OnePlus has long been known for its smartphones, but in recent years, the company has expanded its horizons, offering smart TVs, monitors, audio products, and smartwatches. They even design and sell their own smartphone accessories, backpacks, and travel gear. With their latest addition, the OnePlus Pad, they’ve entered the tablet market, aiming to challenge the dominance of Apple’s iPad. But how does this new tablet fare? Let’s delve into our comprehensive review and see if it’s a worthy contender in the tablet arena.
OnePlus Pad Price in India
The OnePlus Pad is available in a single color, Halo Green. It comes in two configurations: the base model with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage priced at Rs. 37,999, and a higher-end variant with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage priced at Rs. 39,999. While the base model might seem tempting, we recommend opting for the top-end model for its added RAM and storage, ultimately providing a smoother and more future-proof experience.
OnePlus Pad Design and Accessories
OnePlus has consistently adhered to a rounded design language in its smartphones, with the OnePlus 10R 5G being a notable exception. This design philosophy translates to the OnePlus Pad, giving it a unique and refreshing look compared to other tablets available in the Indian market.
The tablet boasts a premium metal unibody design that feels incredibly solid and sleek. At just 6.5mm thin, the OnePlus Pad makes even the latest Apple iPad feel chunky in comparison. Despite its slender form, the tablet holds firm, with no noticeable flex or creaking when pressure is applied.
The OnePlus Pad offers a premium metal unibody design.
The OnePlus Pad’s rear design, while visually appealing with its finely etched texture, does succumb to smudge magnets. These marks can be quite stubborn to wipe off, but thankfully, the two optional cover accessories are available to keep the rear surface pristine.
Despite using aluminum for construction, the OnePlus Pad weighs in at 552g, feeling slightly heavy for regular tasks or single-handed browsing. To combat this, you might find yourself gravitating towards a couch or a table while using the tablet, especially when coupled with the separately sold keyboard accessory. The rounded edges contribute to a comfortable grip, a stark contrast to other tablets with their flat sides and sharp corners that can be uncomfortable to hold for extended periods.
The rear of the OnePlus Pad turns into a smudgy mess which is hard to wipe clean.
While the tablet edges sport a rounded design, the display glass remains flat, seamlessly integrating with the frame. This seamless integration enhances the swipe gesture experience, particularly near the edges. The display glass, however, attracts smudges, but these are easily wiped off.
The Magnetic Keyboard accessory, priced at Rs. 7,999 in India, exudes premium quality with a grippy faux-leather texture on its front and rear panels. It connects to the tablet via three pins for both power and functionality, eliminating wireless Bluetooth connectivity, requiring physical attachment for operation.
The keyboard keys offer a delightful tactile feedback with good travel, providing a confident typing experience. However, they exhibit a slight stiffness, potentially leading to hand fatigue during extended typing sessions. The layout is compact, but thankfully, it proves surprisingly easy to adapt to.
The OnePlus Magnetic Keyboard lacks backlighting but offers a confident typing experience for light work.
While the keyboard lacks backlighting, OnePlus has made magic with the overall key experience. Its minimal learning curve and familiar function keys, similar to Windows or macOS, make it easy to navigate. The trackpad delivers on sensitivity and functionality, with gestures working flawlessly once "tap to click" mode is disabled in the settings. It responds to minimal pressure but acts as a single large button, lacking individual left and right click functionalities. Primarily used for selecting items or entering text fields, the trackpad requires using the shift and arrow keys for text selection, making it more suitable for light work.
A small gap between the top row of number keys and the tablet upon mounting would be a helpful addition, as accidental touches on the display while hitting the number keys did occur during our testing.
The OnePlus Stylo stylus, available for Rs. 4,999 in India, functions as expected and quickly charges when placed on the magnetic area at the tablet’s top edge. However, finding the perfect contact patch on the stylus for docking can be a slight challenge, resulting in occasions where it didn’t snap firmly and could detach with a gentle tap.
OnePlus Pad Specifications and Software
The OnePlus Pad features a MediaTek Dimensity 9000 SoC, a chip commonly found in premium smartphones. Our review unit boasted 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage. The tablet lacks a SIM card slot, eliminating mobile data capabilities and expandable storage options.
