Oneplus pad review

Introduction

The company has been active for nine years, and the OnePlus Pad is the first tablet it has produced. It is a carbon copy of the Oppo Pad 2, with the exception of name.

The OnePlus Pad has an intriguing pricing point and set of specifications. At $479, it is priced in a segment where there isn’t much competition, as the best Android tablets are more affordable and the better iPads are more expensive. It is a semi-premium smartphone with an odd collection of options on its specification sheet.

The display, which has a distinctive 7:5 aspect ratio and 144Hz refresh rate, is probably what will draw the most attention. But an ordinary LCD panel is used for the display. Similar to this, the device has Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos features as well as 67W rapid charging, although it lacks cellular connectivity and uses a MediaTek Dimensity 9000 chipset. As you can see, there is some back-and-forth going on here, and ultimately, it will depend on what you value most in a tablet.

Here is a complete list of the OnePlus Pad’s attributes and features.

Specifications

• Body: 258.0×189.4×6.5mm, 552g; Glass front, aluminum frame; Stylus support.
• Display: 11.61″ IPS LCD, 1B colors, Dolby Vision, HDR10+, 144Hz, 500 nits (typ), 2000x2800px resolution, 7:5 aspect ratio, 296ppi.
• Chipset: Mediatek MT6983 Dimensity 9000 (4 nm): Octa-core (1×3.05 GHz Cortex-X2 & 3×2.85 GHz Cortex-A710 & 4×1.80 GHz Cortex-A510); Mali-G710 MC10.
• Memory: 128GB 8GB LPDDRX5 RAM, 256GB 12GB LPDDRX5 RAM; UFS 3.1.
• OS/Software: Android 13, OxygenOS 13.1.
• Rear camera: 13 MP, f/2.2, 23mm (wide).
• Front camera: 8 MP, f/2.3, (wide), 1/4″, 1.12µm.
• Video capture: Rear camera: [email protected], [email protected], gyro-EIS; Front camera: [email protected].
• Battery: 9510mAh; 67W wired.
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6; BT 5.3, aptX HD.
• Misc: Accelerometer, gyro, compass, stereo speakers (4 speakers).

Unboxing of Oneplus pad

The packing for the OnePlus Pad is relatively ordinary. The tablet and a USB-C cable with USB 2.0 capability are both included inside. You also get an 80W fast charger in some areas, but in others, it costs extra.

The packing for the OnePlus Pad is relatively ordinary. The tablet and a USB-C cable with USB 2.0 capability are both included inside. You also get an 80W fast charger in some areas, but in others, it costs extra.

Design

The OnePlus Pad boasts a striking appearance, impressive thickness, and exceptional build quality.

The device’s front is completely covered in glass, with a very little bend around the corners. The screen is surrounded by a consistent, slightly smaller-than-a-centimeter bezel. It makes sense to want a thinner bezel, yet a tablet needs a large bezel since you need a place to rest your thumb when holding the device.

On the tablet itself as well as the display, the edges are aggressively rounded on all four sides. This may cause unintended truncation of certain content near the very top.

The device’s power button and connectors for two of its four loudspeakers are located on its left side. The remaining two speakers and the USB connection are located on the right. Three contact plates for the magnetic keyboard accessory are located at the bottom.

To hold the optional stylus while charging, the top of the tablet has been flattened. On the right, a pill-shaped pattern indicates where the stylus passes through inductively. The microphone and volume controls are located on the left. Additionally situated on the bezel below this edge is the 8MP front camera.

The big camera lens on the OnePlus Pad’s rear is surrounded by a spinning finish. The back cover otherwise has a seamless unibody design, but there is an uninterrupted line all the way around the edge for radio antennas inside the device. Depending on how the light strikes it, the line can sometimes be seen and other times be buried.

All the smudges on the back are tough to ignore. The metal back is especially prone to this deformity, and because of the small ridges, cleaning it off is more difficult than if the surface were flat and even.

It’s unfortunate because the design is otherwise extremely attractive. We are especially taken aback by how tiny it is; even with a keyboard case on, the entire assembly still manages to maintain a slim profile. You can choose any colour you want as long as it’s green when it comes to colour possibilities.

Even though the tablet is lightweight and has a tiny body, the physical buttons should have been made more user-friendly. They can be challenging to use and are a little too small for a gadget this size. No matter how you hold the tablet, they are also inconveniently placed and never feel comfortable.

The OnePlus Pad is a superbly constructed gadget. The smartphone feels incredibly substantial and robust in the hand despite its thickness (or lack thereof). Although it is not unusual for a tablet, there is no certified ingress protection against dust and water.

