Lenovo Smart Tab P10

An Android tablet that turns into an Alexa smart screen when you dock it to its speaker base

$378 lenovo.com

This is the sweet, sweet melding of Android tablet and Echo Show into one package. Leave the Lenovo 10-inch display in its speaker dock and it turns into an Alexa smart display, working pretty much identically to Amazon’s screens, with beefy speakers for audio. Pull it out and you can use it like any other Android tablet.

Take your tablet

Let’s start with tablet mode. The 10.1-inch screen has a resolution of 1920x1200, and there’s a mid-range Snapdragon 450 chip under the hood. Our review unit came with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of on-board storage, but you can up that to 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage (there’s also the option of adding a memory card).

They’re not market-leading specs, but they don’t have to be to compete with the likes of Amazon’s cheap Kindle tablets. It breezed through simple tasks like emails, web browsing, documents and video streaming, and it coped well with a variety of games. The battery only dropped about 7-8% per hour of video playing in our tests, and the built-in Dolby speakers are pretty impressive.

Android still looks clumsy on tablet devices, with screens occasionally snapping back into portrait mode when they should be using landscape. Most of the key apps – Google Docs, Outlook, Spotify, Netflix and so on – are now perfectly at home on bigger screens, though.

Of course, the option to dock is the real selling point here. Full marks to Lenovo for the looks of the dock. It’s both solid and elegant at the same time, with a subtle dark grey fabric on the front and buttons that integrate nicely into the overall design.

When docked and connected via Bluetooth, the Lenovo Smart Tab P10 really does turn into an Amazon Echo Show – the interface and the functions are identical, and you get a Show Mode shortcut in the Android quick settings for jumping back to the alternative interface.

The dock adds even more speaker oomph, and just about matches a regular current-gen Echo for sound quality. We’d say it’s fine for tunes, if not really audiophile. Mic quality and response match a regular Echo too.

The Alexa functions only work when the tablet is docked, and we should note that you can’t use it as an assistant at other times. Regardless, this feels like a great little mash-up.