Lenovo Legion Tab 5 (2026) review

Even if you’re not a gamer, Lenovo’s latest Android tablet might have what it takes to win you over. If you’re in the market for a tablet nowadays and an iPad won’t do the trick, Samsung is usually the next best alternative. However, the likes of the Tab S series have crept upwards steadily in physical size and price over the past few years.

By comparison, the new Lenovo Legion Tab is both sleeker and snappier. With performance that keeps up with its rivals, the case for buying an Android tablet that isn’t made by Samsung has never been easier to make.

In Australia, the Lenovo Legion Tab 5 is available at a recommended retail price of $1499. That’s not quite budget-friendly. It’s slightly higher than the asking price for the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11, though a little thriftier than what the high-end Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra comes in at. 

As always, though, you can save if you shop around. Check out the table below for a round-up of the best deals for the Lenovo Legion Tab 5 in Australia.

Honestly, the most noteworthy thing about the design of this particular tablet is the size of it. At 8.8-inches, the Legion Tab is slightly larger than the iPad Mini but well short of the Galaxy Tab S. 

While the standard  Lenovo Legion Tab 5 relies on a more mundane palette, the sample sent our way for this review was the ‘FIFA edition’ – which comes clad in a bright/brat lime green. Aside from this coat of paint, the overall design doesn’t deviate too much from the template. 

As mentioned, the form-factor found here is built around an 8.8-inch display with 3K resolution, 600 nits of brightness, 99% DCI-P3 color and a 165Hz refresh rate. While the AMOLED screen here can’t quite compete with the larger and more luxury-grade display panel positioned on the front of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S Ultra, the everyday experience left me with little to complain about. 

Apps and games rendered on the Legion Tab were crisp and colourful in exactly the way you’d want them to be, though the screen did sometimes struggle in brighter environments. To hold and handle, the metal chassis of the Legion Tab feels similarly solid and sturdy. 

Although some of the benefits of this smaller form-factor are eroded by the hefty material design, the fact that the Legion Tab is as lean as it is does a lot to elevate its reason de tre: which is gaming. There are also a few smaller design quirks that play to that same crowd.

When held horizontally, you can reap the benefits of the Dolby Atmos stereo speakers built into shorter sides of the tablet. These speakers sound good, but the positioning of them is perhaps more meaningful than the volume or fidelity of the sound they produce.

In a similar vein, there’s a secondary USB-C port on the left edge of the Legion Tab 5. This isn’t anything revolutionary but it does make it a little easier to charge the tablet while you’re using it to play games that rely on that horizontal handheld orientation.

On the back, there’s a 50MP rear camera that’s not quite but almost entirely flush with the chassis. As always, this inclusion feels like a bit of an appendage on the core experience. I can probably count the number of times I have used the camera on my iPad Mini on one hand. 

Still, when you’re paying this much for a tablet, I suppose there’s an expectation that it should have a camera of some kind or quality. Past that, the nicest thing I can say about it is that it feels like it doesn’t impose too much on the stripped-down and streamlined design writ large. 

The Lenovo Legion Tab 5 feels engineered to elevate tablet-based gaming experiences and while the camera doesn’t necessarily play a direct role in that story, it does feel like some work has been done to ensure it doesn’t get in the way either.

Given that the Lenovo Legion Tab 5 is explicitly billed as a gaming-oriented tablet, you’d hope it has the specs to back that up. Fortunately, the final tally mostly gets there. On the inside, the device is armed with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of on-board storage and a 6550mAh battery. 

It’s not hard to wish for a few more gigabytes of storage, especially given how large some mobile games like Genshin Impact are nowadays. However, in this economy, I can’t say I’m too shocked by the meagre outlay here. You can take the matter into your own hands though, since the Legion Tab 5 supports expandable storage via a MicroSD slot.

Still, in action, the results that Lenovo Legion Tab 5 delivers live up to its namesake. More visually ambitious titles like Destiny: Rising and Zenless Zone Zero ran smoothly and without issues. As someone who has only ever seen high-end mobile games run this smoothly on Apple silicon, I was delighted by the experiences that the hardware here enabled.

Having said that, it is hard to pin down just how much of the difference between the performance found here and on many Android smartphones is down to the thermal management happening under the hood here. The Lenovo Legion Tab 5 features a ColdFront vapour chamber setup that’s inspired by its laptop counterpart. In the short term, this helps keep the hardware cool even when under load. Over the longer term, it means you get a little bit more bang for your buck when it comes to battery life and performance.