For every Android-powered slate I’ve used, only Nvidia’s Shield Tablet really stands out in my memory. Part of the company’s occasional (and all-but-dead) dip into hardware products, the Shield Tablet — and its revitalized K1 follow-up, which I also owned through a recall program on the original — carried me through the back half of college, frequently keeping my Chromebook in my backpack in lieu of a mini Bluetooth keyboard or the Shield Tablet’s built-in stylus. Its front-firing speakers made it great for movie-watching, and while I’m not much of a mobile gamer, I did find it to be a great device for emulation, especially when paired with an external controller.Even if Nvidia hadn’t abandoned the hardware game at the end of the last decade, it’s found new and much more destructive ways to make piles of cash at the expense of your easy access to RAM. And considering the market for Android tablets in general, it’s not all too surprising to see very few companies trying to make headway into offering a miniature, gaming-focused tablet that can easily be thrown in a backpack. Lenovo, however, has managed to fill its spot quite well. 9to5Google’s own Ben Schoon found himself smitten with the Gen 3 model nearly two years ago, and now, its Gen 5 successor has found its way into my nostalgic hands.But expectations around mobile experiences have come a long way since 2016. Whether the Legion Tab Gen 5 can win over your heart really depends on your patience with some old-school Android jank — and whether your wallet can withstand an exceptionally-high asking price. Still, with recent advancements in PC emulation, it’s hard to say Lenovo isn’t onto something.Buy Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 5 at lenovo.comBuy Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 5 at bestbuy.comDesign and displayConsidering the decade between their respective releases, I’m actually quite surprised just how much this tablet reminds me of the original Shield Tablet. Its 8.8-inch 16:10 LCD panel combined with a boxy matte-black design and a near-identical weight meant that I immediately felt at home holding this thing in my hands. You lose out on a couple of clutch features — most notably the built-in stylus — but largely speaking, this feels like the correct size and shape for a miniature gaming tablet.Still, it’s not all perfect. Take, for example, the completely unnecessary camera bump that prevents this slate from properly laying flat on a desk. No one is buying this thing to use the camera, and judging by my very limited experience trying it out, I’m fairly confident whatever potato sensor is shoved in here would fit fine flush with the chassis. I’m pretty fed up with OEMs leaning on camera bumps to make any device look or feel more premium than it actually is, and that goes double quadruple for tablets like this.Just like its predecessor, this thing still picks up smudges and fingerprints at an unreasonable level, its matte-black finish unable to hide anything. 360 grams is also a little heavier than I’d expect for a slate of this size, though to be fair, it’s much more noticeable in portrait than landscape. Holding the tablet with two hands to watch a movie or make my way through another round of Balatro made its top-heaviness much less noticeable.This display is sharp and fast — with one minor caveat — and reasonably bright in all circumstances except direct sunlight thanks to its 600 nits of brightness (and 800 in HBM). Really, it’s the LCD of it all that gets me here; this thing is nearly $1,000, and the lack of OLED alone makes it difficult to recommend at this price. It’s not an outright bad panel, but I found its contrast levels to be pretty lacking, with most blacks only ever showing up as dark grays on-screen.You might think an 8.8-inch display isn’t much of an upgrade over something like a Pixel 11 Pro XL, but aspect ratio is everything here.Oh, and that caveat: On two different occasions, I caught the tablet stuck in 60Hz mode, regardless of what refresh rate option I selected in settings. Switching back and forth between modes a few times eventually unstuck it, but it’s definitely a bug worth being aware of.I think I’d feel a lot better about recommending this to someone looking for a content consumption device if this screen looked a little more premium. Your mileage may vary though — if you can get your hands on a demo unit before buying one, if only to see the display, I’d recommend it. For everyone else, this price tag might have you waiting for the OLED panel rumored to be arriving on next year’s successor.Hardware, battery, and accessoriesAt $900 — or potentially more, considering this tablet actually launched at $850 — the Legion Tablet’s hardware leaves something to be desired. Biometrics are the most obvious weak spot; camera-based face unlock is the only biometric option provided here, without a fingerprint