[Device Reviews and Information] Jupit3r:
System & UI

I bought both the Tab P11 and Tab P11 Pro in China, so they both came with Lenovo’s very own ZUI, a heavily customized skin on top of Android 10. The international editions of these slates will ship with stock Android OS, with only a few twists here and there. I installed the international firmware on the Lenovo Tab P11 Pro for better support for Google apps, but kept ZUI on the standard P11 as it is a gift for my partner, who can’t care less about YouTube or Netflix as he finds enough joy with Chinese counterparts such as bilibili and Watermelon Video.

Unfortunately, the Android ecosystem is going towards a direction which is less and less tablet-friendly. Many of the customized tablet applications in Play Store were released years ago and haven’t been updated for a long time. As a result, most of the apps I ran on these tablets were just phone apps blown up to fill tablet screens, and many of these apps only support vertical mode.

However, Lenovo has designed ”PC Mode” for its ZUI, and “Productivity Mode” for its international interface, These desktop modes work very much like Samsung’s DeX mode. You will get a taskbar similar to the one on Chrome OS and Windows 10. On the left side of the taskbar are the three classic Android keys: Back, Home and Multi-tasking, you can use them to control the running applications. You will also get a shortcut to open the application drawer. What really makes Productivity Mode/PC Mode so special is their ability to run multiple apps in windows. You can browse through Emails, chat on Skype and watch a movie simultaneously. You will almost feel like you are using Windows instead of Android.

Thanks to the keyboard shortcuts and right-click menus, the Tab P11 and P11 Pro feel much more productive than average smartphones and tablets. For instance, you can copy texts from a webpage and instantly paste them into office apps or social networking apps.

Performance

At the core of the Tab P11 Pro is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 730G chipset, which is built on 8nm process, has an octa-core CPU (4 Cores of Cortex-A76 clocked at 2.2GHz and 4 cores of Cortex-A55 clocked at 1.8GHz) and Adreno 618 GPU. The Tab P11, on the other hand, is powered by an older, and relatively weaker Snapdragon 662 chipset, which is built on 11nm process and also has an octa-core CPU (4 Cores of Cortex-A72 clocked at 2.0GHz and 4 cores of Cortex-A53 clocked at 1.8GHz) and Adreno 610 GPU. Neither of these two processors are real powerhouses, and benchmarks tell the story.

To help you better understand the performance of these slates, I also listed the benchmark scores of other midrange and entry-level tablets for comparison.

As can be told in the sheets above, the Lenovo Tab P11 Pro’s is in the same ballpark with the Kirin 810 powered Huawei Matepad 10.4 when it comes to overall performance, while the Tab P11’s horsepower is on par with other tablets in the same price range.

Both the Tab P11 and Tab P11 Pro features the same 128GB UFS2.1 storage, which should be much faster than eMMc drives in terms of speed. In the Androbench test, the P11 and P11 Pro handily beats the Huawei MatePad 10.4 and Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite in terms of Sequential Read Speed, but slightly fall short in Sequential Write Speed.

In the real-world use, both tablets can easily handle everyday tablet tasks with ease. I experienced no issues watching videos in the YouTube App, and editing photos in Snapseed at the same time. With that said, the Tab P11 Pro does feel a bit faster opening bigger applications and loading heavier webpages, but differences can only be perceived when I am running the same tasks on them side by side. Each of them feels fast enough for the tasks it is designed for.

Intense gaming should not be your main reason to buy an Android tablet, as most games are designed for phones and will be difficult to control on a 10+ inch screen. With that said, both tablets can run most games installed from Play Store without issues, but in order to have a smooth visual experience, you need to use moderate settings in some of the big titles. The Tab P11 has a weaker GPU of the two, but it is still able to run “Arena of Valor” and “PUBG” in mid settings smoothly.

Cameras

Cameras are not something I would be concerned about when choosing a tablet, with that said, I still want them to be as high-quality as possible. Both the P11 and P11 Pro come with a very decent 8MP selfie camera, but only the latter has an infrared camera by the side. The P11 Pro rocks dual rear-facing cameras: a 13MP main sensor and a 5MP ultra-wide lens, while the P11 only has a 13MP main shooter on the back.

The quality of their selfie cameras is more than enough for video chatting, and both tablets have the capability of taking clear and color-rich photos with their main camera setup in decent lighting conditions. However, as smartphone cameras are getting so good these days, who really need a 11-inch tablet for photography?

Battery Life and Charging

The Tab P11 features a 7,700mAh Li-Po battery, while the P11 Pro has a larger 8,250mAh battery under the hood. With display brightness and speaker volume both set at 50%, the P11 and P11 Pro lasted 11 hours, 37 minutes and 13 hours, 5 minutes respectively in our battery rundown test in which we played a 1080P local video on loop.

Both the P11 and P11 Pro support Qualcomm’s QC3.0 quick charge, and they both come with a 20W wall charger, but only the Snapdragon 730G powered P11 Pro can take full advantage of charging in 20W, the standard P11 only supports 18W charging at maximum.

Both tablets can be fully charged (from 0→100%) in around 3 hours.

Verdict

With Snapdragon 730G and Snapdragon 662 inside their respective shells, neither the P11 Pro nor the P11 is a powerhouse, but they are not really designed to be the best-performing tablets or break any new grounds. With that said, both tablets get a lot of essential things right. They each comes with a wonderful display, amazing speakers, and offers decent performance and perfect software optimization for everyday entertainment and productivity tasks. For me, they are easy recommendations for anyone who needs a new and affordable Android tablet.