Lenovo ThinkTab X11 Review: A Work Tablet With a Removable Battery

With the ThinkTab X11, Lenovo has built a tablet that puts productive work front and centre: light, mobile and flexible, it aims to smooth the office day — on the move, at the desk or in a meeting. How well the concept holds up is what the published test of this Android tablet set out to establish. This review is based on that test, not on a hands-on trial of our own.

The ThinkTab X11 favours restraint over bling: a matte-black case, rounded corners, generous display borders and the familiar Think styling, complete with a red accent on one button. At 25.7 x 16.9 centimetres it is compact enough for a bag, though at 10mm thick it is no wafer-thin slab. The back looks tidy and robust, with the camera and logos tucked to the edge, and at 650 grams it strikes a sensible balance — light enough to carry, yet substantial enough not to feel like a cheap toy.

Under the bonnet there is no overblown powerhouse but a modern mid-range engine: the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3, tasked with handling apps, browser tabs and office work smoothly in daily use, with an Adreno 810 graphics chip keeping the display fluid. Alongside it sits 8 gigabytes of memory, enough headroom to juggle several apps at once without constant reloading. In the raw benchmarks the X11 showed itself more of an easy-going daily worker than a racer, with a middling 2,902 Geekbench points — yet in the hand it feels distinctly quicker, with a high operating speed and pleasingly low on-screen input lag of 63 milliseconds. The 256 gigabytes of storage leave room for apps, documents, photos and offline content, and if that is not enough, a microSD card adds up to 2 terabytes more.

The display is the tablet's small stage: 10.9 inches, in the practical 16:10 format, and sharply resolved at 2560 x 1600 pixels. Across its usable 23.5 x 14.7-centimetre area that works out to a high pixel density of 277 ppi, so text, icons and web pages look crisp. A measured maximum brightness of 617 candela per square metre gives it real luminous punch, though the contrast ratio of 1481:1 could stand to be higher. Colour is near-faithful at 96 per cent of sRGB, but the wider DCI-P3 gamut is covered only to 74 per cent, and a 90 hertz refresh rate keeps motion looking smooth. A neat touch: a stylus is included for sketches and handwritten notes.

The real highlight hides under the back cover: the 10,200-mAh battery can be removed without tools, something very few tablets allow. In Batteryless Mode the ThinkTab X11 will even run straight from the mains with no battery fitted, which is handy for fixed installations such as in a vehicle. There is plenty of stamina, too: in continuous-use testing the Lenovo lasted well beyond twelve hours, enough for a long working day with reserve to spare. Charging is quick as well — a full charge took just an hour and a half over cable, reaching 20 per cent in 15 minutes, 39 per cent in half an hour and 76 per cent in an hour, and at up to 48 watts it claws back around eight minutes of runtime for every minute on charge. Wireless charging, however, is not on the menu.

To make up for that the X11 has two USB-C ports. Why two? So you can use an accessory such as an attached keyboard on one while the tablet charges through the other. A fingerprint sensor unlocks it conveniently, and at home or in the office it connects over fast Wi-Fi 6E. The cameras impressed too: the 13-megapixel rear lens took high-quality photos in both daylight and low light, firing in 134 milliseconds, and shoots 4K video at 30 frames per second, though slow-motion and zoom are absent. The 8-megapixel front camera also won the testers over, handling video calls well and, with a 66-degree field of view, fitting two people in front of the tablet.

The Lenovo ThinkTab X11 is a rugged work tablet with a clear focus on practicality over show. It scores with a sharp, bright display, a long-lasting and, unusually, swappable battery, and the accompanying Batteryless Mode. The two USB-C ports are unusual but genuinely useful, and a stylus is in the box. The pace is ample for everyday tasks, office work and note-taking, but remains firmly mid-range. In short, it is aimed less at the sofa than at the desk, the road and the fitted dashboard, and against that brief it delivers. The upshot is a tough, clever companion for the job, for travelling and for the service vehicle — and so distinctive that there is currently no truly comparable tablet.