Now would be a good moment to discuss the accessories, which, as was previously indicated, must be purchased individually. The OnePlus Magnetic Keyboard, a pricy device that combines a folio case, a keyboard, and a trackpad, is the first in this list. The tablet is magnetically attached to it, and data is transferred using pogo pins.

When being transported, the folio’s exterior offers a considerable level of traction because to its soft leather-like texture. A felt-lined interior of the folio that comes into contact with the tablet’s metal back might help remove certain smudges.

The keys for the alphabet and digits are of a size that is typical of chiclet keyboards. Shortcuts for frequently used features can also be accessed by using the Fn key and are located on the number row. The keyboard will require some getting accustomed to, but after a few hours, I discovered that I could type swiftly. The keys are comfortable to type on and provide decent tactile feedback.

The trackpad is located underneath the keyboard. It may be squeezed across the entire surface and has a central hinge. Moreover, multi-touch motions are supported.

Although it has some drawbacks, the Magnetic Keyboard is a respectable device. The OnePlus Pad is installed at an extremely steep angle, which causes the tablet to sit at a very upright, nearly vertical angle when the built-in kickstand is used. This was probably done to keep the tablet balanced on a lap and prevent it from tipping over, but the drawback is that you are constantly staring at the screen at an odd angle.

The lack of backlighting on the keyboard is the second problem. Because of this, using the keyboard in the dark is really challenging, especially when it’s new and you haven’t completely mastered the layout.

The OnePlus Stylo was the other attachment we got. This is a Bluetooth-enabled wireless stylus that charges by magnetically fastening to the tablet’s top. It has a flat edge that connects to the tablet and a smooth, largely uniform surface. From tip to end, it is well balanced and reasonably well-weighted.

The stylus performs admirably, and everything from pairing to charging went without a hitch. It appeared to function well for drawing in our little creative skills when it was really put to use. It boasts a pressure-sensitive tip with a 4096-level range that can be angled to draw bigger strokes and thicker lines when you press down harder. If you simply hover over alternatives, the OS will highlight them as well. When drawing, you may place your entire hand on the screen thanks to the effective palm rejection.

Although OnePlus claims 2ms latency, it occasionally looked to be a little bit higher. This might be because most sketching programmes are limited to 60Hz by the display, but more on that later.

Overall, if you’re serious about utilising an Android tablet for drawing, the OnePlus Stylo is a useful tool.

Display

The IPS LCD panel on the OnePlus Pad has a resolution of 2800 × 2000 pixels and an uncommon aspect ratio of 7:5. Here, the high refresh rate reaches a whopping 144Hz. The display utilises an 8-bit panel with FRC to produce 10-bit colours.

OLED panels are only used by a small number of high-end tablets, while the OnePlus Pad’s LCD is of fairly good quality. Whether you’re gazing at the screen straight on or from an angle, the contrast and colours don’t change.

By manually adjusting the slider, we were able to measure a maximum brightness of 442 nits. Although there is no further improvement in bright light, it is still a decent result for a tablet and comes very near to the promised 500 nits.

It’s not great because the black levels are greater than average, which led to one of the lowest contrast ratios of all the tablets we tested, at 1195:1. When viewing dark content, especially in a dark environment, this is readily apparent as greyish blacks.

Color Accuracy

Although the Vivid option of the display produces excellent, vivid colours, it is not very colour correct. The bluish whites and greys are greatly reduced when the Colour temperature slider goes all the way to Warm.

The Nature Tone Display is designed to rectify the colour temperature of the whites so they seem neutral by adjusting the screen’s colour temperature in reaction to environmental light.

The monitor provides a fairly accurate colour output when compared to sRGB content (average deltaE of 3) when you switch to Natural mode. For DCI-P3 content, the Pro mode had nearly same colour accuracy (average deltaE of 3.6).

Refresh rate

The maximum refresh rate advertised by OnePlus is 144Hz, which is a figure that appears frequently in the company’s marketing materials. The highest supported refresh rate, 144Hz, should be noted in this case. It’s another thing entirely whether the monitor actually runs at 144Hz.

Only Chrome was the only software that would operate at the full claimed 144Hz in all of our testing. Other browsers and the majority of other applications operate at 120Hz or 60Hz. Unfortunately, this also applies to latency-sensitive software, such as drawing programmes and games, which are frequently set to 60Hz. Outside of video playback, video apps like YouTube will only function at 60Hz and will continue to do so regardless of the video frame rate.

