect on this.

In fact, you can switch from one language to another on this keyboard by pressing Ctrl+space. And it really works. But not in all programs! I’ve never been able to switch languages in Google Docs, although I had no problems with Microsoft.

Another unfortunate drawback: the Ukrainian layout does not allow for an apostrophe, but for some reason there is a Russian letter “ё”.

The latter two problems can be easily fixed by the manufacturer with a software update, and I hope that Lenovo will do so in the near future. But you really have to put up with the lack of backlighting, which is the biggest disadvantage of this keyboard.

Audio and camera

Given the platform, Lenovo Tab P12 is not designed for complex tasks; hardly anyone will undertake video editing on this tablet. But in terms of multimedia, this is a really interesting model, because the 12-inch screen is complemented by a system of 4 1W JBL speakers, and they are very loud.

So much so that you just don’t expect it from such a relatively compact device. Most large laptops sound worse than this tablet. And it has volume and bass, so you can listen to music as if it were a portable speaker. It’s more than enough for watching videos.

The main camera in the tablet is an 8-megapixel camera with autofocus and electronic stabilization. It doesn’t claim to be of high quality, but it’s good enough to take a picture of a document or a child’s homework.

The front-facing camera has a resolution of 13 megapixels and is well suited for video calls.

Battery life

The Lenovo Tab P12 has a 10200 mAh battery and is charged via USB-C 2.0 with support for up to 30W charging. Unfortunately, we were unable to run our standard PCMark battery test on the tablet, but it lasted just over 10 hours when playing videos at medium brightness and almost 4 hours at maximum brightness with a load created by 3DMark. That’s a good level of battery life that should give you a few days of use in mixed mode.