OnePlus Pad review

Display

The OnePlus Pad features an IPS LCD panel with a 2800 x 2000px resolution, which makes for an unusual 7:5 aspect ratio. The high refresh rate goes all the way to 144Hz here. The display achieves 10-bit color output using an 8-bit panel and FRC.

Only a handful of high-end tablets use OLED panels, and the LCD on the OnePlus Pad is of pretty high quality. Contrast and colors remain the same regardless of whether you are looking at the screen straight on or at an angle (no shifting).

We measured a max brightness of 442 nits with manual control of the slider. There is no boost beyond that in bright light, but it's still a respectable result for a tablet and close to the 500 nits claimed number.

What's less than stellar is that the black levels are higher than average, so the resulting contrast ratio of 1195:1 was among the lowest in the roster of tablets we've tested. This is easily noticeable in the form of grayish blacks when watching dark content, especially in a dark environment.

Color accuracy

The display's Vivid mode has nice and punchy colors but is not very color accurate. Sliding the Color temperature slider all the way to Warm mitigates the bluish whites and grays to a great extent.

The Nature Tone Display is supposed to adjust the screen color temperature in response to the ambient light correcting the color temperature of the whites so they appear neutral.

If you switch to Natural mode, the display has a very color-accurate output against sRGB content (avg deltaE of 3). The Pro mode was almost equally color-accurate for DCI-P3 content (avg deltaE of 3.6).

Refresh rate handling

OnePlus claims a maximum refresh rate of 144Hz, a number that is repeated quite often in the company's marketing material. What's important to note here is that 144Hz is the maximum supported refresh rate. Whether the display actually operates at 144Hz, is a different matter altogether.

In all our testing, we came across only one app that would run at the full advertised 144Hz, and that was Chrome. Most of the other apps, including other browsers, run at either 120Hz or 60Hz. This, frustratingly, also includes latency-sensitive apps like drawing apps and games, which are also often locked to 60Hz. Video apps like YouTube will only work at 60Hz outside of video playback and will stay at that refresh rate regardless of the video frame rate.

Unfortunately, as we have seen on other OnePlus devices, the company likes to be the judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to the refresh rate. All you can do as the user is either choose this variable mess or permanently lock it to 60Hz. There is no option for users to unlock 144Hz in all apps, manually whitelist apps for high refresh rates, or even set custom refresh rates across apps. Instead, the user is treated like a child who cannot be trusted with fancy toys lest they break something and must be told how to use the devices they paid for. It is getting extremely tiresome at this point and bordering on false advertisement.

Response times are a concern on IPS panels, especially at higher refresh rates where they become more obvious. The display has some noticeable blur when objects are moving rapidly across the screen, such as while scrolling in the browser. This is obviously worse than an OLED panel, which has near-instantaneous pixel response times, but we didn't find it to be particularly bothersome. The jelly scrolling distortion that occurs when using the display in orientations other than how the panel is mounted is also subtle and inoffensive.

Video playback

The OnePlus Pad supports HDR10, HDR10+, HLG, and Dolby Vision. The device was locally able to play files in all the aforementioned formats, but finding content online can be challenging. Netflix is currently the only provider offering Dolby Vision content on Android and, at the time of testing, hadn't certified the OnePlus Pad. This meant that not only was there no Dolby Vision on Netflix but there was no HDR of any kind inside the app. Similarly, Prime Video also did not play in HDR. More importantly, both apps limit themselves to 1080p, which doesn't look great on the OnePlus Pad's high-resolution display. YouTube was the only app that could play in HDR and offered up to 4K resolution.

The lack of widespread HDR support isn't as big of a deal on the OnePlus Pad as you may think. IPS LCD displays are generally bad at HDR, particularly when there is no local dimming to compensate. The blacks are mostly gray and in your face since the taller-than-usual 7:5 aspect ratio display means everything will have black bars at the top and bottom.

The lack of per-pixel control also means highlights cannot get bright without the entire image being forced to get brighter, and they don't get that bright, to begin with. OnePlus also bumps up saturation and sharpness and introduces dynamic tone mapping. As a result, HDR content is exceptionally unimpressive on the OnePlus Pad and, in some cases, looks worse than SDR.

Battery life

The OnePlus Pad has a 9510mAh battery, which is larger than average, but you have to remember inside the tablet is a high-performance chipset. So going into this test, we were not sure what to expect.

The OnePlus Pad returned solid battery life with a very good run times of 12:54h Wi-Fi web browsing and 12:33h video playback.

We don't calculate tablet endurance ratings as our formula for phones takes standby battery draw into account. Applying the same formula for tablets with their larger batteries doesn't make sense because their standby power draw is minimal, so we focus on the active screen-on tests instead.

The web browsing test was carried out at the High mode for refresh rate, whereas the video playback test was done at 60Hz.

Charging test

The OnePlus Pad supports 67W fast charging using the Oppo/OnePlus SUPERVOOC standard. The device comes with an 80W charger in the box in some regions, which is the same one we saw on the recent Nord CE 3 Lite that also supports 67W charging. The charger only has USB-A output, which means it can only deliver high-speed charging to compatible OnePlus and Oppo devices using proprietary technology and cable, and anything else will fall back to standard USB-A charging speeds.

In our testing, the OnePlus Pad charged 50% in the first 30 minutes. A full charge took around 78 minutes, which is close to the 80 minutes claim OnePlus makes.

Overall, we were satisfied with the rate of charging on the OnePlus Pad, and it is one of the fastest charging tablets we have tested. The fact that a full-sized tablet charges in less time than the iPhone 14 is impressive.

Speakers

The OnePlus Pad has a set of four speakers near each corner. Depending on how you hold the tablet, the system will automatically assign channels to the speakers. Essentially, the speakers on the left side of the device will always play the left channel, and this remains true regardless of how you hold the device.

The OnePlus Pad speakers have decent audio quality. The speakers sound their best between 40-70% volume as the level of bass falls off outside this range. The bass is lacking in general, which is perhaps the greatest knock against these speakers. The vocals do, however, sound amazing, and the speakers also have exceptional imaging and soundstage when playing Dolby Atmos encoded content. Just make sure you don't increase the volume beyond 70% as although the speakers can get very loud, they also get tinny and congested.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.

One frustrating omission is that of a headphone jack, which could have easily been included on a device of this size and thickness. You can use passive USB adapters, which work reasonably well, and use the built-in DAC and amplifier that sound good and get loud enough. Of course, the expectation here is to use Bluetooth, and the OnePlus Pad supports all major codecs.