Unfortunately, the business prefers to be the judge, juror, and executioner when it comes to refresh rate, as we have seen on prior OnePlus products. As a user, your only options are to select this variable mess or set the frequency permanently to 60Hz. Users cannot manually whitelist apps for high refresh rates, enable 144Hz in all apps, or even configure different refresh rates for different apps. Instead, the user is regarded like a little child who needs to be taught how to use the expensive gear they paid for since they cannot be trusted with fancy toys for fear of breaking things. At this point, it is becoming quite tedious and almost feels like fake advertising.

On IPS screens, response times are a problem, especially at higher refresh rates where they are more noticeable. When things are moving quickly across the screen, like when scrolling in a browser, there is some obvious blur on the display. We didn’t find this to be especially irritating, despite the fact that it is plainly worse than an OLED screen, which has almost immediate pixel response times. When utilising the display in orientations other than how the panel is installed, a mild and unobtrusive jelly scrolling distortion also appears.

Video playback

The OnePlus Pad is compatible with Dolby Vision, HLG, HDR10, and HDR10+. All of the aforementioned file formats could be played on the device locally, but it can be difficult to locate content online. At the time of testing, the OnePlus Pad hadn’t received certification from Netflix, the only service currently supporting Dolby Vision content on Android. This implied that the Netflix app did not contain any form of HDR, including Dolby Vision. Similar to that, Prime Video does not support HDR playback. More crucially, both apps are 1080p-only, which doesn’t look fantastic on the high-resolution display of the OnePlus Pad. The only app that supported HDR playback and up to 4K resolution was YouTube.

The OnePlus Pad’s lack of mainstream HDR support isn’t as problematic as you may expect. In general, IPS LCD panels perform poorly in HDR, especially when there is no local dimming to make up for it. Since everything will have black bars at the top and bottom due to the display’s unusually tall 7:5 aspect ratio, the blacks are mostly grey and obvious.

Highlights cannot get bright without making the entire image brighter, and they don’t get that bright to begin with because there is no per-pixel control. Additionally, OnePlus introduces dynamic tone mapping, increases saturation, and sharpness. As a result, HDR material on the OnePlus Pad is incredibly disappointing and occasionally worse than SDR.

Battery Life

The 9510mAh battery in the OnePlus Pad is larger than typical, but you must keep in mind that the tablet also houses a powerful chipset. So, we had no idea what to expect going into this test.

The OnePlus Pad has a strong battery life, with run lengths of 12:54 hours for Wi-Fi web surfing and 12:33 hours for movie playback.

Since standby battery consumption is taken into account in our calculation for phones, we do not calculate ratings for tablet endurance. We concentrate on the active screen-on testing rather than using the same technique for tablets with their larger batteries because their sleep power use is negligible.

In terms of refresh rate, the online surfing test was run in High mode, but the video playback test was run in 60Hz.

Charging speed

Using the Oppo/OnePlus SUPERVOOC standard, the OnePlus Pad enables 67W fast charging. In some regions, the gadget is shipped with an 80W charger, the same one we saw on the new Nord CE 3 Lite that also allows 67W charging. The charger only has a USB-A output, therefore it can only use proprietary technologies and cables to give high-speed charging to compatible OnePlus and Oppo devices. For all other devices, conventional USB-A charging rates will apply.

The OnePlus Pad charged 50% in the first 30 minutes of our tests. Close to the 80 minute claim made by OnePlus, a complete charge took about 78 minutes.

The OnePlus Pad has one of the fastest charging rates of any tablet we have tested, and overall we were happy with it. It’s impressive that a full-sized tablet can charge faster than the iPhone 14 does.

Speakers

Near each corner of the OnePlus Pad are a set of four speakers. The system will automatically assign channels to the speakers based on how you hold the tablet. In essence, regardless of how you hold the device, the speakers on the left side of the device will always play the left channel.

The audio quality of the OnePlus Pad speakers is respectable. The speakers perform best between 40 and 70% volume since outside of this range, the bass level drops considerably. The biggest criticism of these speakers is probably their general lack of bass. However, while playing Dolby Atmos-encoded video, the vocalists sound fantastic, and the speakers also offer excellent imaging and spaciousness. Just be careful not to turn it up past 70% because although the speakers can become very loud, they also start to sound tinny and crowded.

Software

OxygenOS 13.1, on top of Android 13.1, powers the OnePlus Pad. This is a minimally altered version of OxygenOS for tablets.

