Lenovo Legion Tab (5th-gen) gaming tablet is now available… if you can afford it

The Lenovo Legion Tab (5th-gen) is an Android tablet built for gaming. With a powerful processor, speedy memory, and a high-res display with a high refresh rate, it’s one of the most powerful Android tablets available. But it’s also one of the most expensive.

First unveiled in March, the Lenovo Legion Tab (5th-gen) is now available in the US for $849.

What you get for that price is a tablet with an 8.8 inch, 3040 x 1904 pixel, 165 Hz IPS LCD display with a 480 Hz touch sampling rate and up to 600 nits brightness, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, 12GB of LPDDR5T-10667 memory, and 256GB of UFS 4.1 Pro storage.

The tablet has a 9,000 mAh battery and two USB Type-C ports. Both support charging, but one is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port with support for video output and data transfer speeds up to 10 Gbps, while the other is a 480 Mbps USB 2.0 port with support for audio and data. There’s also a microSD card reader with support for cards up to 2TB.

Lenovo equips the tablet with a 50MP rear camera and 8MP front-facing camera and stereo speakers. And the 5th-gen gaming tablet supports WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0.

It measures 206.5 x 128.5 x 7.6mm (8.1″ x 5.1″ x 0.3″) and weighs 360 grams (12.7 ounces).

And of course, since you clearly wouldn’t know it was a gaming tablet if it didn’t have RGB lighting effects, there’s a glowing ring on the back of the tablet (near the camera) that supports Legion Halo AI Adaptive Lighting effects.

The new Legion Tab (5th-gen) brings some improvements over the 3rd-gen model that was the most recent version available in North America until recently, including a higher-res display and camera, bigger battery, and faster memory and WiFi. But it also brings a pretty significant price increase – the previous-gen model sold for $500 and up when it launched last year.

With RAM & storage prices skyrocketing, we’re seeing price hikes for many phones, tablets, and PCs. But $850 still feels like a lot of money to spend on a gaming tablet that ships with Android… even if it is one of the most Android tablets available at the moment. And the model currently available in the US might not even be the most expensive version of the Legion Tab 5.

When Lenovo first introduced the tablet, the company said it would be available with up to 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. While that model’s not currently available for US customers, if it does make it to North America, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it sell for $1000 or more.