OnePlus Pad 2 review

Display

The OnePlus Pad 2 features a 12.1-inch IPS LCD screen panel of 2,120 x 3,000 pixels or 304ppi. It supports up to 144Hz refresh rate and the most popular streaming formats - HDR10+ and Dolby Vision.

According to the official OnePlus specs, the panel offers up to 500nits of typical maximum brightness and up to 900 nits of peak brightness.

Our display measurements confirm these numbers - we captured 570 nits of maximum manual brightness and 793 nits of maximum automatic brightness. The smaller the white patch becomes, the higher the brightness and it can do 900 nits hassle-free.

It's an LCD panel, meaning it can go completely black, and hence, the contrast is not infinite, and the contrast ratio is, in fact, a bit low at 864:1. The minimum brightness at point white was just 2.1 nits.

Refresh rate

The OnePlus Pad 2's display supports seven fixed refresh rates - 30Hz, 48Hz, 50Hz, 60Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz and 144Hz. There are three system modes to choose from - Auto Select, Standard, High. There is also a White List where you can manually raise or limit the refresh rate per app basis.

When using Auto, the system uses 50Hz for idle, 48Hz or 60Hz for video, 90Hz for system apps, and 60Hz for most third-party apps. High mode raises the refresh rate ceiling for third-party apps to 90Hz or 120Hz. No app will use 144Hz unless forces through the white list.

Naturally, Standard limits the maximum refresh to 60Hz, but it still drops to 50Hz and 48Hz when needed.

We never saw the screen drop to 30Hz though.

HDR and streaming

The display supports HDR10+ and Dolby Vision streaming, as confirmed by all hardware-scanning apps. YouTube does offer HDR streaming. But Netflix does not recognize the tablet as HDR compatible, at least for now, and offers 1080p SD streaming only.

Battery life

The OnePlus Pad 2 is powered by a large 9,510mAh battery, the same capacity battery as the one inside the OnePlus Pad.

The new tablet scored a solid Active Use Score of 10:51h. It lasted over 33 hours on internet voice calls, over 11 hours on web browsing, 10 and a half hours on video streaming and 6 and a half hours on gaming.

Our new Active Use Score is an estimate of how long the battery will last if you use the device with a mix of all four test activities. You can adjust the calculation based on your usage pattern using the sliders below. You can read about our current battery life testing procedure here. For a comprehensive list of all tested devices so far, head this way.

Charging speed

The OnePlus Pad 2 supports 67W fast charging, but it ships without a charger. OnePlus is giving one for free right now if you order it from its website, or you can use any VOOC charger from OnePlus or Oppo.

We didn't have exactly a 67W VOOC charger in our office, but we had a 100W one, which we used for our charging test.

Any compatible SuperVOOC charger, 67W or higher, will recharge 36% of the dead battery in 15 minutes and 65% in 30 minutes. A full charge took 56 minutes, which is impressive for such a large tablet and battery cell.

Speakers

The OnePlus Pad 2 has six stereo speakers, four full range ones and two woofers. Those sound incredibly loud when listening to music or watching movies, which is nice.

These six speakers scored an Excellent mark for loudness on our test, as we suspected. The audio quality is unimpressive, though. There is a noticeable thump, which is good, and the high-frequency range is well presented, but the vocals are lacking, coming through quite muffled.

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.