Connectivity includes Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, and support for standard satellite navigation systems. While cellular connectivity is absent, OnePlus simplifies hotspot data sharing with its Cellular Data Sharing feature. This feature automatically connects the tablet to a OnePlus smartphone, facilitating seamless data transfer. This requires the tablet to be within a range of one to five meters from a OnePlus smartphone.
Powering the OnePlus Pad is a 9,510mAh battery, and OnePlus includes a 100W charger in the box. However, the tablet’s charging rate is limited to 67W.
The OnePlus Stylo works as expected and sticks firmly to the top-edge of the tablet.
OnePlus has made a few omissions, forgoing the 3.5mm headphone jack and a secure biometric unlock method like a fingerprint sensor. The tablet relies on PIN or face unlock via the front camera for security. While face unlock offers convenience, it’s not the most secure method and depends heavily on good lighting conditions.
Despite lacking cellular capabilities, the OnePlus Pad allowed us to make voice and video calls via WhatsApp. Calls functioned as expected, with clear audio transmission through the tablet’s built-in mic. The selfie camera incorporates OnePlus’ Limelight camera feature, proving effective during video calls, efficiently keeping your face centered as long as you don’t venture too close to the camera frame’s edges.
The OnePlus Pad runs on OxygenOS 13.1, based on Android 13, with a few tablet-friendly customizations. These customizations include a dock at the bottom, displaying pinned apps and recently used apps, mimicking the layout found on Apple iPads with iPadOS. Swiping up from the bottom reveals the app drawer.
OnePlus has introduced several software features to enhance the usefulness of OxygenOS on a larger display. The ability to open one app in a resizable floating window and even two apps side by side using the split window feature allows for a total of three apps to be displayed concurrently. It’s worth noting that not all apps scale well when resized to fit a floating window, including some of Google’s own apps like Drive, Docs, Sheets, and more. This seems to be a bug, hopefully addressed in future updates.
OnePlus Pad Performance
The OnePlus Pad features an 11.61-inch LCD display with a resolution of 2800 x 2000 pixels. The display boasts a brightness of around 500 nits, sufficient for outdoor viewing and under direct sunlight. Viewing angles are decent, with slightly saturated colors at the default Vivid color profile. Blacks are impressive, albeit not quite as deep as those found on AMOLED panels. The tablet’s display is Dolby Vision-certified, and content on Netflix and YouTube displays as expected. Complementing the display is a quad-speaker setup, which delivers both volume and immersive sound thanks to Dolby Atmos support.
However, it’s the display’s aspect ratio that sets it apart from the competition. OnePlus has opted for an unusual 7:5 aspect ratio. While this does provide additional vertical screen space for browsing web pages or spreadsheets, the layout can feel slightly squished when viewing two apps side by side or in split view. This issue is amplified by the display’s limited scaling options, restricting users to Standard and Small settings, with no options for larger scales to view more content on the same screen space.
The OnePlus Pad offers a vibrant but slightly saturated 7:5 aspect ratio display.
The LCD panel on the OnePlus Pad offers a 144Hz refresh rate, capable of switching between 30Hz, 60Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz, and 144Hz based on what’s needed. However, during testing, we observed that the 144Hz refresh rate is only available in specific apps, such as Chrome, which have been whitelisted by OnePlus. Even while using the interface or browsing the homescreen, the display switches between 60Hz (when idle) and 120Hz (when in use) most of the time.
The majority of games, including casual titles that support high refresh rate displays, are capped at 60Hz. We observed that only certain games, like Call of Duty: Mobile, allow for 90Hz refresh rates when selecting the "Ultra" framerate setting. During testing, we didn’t observe the screen dropping to 30Hz, but it’s also not fully utilizing its 144Hz capability most of the time.
The OnePlus Pad’s SoC performs as expected, achieving 8,29,370 points in AnTuTu (v10). In terms of graphics, the tablet achieved 32fps, 55fps, and 60fps in GFXBench’s Car Chase, Manhattan 3.1, and T-Rex test suites, respectively.
Overall, gaming performance is quite good. The tablet did heat up slightly while playing Call of Duty Mobile at "Very High" graphics and framerate settings, but remained comfortably cool even after gaming for 30 minutes continuously. Asphalt 9 Legends displayed almost console-like graphics with smooth frame rates, benefiting from the device’s 60fps mode support. However, the 120Hz/144Hz touch sampling rate felt slightly insufficient when playing Call of Duty Mobile, lacking the responsiveness expected despite tweaking sensitivity settings in the built-in gaming tools.
