Lenovo’s latest Android tablet doubles as a Bluetooth speaker

Ben Schoon | Jun 20 2024 - 3:00 am PT

Lenovo today announced its new Tab Plus, an affordable Android tablet with JBL audio, a built-in kickstand, and more.

The Lenovo Tab Plus is an 11.5-inch tablet that, for its price, actually, sounds pretty good. The tablet is mid-range on the spec sheet, powered by MediaTek’s G99 chipset with 8GB of RAM. It also has 128GB or 256GB of storage depending on variant and has microSD support. The display is an LCD panel at 2000×1200 with a 90Hz refresh rate. It also has an 8,600 mAh battery with up to 45W charging.

It’s a fine spec sheet, as the main focus of this tablet is entertainment.

The tablet touts eight speakers tuned by JBL. There are four “matrix tweeters” and four woofers to provide rich audio output – you can see a massive subwoofer cutout on the side. There’s also a kickstand to prop the tablet up for media consumption, and Lenovo says the tablet can output up to 26W of audio. As a point of reference, that’s pretty close in output to the JBL Flip 6 speaker.

As a wild use of that potentially great speaker, Lenovo has built in an option on this tablet for the speakers to be used as a Bluetooth speaker by other devices such as your smartphone. Lenovo explains:

To maximize the tablet’s functionality and audio system designed and engineered with JBL, the Lenovo Tab Plus transforms into a Bluetooth speaker for seamless audio anywhere, streamed from your portable device like a smartphone, and comes with an integrated kickstand for up to 175 degrees of viewing flexibility.

There’s also a 3.5mm headphone jack if you need wired audio.

The Lenovo Tab Plus runs Android 14 out of the box and will be getting two years of Android upgrades (theoretically through Android 16) as well as security patches through June 2028.

Tab Plus is available starting today.