Lenovo’s Tablet Sports ‘Room-Filling’ Speakers Usable With Any Other Bluetooth Device

Is Lenovo’s new tablet a smart speaker with an attached display or a tablet with an integrated sound grill? Why not both? In the end, all you need to know is that the Lenovo Tab Plus Gen 2 finally lets you use its supposedly “room-filling” sound system with any other Bluetooth-connected device you own.

Lenovo’s $400 Tab Plus Gen 2 promises to bring the noise with a 9-unit speaker system developed by JBL. The original Lenovo Tab Plus that first launched in 2024 features side-firing speakers built into a hump behind the tablet. Sure, the audio quality was good enough that you wouldn’t immediately reach for a pair of headphones, but it didn’t change how you may use a small-scale Android tablet.

The speakers promise to have enough oomph to fill your room with sound, and also support Dolby Atmos for an ad hoc spatial audio experience. What’s easily the most unique feature of this thicker-than-normal tablet is the Bluetooth mode that turns the Tab Plus Gen 2 into a wireless speaker.

It’s the kind of “duh” feature that just makes sense if you’re going to stick high-end speakers onto a relatively small 12.1-inch screen. Compared to some other tablets with OLED displays, the Lenovo Tab Plus Gen 2 sports an IPS LCD screen that hits a max brightness of 800 nits in HDR. It also packs a surprising 120Hz refresh rate, though we’d be curious to learn how capable this device is for gaming to make use of those higher refresh rates.

The new Lenovo Tab is running on a MediaTek Dimensity 7400, an upgrade from last-gen’s MediaTek Helio G99, though it’s not exactly built to be a flagship mobile chip. That processor runs on four Arm Cortex-A78 cores and another four Arm Cortex-A55 cores—an older chip microarchitecture that’s still good enough for a mid-range mobile device, just not something that can push framerates as high as another flagship-level chip.

The new Tab includes a rotating ring-shaped kickstand that will hold up your tablet both horizontally and vertically. This exposes the rear speakers and props up the screen, almost like a smart home speaker with a screen. It means you won’t have to fiddle with your tablet if you want to use it in the new Bluetooth mode, which turns the tablet into a kind of smart speaker you can use from any other connected device. Lenovo even showed how you could use the kickstand to hang the tablet from a hook, either screen- or speaker-side out.

The amount of memory you pick may also determine performance. You can get this tablet with either 6GB of RAM and 128GB of SSD storage or up to 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Lenovo claims buyers will get two years of OS updates after Android 16 and a measly four years of security patches until 2030.

Once the tablet loses its security patches, it may just become a speaker with a screen. If the sound quality matches Lenovo’s promises, it may be worth keeping around after Lenovo puts it out to pasture. The tablet will be “available soon,” though Lenovo did not share a specific date.