scanner in sight. I wouldn’t blame some if they saw this as a dealbreaker, because even if you’re willing to put up with the security concerns that a basic front-facing camera brings to the table, I can promise you you’ll be typing the code in all the time. Whether you’re trying to unlock in a darker environment or it’s just been four hours since you last unlocked the slate, make sure you have your pin memorized.If you’re primarily buying this as a content consumption machine, I think you’ll mostly have a great time. Lenovo built stereo sound into this slate, but did so in one of the smartest ways I’ve ever seen, ensuring all speakers are located to the right side along the bottom and top of the device. This might sound a little unbalanced in portrait mode, but in landscape, it guarantees you’re never actually covering up the speakers while holding the slate in your hands, something practically every other equivalent tablet is guilty of. No headphone jack here, unfortunately, something I would’ve liked to have seen on a gaming-focused device.I find battery life genuinely difficult to judge on tablets, especially if you don’t pick it up every single hour of every single day, but I’ve been impressed overall with the Legion Tab’s longevity. Some weekend YouTube binge watching sessions at relatively high brightness settings left me with plenty of juice in the tank, and its standby time between sessions has been excellent. Obviously, if you’re really pushing your graphical limits on this thing — or if you’re emulating non-native software through something like DroidDeck — you’re going to see a bit of a dip, but combined with fast charging and two USB-C ports for both portrait and landscape access, battery life gets a big thumbs-up from me.Lenovo’s packed a couple of accessories in the box with this thing, but I wouldn’t get too excited. While it’s nice to see a 68W charger included for those aforementioned fast top-offs, the included folio case is just awful. Not only does the triangle-shaped flap barely stick together to form a proper stand, but one of the corners of my case was loose enough to frequently flex back and forth. Holding the tablet while wrapped in its case just felt bad, in the way that so many bundled cases often feel, and a quick look at Amazon shows that basically no recognizable brand — or unrecognizable, for that matter — has stepped up to offer something better.The Legion Tablet also includes a screen protector in the box, if that’s how you roll.Specs, software, and performanceUnsurprisingly, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in here can handle effectively anything you dare to throw at it. While my mobile games might be limited to more casual, indie fare like Balatro — and, by the by, if you’re still enjoying Balatro a couple of years later, the size and shape of this device makes it perfect — graphically-intense games played fine. Asphalt Legends or the HoYoverse games might not be my cup of tea, but they perform excellently on this device, and compared to the 12-inch tablets companies like Samsung and Amazon have become obsessed with, the display size here actually feels perfect.We definitely have to talk about emulation, though, because it’s increasingly becoming the main focus of mobile gamers everywhere, and this feels like a tablet perfectly designed for something like DroidDeck. Getting Steam emulation — complete with the Deck’s usual Big Picture mode UI — available as an application on the Legion Tab Gen 5 takes all of two minutes and a handful of taps on your display, and I have to say, I’m pretty shocked at just how impressive the overall experience is right now.DroidDeck gave me the option to bring my mini gaming tablet experience full-circle. While my Steam library has no shortage of games I think could run without stressing this slate, I wanted to push the envelope a little bit. Persona 3 Reload felt like as good a candidate as any: a modern title that doesn’t necessarily require quick response times and fits virtual controls quite nicely. Plus, most of my gaming time on Nvidia’s tablet a decade ago was spent working through Persona 3 Portable; like poetry, it rhymes. I installed the game, ran it on the Legion Tab, and to my surprise and delight, it was absolutely in a playable state.Now, there are some caveats here. I did drop the game’s graphics preset to low, and even still, there were some occasional hiccups while running around an early dungeon. The game’s initial intros and disclaimers actually gave the impression the title wouldn’t run at all, but I was able to sneak up on a shadow, use a slash attack to begin the battle — basically the only thing in P3R that remotely requires accurate timing — and issue commands to my player character and party mates.Obviously, your experience emulating Steam titles on the Legion Tab will vary on what you want to play, and with such wide