Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus

The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus is one of the few new tablets that doesn’t just scrape together minimal specs in an attempt to attract buyers who find the iPad a bit too expensive. 

It’s only slightly less expensive than Apple’s entry-level new iPad, and that has more storage too. Factor this in and they’re similarly-priced.

As with most Android tablets, the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus's design doesn’t quite match an iPad’s. However, if you’re resolutely an Android lover, this is one of the few good mid-price options you have.

Highlights include a screen that's great for comic books and movies, GPS and expandable memory. It’s also half the price of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3, although the older 8-inch Galaxy Tab S2 is still around and may be more compelling if you don’t mind an 8-inch screen rather than a 10-inch one.

There’s surprisingly little direct competition for the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus on the Android front, most likely because the audience for a large, mid-range tablet like this is small. 

It starts at $279/£299 (around AU$350) for the 16GB version, rising to £349 (roughly $470/AU$590) in the UK for a model with 64GB of storage.

Don’t confuse these with the non “Plus” Tab 4 tablets, which are significantly cheaper, but have much lower resolution screens and less powerful chipsets.

The best lower-cost alternative doesn’t come from Lenovo, though. The Amazon Fire HD 10 (2017) is half the price. Its chipset is less powerful, the cameras much worse and the software won’t please all. But as it has one crucial element, a 1,200 x 1,920 screen, it’s a very attractive alternative for those on a budget.

Key features

• Large widescreen display
• Mid-range chipset
• Better cameras than cheaper models

The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus represents a step up from most Android tablets we see on shelves these days. Buy a sub-$250/£200/AU$300 10-inch tablet and it may well have a screen with fewer pixels than a 5-inch phone. Seems a bit wrong, doesn’t it?

A 1,200 x 1,920 display makes the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus much better for games, movies, digital comics and for reading articles than those tablets. iPads are sharper still, but the leap from a ‘bad’ resolution to a ‘good’ one is the main thing.

The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus also has the same chipset you’ll see in some mid-range phones, including the Moto G5S Plus and Xiaomi Mi Max 2. It’s the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625.

As is often the case, if you have a good phone its cameras will be better than the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus’s. But photo quality is also a lot better than that of ultra-budget tablets.

This is a solid slate, all-round.

Long-term tablet users like us are likely to be stultified by the lack of progress, though. In some ways the Nexus 10, a tablet released five years ago, doesn’t seem that far behind a new tablet like this, and actually beats the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus for screen resolution.

While we’d be happy to use this as our main tablet, it’s a good clue as to why not many people buy new tablets these days.

Design

• Glass and aluminum with some plastic trim
• Large widescreen frame
• Fingerprint scanner

The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus has a high-quality design, if not quite one with the same level of finish as an iPad.

Its front and back are glass, the sides (when held landscape) are mostly metal. However, the top and bottom edges are plastic, as is a 1mm border around the other sides.

The visual and tactile impression left is of a high-quality “non-budget” tablet, but not quite a flawless, pristine one. You’ll have to decide whether this matters.

10-inch tablet design also hasn’t really developed much since 2013/2014. Unlike some of the latest phones, the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus still has fairly chunky screen surrounds. Front on it looks a little like the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014), a tablet that would still hold up well today if its software wasn’t woefully out of date.

The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus is a rather non-trendy shape, with a 16:10 screen intended for landscape orientation use. Samsung’s Tab S series switched to a more iPad-like aspect several years ago.

The Lenovo's shape is more awkward and seems larger relative to the screen inch count, but is still a great design for a tablet you’ll use more, say, on the sofa than sat on a train seat.

At 7mm thick and 475g it’s among the smaller, lighter 10-inch models. It’s significantly thinner than the new Amazon Fire HD 10 (2017), for example, whose tough plastic casing is 9.8mm thick.

Every part of the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus design tells you it’s intended for landscape use: the side button placement, the position of the front camera and fingerprint scanner.

As usual, you use the finger scanner to bring the tablet out of sleep without a password. While fairly quick it’s not the most reliable scanner, at times taking a couple of attempts to work.

You can avoid this with more careful prodding. And as you won’t need to use it anywhere near as much as a phone scanner, it doesn’t matter all that much anyway.