Starting with the launcher, you may choose between using an app drawer or having all icons on the homescreen like the iPad. Nevertheless, the icons are all very evenly spaced out, and the sides have a lot of padding. The number of items you can put on the homescreen is typically severely constrained by this, especially when it comes to widgets. When you have one huge widget, there may be no room left on the side for any additional smaller ones.

To bring down the notifications, you can select to swipe down on the homescreen. The toggles with controls for brightness and audio playback are located on the left side. The alerts are displayed to the right. Although the shortcut for pulling down is useful, it interferes with any widgets that include scrolling components. The launcher nearly always opts to bring down the notifications when you swipe down on a widget to navigate within the widget.

A few helpful features from OnePlus have been included to make multitasking simpler. Activating the split screen feature only requires a two-finger swipe downward. Although the majority of the programmes we tested did allow split screen, this feature is still only available in those programmes.

Flexible windows, which allows you to open some apps in a small floating window on the side that may be minimised, is another helpful feature. Unfortunately, you can only use one of these apps at once, and it isn’t compatible with all apps.

However, hardly any of the installed apps we tested supported dual windows, which allows you to open the same app in two separate windows. Last but not least, you can choose how to display programmes that don’t adequately support fullscreen landscape mode using the Display size function. Even while this could be used for many more apps, it was only available for a small number of them.

All of this is regrettably required because the Android tablet experience is still terrible, especially in terms of third-party app support. The majority of Android apps still do not anticipate being launched on tablets even after all these years. On a tablet, you typically use programmes in landscape orientation, but this is not always the case, especially when a keyboard is attached. Many feature an incomplete landscape mode that simply extends the portrait mode in an inconvenient way and uses the available space poorly.

Numerous other applications will occasionally flip to portrait mode; Spotify, for instance, will do so when you make the lyrics full-screen. Only a very small percentage of the tested apps had a true tablet UI created to fully utilise the larger canvas, and the majority of them just so happened to be either OnePlus’ or Google’s own apps.

Some of these problems are even worse when an Android tablet is connected to a keyboard and trackpad. The majority of apps on the platform simply sit there awkwardly and do nothing because they are unable to utilise standard keyboard shortcuts that would be usable on a desktop or even an iPad.

When scrolling or highlighting text, the mouse pointer can act strangely in some apps and be quite unreliable. As a result, you frequently have little choice but to use the touchscreen to interact with the apps, as many of them are just not made to be utilised with a mouse pointer or keyboard.

The majority of these problems are common to Android and aren’t necessarily the fault of OnePlus. But unless you really make an effort to get around them, they significantly reduce the platform’s value as a workstation or sort of laptop replacement. As of right now, iPadOS is far superior in every important statistic, leaving Android tablets as laptop replacements in the dust. This is worth remembering before purchasing any Android tablet, not just the OnePlus Pad.

The lack of cellular connectivity on the OnePlus Pad might be a deal-breaker for some people. In order to make up for this, OnePlus has added Cellular Data Sharing, which enables you to share the cellular data on your OnePlus phone simply by having it nearby and being logged into the same OnePlus account.

Multi-Screen Connect, which is OnePlus’s take on Apple’s Handoff feature, can also take advantage of this connection to do tasks like screen mirroring, content sync (clipboard, media), and app relay. These require both the tablet and the OnePlus phone to be on OxygenOS 13.1.

Perhaps a more significant omission, one to which OnePlus has no alternative, is fingerprint scanning. The OnePlus Pad has no fingerprint scanner and has to rely on passcodes to secure the device. You can use rudimentary face recognition to unlock your tablet, but it’s not safe and cannot be utilised by apps like password managers to unlock. This means you are regularly entering your passcodes and passwords on the gadget, which can grow monotonous very soon. The scanner could have been placed virtually anywhere on the handset, even inside the power button, but OnePlus decided against doing so.

Overall, the software experience on the OnePlus Pad is terrible. Although OnePlus has made every effort to make the user experience enjoyable, the platform’s depressing lack of support from third-party developers makes it difficult to sell to the average user, who is almost always better off using an iPad.

performances

The MediaTek Dimensity 9000 MT6983 chipset, which powers the OnePlus Pad, has an 8-core CPU and Mali-G710 MC10 GPU. It comes with a choice of 128GB or 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage and your choice of 8GB or 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM. This varies by area because the OnePlus Pad is only offered in an 8/128GB option in the majority of American and European regions. But the review unit we received from India had 12/256GB.

This chip’s overall CPU performance is more comparable to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 870, while its GPU performance is more comparable to the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. Since Android tablets don’t often get the newest and best chips, this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to anyone. However, if you look at the competition, you’ll realise that the OnePlus Pad is really pretty competitive because the most of its competitors are noticeably poorer.