The OnePlus Pad can display three apps at a time, but is better used for light productivity work.
While the Google Play Store is sadly lacking in tablet-optimized apps, the OnePlus Pad handles apps that are stretched smartphone apps surprisingly well. Disappointingly, some official apps from Instagram and Reddit still refuse to run or support a horizontal layout, despite being available for tablets.
The 12GB of RAM is more than sufficient for handling multitasking, widgets, app pairs, and floating windows, keeping them in RAM for extended periods. In terms of bloatware, OnePlus has kept it minimal, including only Netflix and WPS Office apps, both useful and easily uninstalled.
OnePlus Pad Cameras
Image quality from the OnePlus Pad’s 13-megapixel rear camera is decent at best. While colors appear mostly natural, resolved detail is notably low, even with objects closer to the camera. The 8-megapixel front-facing camera struggles with selfies, producing images with below-average detail and a dream-like HDR effect.
Still image quality in low light using auto mode falls short of expectations, while Night mode, while passable, exhibits a noticeable watercolor-like effect with flattened textures.
OnePlus Pad camera samples. Top to bottom: Close-up (primary), Portrait selfie, Night mode (primary) (Tap to see full size).
The camera is capable of recording 4K 30fps video, delivering sharp footage with good dynamic range and detail but exhibiting noticeable shake. 1080p 30fps video utilizes electronic stabilization, reducing hand shake but appearing slightly soft with less detail. Low-light video quality is not ideal, showing significant noise and softer textures.
OnePlus Pad Battery Life
The OnePlus Pad delivers impressive battery life, exceeding two days with regular casual usage. Our testing included playing casual games, streaming videos, scrolling through social media apps, and keeping two email accounts synced. This stands out as exceptional for a slim tablet of this size.
Our HD video loop test also yielded promising results, achieving an impressive 18 hours and 10 minutes of runtime, making it a remarkable feat for a slim tablet.
The optional OnePlus Magnetic Keyboard accessory has a very premium look and feel.
We also tested the tablet in a work environment, simulating tasks performed on our laptops. With the display set to 50 percent brightness and a timeout of five minutes, the OnePlus Pad surprisingly lasted two whole workdays (approximately nine hours each), impressive for a tablet.
Charging the OnePlus Pad was equally quick despite the capped charging speeds. The tablet went from zero to 47 percent in 30 minutes, 85 percent in an hour, and fully charged in an hour and 29 minutes.
Verdict
Until Google’s Pixel Tablet makes its way to India (if it ever does), the OnePlus Pad might be the best Android tablet experience available. This is particularly true considering the high refresh rate display, fast charging capabilities, and high-quality accessories, all offered at reasonable price points. While the initial price of Rs. 37,999 seemed steep, after experiencing the tablet firsthand, we believe the raw performance coupled with a lighter build, surpassing most laptops in this price range, justifies the cost.
OnePlus has expertly crafted its software, balancing sustained performance with valuable features like split-screen mode and floating windows, all working as expected thanks to the robust hardware powering the device.
Overall, there’s very little to criticize or complain about, unless you require an AMOLED panel. In that case, you might want to consider Lenovo’s P11 Pro Gen 2, which resembles the P11 Pro we reviewed earlier. It’s priced at Rs. 44,999, but lacks the software experience of the OnePlus Pad.
On the Apple side, the new Apple iPad (2022) starts from Rs. 44,900 for the Wi-Fi-only model, but comes with a standard refresh rate display and only 64GB of storage; the only other variant costs Rs. 59,900 (for 256GB). Those seeking cellular connectivity or a robust app ecosystem with tablet-friendly apps might find the Apple iPad appealing, but its accessories come at a premium price, especially if work is your primary focus.
The OnePlus Pad offers a compelling alternative for those seeking a premium Android tablet experience with a high-quality display, fast charging capabilities, and a competitive price point. They haven’t reinvented the wheel, but with its refined design, capable hardware, and thoughtful software, the OnePlus Pad stands out as a worthy entry in the tablet market, offering an excellent option for work and play.
OnePlus recently launched its first tablet in India, the OnePlus Pad, which is only sold in a Halo Green color option. With this tablet, OnePlus has stepped into a new territory that’s dominated by Apple’s iPad. We discuss this and more on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.
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