OnePlus Pad 2 review

Android 14 with OxygenOS 14.1

The OnePlus Pad runs on OxygenOS 14.1 atop Android 14. It is a slightly modified version of OxygenOS for the tablet form factor.

Starting with the launcher, you have the choice of having either all icons on the homescreen like the iPad or using an app drawer. Regardless, the icons are all fairly spaced out, and there is also a generous amount of padding on the sides. This tends to heavily limit the number of things you can place on the homescreen especially when it comes to widgets. You can maybe have one large widget, and suddenly there is no longer any space available for even smaller ones on the side.

Launcher

You can choose to swipe down on the homescreen to pull down the notifications. On the left are all the toggles with controls for brightness and audio playback. The notifications appear on the right side.

OnePlus has added some useful features to make multitasking easier. The split screen function can be evoked by a simple two-finger swipe down. This feature is still limited to apps that do support split-screen, but most of the apps we tried did. Up to three apps are supported in split screen, though only two can be used in the same time.

Another useful feature is floating windows, which lets you open some apps in a small floating window on the side that can be minimized. Unfortunately, you can only run one such app at a time, and it also doesn't work with every app.

Features

OnePlus has just a few proprietary apps such as Community, Photos and OnePlus Store. And Settings and Camera, of course. Everything else is Google's default.

The optional OnePlus Smart Keyboard is quite useful and comfortable. It has a nicely large touchpad with great tactile feedback. The keys have enough travel to make it feel like a full-blown keyboard; there are plenty of useful shortcut keys, too. The only thing it does not have is backlighting.

Keyboard options

The touchpad gestures mostly mimic the on-screen ones - swipe with two fingers for scrolling, with three from different directions to close/open the task switcher/pull down notifications. Split screen works, too.

The mouse pointer works very well, but clicking on buttons or other clickable content for some reason is a hit and miss (50/50 chance of the click to be accepted).

Keyboard options

Switching between languages is somewhat weird - you must not be currently in an active text field in order to switch with the Ctrl+Space shortcut. This is incredibly inconvenient if you are a bilingual writer.

Most of these issues are probably inherent to Android and aren't necessarily OnePlus's fault. But they significantly diminish the value of the platform as a work machine or a laptop replacement of sorts unless you really go out of your way to work around the shortcomings.

The Stylo 2 pen is very comfortable, and writing with it is a breezy experience. It supports quick notes, notes with the screen off, and even presentation mode with laser pointer and draw on the screen functions. Scribble is supported, too.

Stylus options

The Stylo 2 has a capacitive surface (the thin flat line), where you can swipe or tap. Depending on what you are doing - taps and swipes have different functions. If we had to choose between the keyboard and the stylus, we would get the stylus for its better experience and painting/writing potential.

Stylus features

Performance and benchmarks

The OnePlus Pad 2 is powered by the most recent Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset by Qualcomm, a huge upgrade over the Dimensity 9000 inside the original Pad. This means you are getting an octa-core processor with 1x3.3 GHz Cortex-X4 & 3x3.2 GHz Cortex-A720 & 2x3.0 GHz Cortex-A720 & 2x2.3 GHz Cortex-A520 cores. The Adreno 750 GPU is onboard as well.

The OnePlus Pad 2 is internationally available with 256GB UFS 3.1 storage and 12GB LPDDR5X RAM. There is also 128/8GB version in circulation in some markets.

Just like other OnePlus and Oppo devices, the tablet has a Performance mode in its battery settings, which allows for higher CPU temperatures and higher scores (with about 10%-20%) when testing with benchmarks. It does not affect the GPU performance. This is how we ran the benchmarks.

Update, 23 Aug 2024: Following our readers' feedback about the original benchmarks numbers coming out too low, we procured an another review unit and this time around, we got much better results - befitting the flagship silicon inside the tablet. The GPU stability has risen to a much better score, too.

As you can see, the results speak for themselves. In our testing, the OnePlus Pad 2 tops the charts across all benchmarks.

The CPU and GPU tests returned outstanding scores with about of 90% stability! The tablet never got hot, just slightly warm at one specific spot.

CPU test • GPU test

Overall, the OnePlus Pad 2 is properly equipped with the latest available hardware. It suupports high refresh rate gaming too, you just need to whitelist each game app.