You get 16GB or 64GB of storage with the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus depending on the version bought, and it has a microSD tray on the side. It lives under the Lenovo logo, which is actually a removable flap. In some territories there are 4G LTE versions of the Tab 4 10 Plus too, although our sample only has space for a memory card.

Screen

• 10.1-inch 1,200 x 1,920 IPS LCD screen
• Good color
• Decent outdoor visibility

The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus has a 10.1-inch 1,200 x 1,920 IPS LCD screen. This is perhaps the most important part of the tablet, the element that separates it from most much cheaper models.

Many budget 10-inch tablets have 800 x 1,280 screens, with a pixel density so low that font characters appear blocky or grainy. The new iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 are sharper still: look closely and you’ll see some light pixelation here. However, it’s sharp enough to comfortably read from.

Color is punchy and contrast is good. It needs a slightly higher pixel density to be considered a world class display, but is otherwise not too far off when viewed indoors.

From using the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus at home we were a little worried it’d struggle outside as it doesn’t initially appear to have the intense brightness of Samsung’s Super AMOLED panels. To test it out we took it out on a bright autumn day to the park.

We were pleasantly surprised by how well it fared. No squinting needed: the image was still very clear. There’s even a special mode in Settings designed to combat bright environments. However, switching it on and off we couldn’t actually tell the difference.

Battery Life

• Roughly 8.5 hours video at max brightness
• 7,000mAh cell

The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus has a 7,000mAh battery. That’s just slightly lower capacity than the 7,306mAh of the iPad Pro 9.7, and a chunk lower than the 8,827mAh of the ‘budget’ new iPad.

Some cheaper tablets have amazing stamina when simply playing back video, thanks to a mix of their low-res screens and clever optimization. The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus’s longevity is slightly more ordinary, but actually exceeds the 8 hours some retailers list for the tablet.

A 90-minute movie played at full brightness claims 18% of the battery, suggesting that from full to flat it’ll last around eight hours 20 minutes.

Lenovo’s own website claims a fair more ambitious 20 hours of use. You’re unlikely to manage this unless you use very dim screen brightness and barely do anything.

The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus holds its charge fairly well in standby. You can leave the tablet sitting for a few days without much of a drop.

Like most new mobile devices, the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus uses a USB-C connector rather than the older micro USB sort. Recharging takes a few hours because the power adaptor doesn’t have the high wattage or voltage needed for ultra-fast charging.

Camera

• Better image quality than budget tablets
• Not the fastest shooter around
• Decent selfie quality

The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus has both front and rear cameras. There’s an 8MP sensor on the back with a flash and a 5MP one on the front.

The new iPad has a better rear camera, but this one is actually perfectly respectable for a tablet. Such cameras often feel like they’ve been bunged in just because a tablet has to have a camera to feel complete. This one is at least a level above.

Low-quality camera sensors have poor dynamic range, which makes images look flat and lifeless. The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus’s daylight pictures look fairly punchy and rich, worthy of a social network post if not printing out and hanging on the wall.

The relatively low 8MP resolution means you can’t crop images much before you lose clarity. However, we're pleasantly surprised by how well most of the shots taken hold up when viewed on a laptop screen. There’s a recurring blue skew and shadow detail could be better, but photos are respectable.

The actual experience of using the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus is not great, though, aside from having the large screen to check out images afterwards. Focusing is fairly slow, and while there’s an HDR mode it adds significant processing lag. This isn’t an immediate-feeling camera.

We also feel much less of a social stigma when using a smaller 8-inch tablet to take photos than a giant 10-inch one when out in public. These things just don’t feel made for photography, much as many people may use them to take photos.

Perfectly decent image quality is matched with very usable video too. The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus shoots at 1080p 30fps or at 720p.

That’s nothing special, but from the image quality alone you can tell Lenovo hasn’t just bunged in the cheapest 8MP sensor it could find. You can also re-focus during capture. There’s no software image stabilization, though, so if you walk around with the tablet shooting video it’ll look very juddery.