Performance in the real world is a bit unpredictable. The OnePlus Pad responds quickly to all inputs and feels generally pleasant to use. There is, however, a constant delay when scrolling that frequently appears in all applications. Every ad, video, and other embedded element will cause the browser to stutter, and sometimes it stutters for no apparent reason. This is especially obvious while browsing. Given the amount of power available, it doesn’t appear to be a hardware issue; rather, the OS and, frequently, the software you are using, need to be optimised.

If you enjoy playing challenging, current games, gaming performance is also subpar. There isn’t enough performance here to maintain the native resolution at 60 frames per second. Genshin Impact and Fortnite, two of the games we examined, had trouble operating properly on the gadget and ran at incredibly low resolutions. The display’s unusual aspect ratio and resolution could be the cause of the problem. Additionally, they were still dropping frames in spite of their poor rendering resolution.

The experience of playing older games was great. Most of the time, you can keep a consistent 60FPS with only occasional dropouts. Apart from the corners being shortened due to the severe curve, the majority of the other games we tested didn’t have any issues with the display. Every game we played could only support a refresh rate of 60Hz due to OS limitations, thus it would have been wonderful if that number could have been increased.

The OnePlus Pad performs thermally well and dissipates heat well, as you would expect from a big tablet. Even during stress testing, the chipset does not significantly lose performance over time. Under pressure, the area between the power button and the rear camera does get a little warm, but ordinarily, that location is so far away from the grip of the device that you wouldn’t even notice it.

Camera

A single 13-megapixel camera with autofocus and an LED flash is located on the back of the OnePlus Pad. 720p, 1080p, and 4K video can all be recorded at 30 frames per second with no digital image stabilisation, though.

An 8-megapixel fixed-focus ultrawide camera on the front is capable of 1080p video recording at 30 frames per second.

Although it has a similar layout to other OnePlus devices, this camera software is really simple. The toggles for flash, timer, AI improvement, aspect ratio, and HDR are on the left and you may switch your camera settings from the bottom. There is also a straightforward toggle for a 2x digital zoom.

There is a night mode that you may select as well as the Selfie mode, which blurs the background of your subject. In addition to those, there are panorama, slow-motion, and time-lapse options.

The back camera’s image quality is respectable for a tablet. The degree of detail is fine, and colour reproduction and dynamic range are both excellent. The image quality on offer here should be more than sufficient for taking a casual photo or for taking pictures of papers. The front camera also produces passable-looking photos and movies, and the quality was adequate for video calls.

Although the ultrawide selfies are a wonderful addition, the quality isn’t fantastic at arm’s length.

A feature called Limelight should be added to that ultrawide selfie camera for video calls. It is intended to identify faces in the frame and crop the image to maintain them in the centre.

Our Verdict

The OnePlus Pad is a respectable entry-level tablet. First impressions are largely favourable thanks to the device’s svelte design, high-quality materials, and expansive, high-resolution display. The fact that the device came with a keyboard case and pen at launch suggests that it has more ambitious goals than simply serving as a media player.

When we looked closer, we were appropriately impressed by the lightning-fast charging and the good quality speakers and cameras. Performance is also generally more than adequate. Despite having some drawbacks, the supplementary keyboard and stylus peripherals are functional.

The display of the OnePlus Pad falls short. Although the LCD panel isn’t the worst thing ever, it is let down by the limitations of the technology itself. Even worse are OnePlus’ perplexing software choices, which frequently restrict refresh rate, turning the 144Hz number into little more than a marketing gimmick. To eliminate the sporadic stuttering while scrolling and the sporadic flaws that occasionally appear, the software as a whole needs to be polished. Other deal-breakers include the absence of a fingerprint scanner and integrated cellular connectivity.

The Android operating system, or more particularly, its software ecosystem, is the tablet’s major weakness. Despite being around for more than ten years, there are hardly any apps that are specifically designed for tablets. The majority of well-known apps that typically function well on a phone will act foolishly when launched on a tablet. It’s no knowledge that Android is inferior to the iPadOS when it comes to tablet app creation, but until you actually use one of these devices, you won’t understand just how much of a difference there is. Android is not a viable alternative if you want a high-quality tablet productivity experience.

In the end, we discovered that the OnePlus Pad worked well for video conferencing, web surfing, casual doodling, and office work. Consider the iPad if you want a tablet experience that is more refined or the second-generation Lenovo Tab P11 Pro if you want something more suited to watching HDR video.

Pro’s & Con’s