variables between experiences, I probably wouldn’t push most gamers to run out and pick one up right away. It might be early days for DroidDeck, but considering how we’ve already seen it progress, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some buyers picking this up as a Valve-esque take on a gaming tablet.With all of that power under the hood, though, it’s Lenovo’s take on Android that leaves a lot to be desired. It’s not just that this feels like a rough-and-ready take on AOSP, an unrefined package that would feel more in line with devices from a decade ago, though, yes, that’s half the struggle here. But at its worst, the Legion Tab Gen 5 simply feels unoptimized in daily use.Scrolling through web pages or various apps often felt sluggish and heavy, like the UI elements on screen never actually match the movement of my finger, and it’s unclear how much of that was due to the refresh rate bug I described above. Auto-rotate was both super finnicky and super sluggish, alternating back and forth between one state or the other, and the auto-rotate button that pops up when it’s disabled would frequently fail to appear. Occasionally, I’d run into app issues, such as choppy playback on a 1440p YouTube video that got so bad — regardless of what resolution I selected — that I had to fully force close the app in settings to fix it. Even getting the slate to reliably wake up (or not wake up) when picking it up was annoying, as it’s simultaneously sensitive enough to frequently turn on when I don’t want it to, or to stay asleep when I’m trying to unlock it. Inevitably, I turned that setting off.It took three screenshots to capture the entire list.You might think that shelling out $900 for an Android tablet would buy you an out from pre-installed bloatware; you’d be wrong. During setup, the Legion Tab attempts to install a whole host of apps and games, including Perplexity, TikTok, Temu, several match-three games that I’ve truly never heard of, and no less than two mahjong and solitaire titles each. In fact, there might actually be three solitaire titles depending on what “Jigsawcard Solitaire Puzzle” is, but I unchecked all of these apps during setup and didn’t deem the title worthy of bothering to check.While Lenovo has been trying to improve its software update policies on some recent devices, this slate isn’t among that group. To my knowledge, there is no official update schedule for this device, but based on past performance, I’d expect somewhere around 2 OS upgrades and 4 years of security patches, give or take.ConclusionI would’ve loved nothing more than to recommend this year’s Legion Tab to small tablet fans and gamers everywhere, but when this thing is $200 more than Apple’s latest iPad Mini — which in and of itself is absolutely overpriced — and $100 more than the base OLED Steam Deck post-price hike, I just have a hard time telling anyone to buy it. Really, its Steam performance was one of the few areas that made me feel truly excited by this thing, but it’s simply too unpredictable an experience at this point (and price) for me to recommend.Even setting aside the price, there’s simply too much here that feels unfinished or rough around the edges for my liking. A handful of bug fixes and a couple of additional optimization passes could fix a lot of my more minor quibbles, but despite what I just said, you can only ignore the $900 price tag for so long before it bites you in the ass.We have seen a post-iPad Mini discount bringing this slate to an Apple-matching $700 ahead of the holidays, but even that price is $150 more than its predecessor was at launch without a whole lot to show for it. If you’re looking for a gamer-friendly tiny tablet, I do think Legion is a brand worth keeping your eye on, especially as DroidDeck and other Steam emulation apps continue to evolve. But at this point — and for this price — your best bet is waiting for whatever model follows this one. It might still be stupid expensive, but at least you’ll be getting OLED.A decade ago, Nvidia’s Shield Tablet felt like a no-brainer addition to my everyday carry. But in this economy, gamers and tablet fans alike are simply better off dropping $900 elsewhere.Buy Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 5 at lenovo.comBuy Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 5 at bestbuy.comLenovo Legion Tab Gen 5$700$90022% offLenovo’s Legion Tab Gen 5 is a powerful, mini gaming tablet, something you won’t find much of on store shelves these days. But with some software jank and a sky-high price, you might be better off waiting for a more powerful version — with OLED — in the months to come.ProsSmall, backpack-friendly sizeGreat battery lifePowerful enough for Steam emulationConsLenovo's take on Android is lackluster and filled with bloatwareOLED would've been a great upgrade$350 more expensive than its predecessor without much to show for it