Around the front you get a 5MP selfie camera. Some cheaper tablets have just VGA sensors, whose images would look terrible on a 5-inch screen, let alone a 10-inch one. We’re once again perfectly happy with the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus’s selfies. In reasonable lighting, fine facial details like beard hairs make the cut.

Camera samples

Interface and reliability

• Looks and feels mostly like vanilla Android
• Special tablet mode to improve large screen usability
• Solid general performance

The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus runs Android 7.1. It’s not a completely standard version, but looks like it is.

There are simple home screens and the usual vertical-scrolling apps menu with a background that uses a blurred-out version of your home screen image.

In one sense this is a simplified version of Android 7.1, because there are no home screen shortcuts. Some phones with version 7.1 let you zap straight to certain parts of apps by long-pressing the icon. This one doesn’t.

However, it does have a custom Android layout called Productivity Interface. This radically changes the soft key bar at the bottom of the screen, filling its width with little app icons. It’s similar to the dock of Mac OS X, making better use of those extra screen inches than Android normally does.

You can also run two apps on-screen at once with the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus. This actually works rather well, more so than with a squatter 9.7-inch tablet. Not all apps support split screen but you can, for example, run a browser video and a video player at the same time. Portrait and landscape orientations work too.

On its own this is not a replacement for a laptop. We’d advise checking out a Chromebook or hybrid if you’re after a low-cost laptop-replacer. However, it’s good to see Lenovo acknowledge Android can do with some tweaks to make it feel right on a screen much larger than a phone’s.

Lenovo also makes a Bluetooth keyboard case for the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus, available for £30/$30 (around AU$40).

Reliability and interface responsiveness is very good too. Apps load reasonably quickly and we haven’t bumped into any ugly bugs slowing the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus down. That’s good news, as at the time of review this tablet is new: even major manufacturers tend to release devices with some un-squashed bugs.

There are a few apps pre-loaded. The Microsoft Office suite is a sensible extra, and if you don’t want Word or Excel, these apps can be fully uninstalled. SyncIt is a Lenovo app that lets you back up your contacts and apps to an SD card. It’s not desperately useful for most people, and you can run this app on any Android.

Similarly, ShareIT is a fairly generic file sharing tool that anyone can download from Google Play. The one piece of truly shameless bloat is the Lenovo Tab4 10 Plus app. It’s an advert for the tablet you already own, and the accessories available for the tablet.

We could do without most of Lenovo’s bonus software, but it doesn’t feel overburdened with unwanted apps.

Movies and music

• Great as a video jukebox
• Disappointing integrated speakers
• Expandable storage

Lenovo hasn’t got stuck into media apps, you simply get the Google music and video apps. These let you play your own files, and download/stream media from Google’s servers. This doesn’t come for free, though. You pay for movie rentals, or to buy movies, which are then linked to your Google account just like when you buy an app from Google Play.

The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus is a great mobile movie player. This is where it gets the edge over a more ‘squat’ tablet. A widescreen aspect means smaller black bars when watching cinema aspect 2.39:1 ratio movies and a very nearly screen-filling image with 16:9 ones.

This tablet has a 16:10 screen, which looks that bit less narrow with non-movie content than a true 16:9 one.

Watching a film on the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus, motion handling is decent rather than fantastic. That’s typical for an LCD, and the experience is otherwise great. Image quality is much better than the average airplane screen, and with the 64GB version in particular there’s lots of room for locally-stored media.

The weakness is sound, not image quality. On paper, the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus's speakers should be good. There are drivers at each end of the top of the tablet, for a stereo effect when you hold it in front of your face.

Dolby Atmos provides sound processing, with different modes for music, movies and spoken word audio. However, no matter the setting used sound is way off what an iPad offers. With zero bass, the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus sounds thinner and weaker than hoped.

At the time of writing we’re yet to fully review the Amazon Fire HD 10 (2017) but judging by Amazon’s recent record it may actually have better speakers, despite costing half the price.

Performance and benchmarks

• Snapdragon 625 octa-core CPU
• Not as much graphics power as an iPad
• Fine for gaming

The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chipset. This is a mid-range octa-core chip with eight Cortex-A53 cores. You get either 3GB or 4GB of RAM depending on the model.

How does it compare to the competition? The new iPad has just two cores in its A9 CPU, but those cores are much better, resulting in similar Geekbench 4 scores. The Tab 4 10 Plus scores 4,279 points in multi-core tests, while the new iPad scored 4,351.

The Amazon Fire HD 10 (2017) has a quad-core MediaTek CPU that is somewhat weaker. But it has more than the 50% of the power the core count suggests. The Amazon tablet has two Cortex-A53 cores but also two Cortex-A72s as well, which are more powerful performance cores.

Graphics performance matters just as much, of course. And it shows how smart Apple and Amazon have been with their hardware choices.

The PowerVR GX6250 of the Amazon Fire HD 10 (2017) is actually slightly more powerful than the Lenovo’s Adreno 506. And the iPad’s PowerVR GT7600 is radically more powerful. Hugely so. For gamers, the new iPad is a better choice.

However, games still run well on the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus. High-end games like Asphalt 8 are fairly smooth. The big screen does make any slight frame rate issues more apparent, but general immersion is far better than playing on a phone.

If you’re just here for tablet gaming you might also want to consider a Nintendo Switch. It’s a little cheaper than the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus, although once you factor in the £50/$60/AU$80 cost of triple-A games, that benefit fades.

Verdict

The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus is more proof of how little tablets have progressed in the last few years. It’s slightly thinner then old models, has a current chipset and newer software.

But it also lacks most of the exciting features seen in new phones, or in Apple’s pricier iPads.

However, it’s the sort of larger tablet that will satisfy the more discerning buyer. Thanks to its higher-quality, sharper screen, it’s a lot better than most models that cost $120/£100/AU$150 less.

Who’s this for?

The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus is for people who don’t want a new iPad, but do want a tablet of comparable quality at a similar price.

Should you buy it?

If the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus were slightly cheaper, it’d be easy to recommend. Thanks to competition from the new iPad and the lower-cost Amazon Fire HD 10 (2017), it’s in a tricky spot.

Amazon’s Fire HD sounds like the better choice for bargain hunters. However, its build is far more utilitarian, the cameras are much worse and the Fire OS software will put off a lot of people. But it’s half the price. Half. The. Price.

With $329/£339/AU$469 to spend we’d probably pick the new iPad over the Lenovo. However, if a large, widescreen Android tablet is what you want, the Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus is a good solution.

We’re partly to blame for the lack of progress and price-aggressiveness of tablets like this too. If Lenovo believed it would sell millions of this model it could probably afford to reduce the price. But people, it seems, just aren’t buying that many high-quality tablets anymore.

The Lenovo Tab 4 10 Plus is a good iPad alternative for those who prefer Android and want a more widescreen display, but there are other options, such as the following three.

New iPad

The basic iPad is the supermarket own-brand cereal of the tablet world. It may not get everyone excited, but it's good value, and gets you much the same basic experience as more expensive options.

It has a sharper screen than the Tab 4 10 Plus, along with lots more graphics power and a seam-free metal case. However, the Lenovo’s widescreen aspect ratio is better for movies.

• Read our new iPad review

Amazon Fire HD 10 (2017)

Until this year, Amazon’s low-cost 10-inch tablet had a low-res screen just like all the other bargain basement models. Now that Amazon has upgraded the resolution to 1,200 x 1,920, it gets uncomfortably close to the Lenovo for half the price.

The three ways it falls behind are: build, software and camera quality. Kindle Fire tablets are actually very well-made, designed to avoid as many customer returns as possible.

But they are plastic: not a feast for the fingers. The software is ad-packed too, and feels slower than standard Android. Amazon has also saved pennies on the camera tech, making the snappers borderline useless for anything but throwaway fun.

• Read our hands on Amazon Fire HD 10 (2017) review

Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 8.0

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S3 isn’t really a competitor for the Lenovo audience as it’s twice the price. The older Galaxy S2 8.0 is, though.

It has a much higher-res screen than the Lenovo, and is far sharper as the display is smaller too. It’s an 8-inch screen with a shape more like an iPad mini’s. As it’s so much smaller the experience of using it is rather different, but we’d pick the Samsung over the Lenovo for all-portable use.

• Read our Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 review

First reviewed: September 2017