OnePlus Pad Go Review: Affordable Media-Focused Tablet

Lower than a 12 months on from the OnePlus Pad, which launched the model to the cut-throat world of Android tablets, the ‘By no means Settle’ agency is again with the OnePlus Pad Go.

Apparently, this isn’t a direct follow-on from the unique Pad, and it doesn’t appear to be attempting to do something massively completely different to the OnePlus Pad. Relatively, the OnePlus Pad Go tries to do the same at a less expensive value.

It’s one other full-sized media-focused pill, however one which makes considered cuts to the core specs in an effort to hit a sub-£300 price ticket.

Discover out what rivals the Pad Go should face in our greatest pill chart.

Design & Construct

• Aluminium and plastic construct
• Solely accessible in ‘Twin Mint’
• No fingerprint sensor, simply insecure face unlock

OnePlus has broadly caught to the same design language because the OnePlus Pad for the Pad Go. That is one other sagey-green (‘Twin Mint’, in actual fact) pill with rounded corners and a centrally positioned digicam module that’s means greater than it must be.

It’s a pleasing trying piece of package, albeit not as premium feeling as its huge brother. New to the Go is a cut up between a traditional aluminium body and a shiny plastic strip alongside the highest, the place the digicam is.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

The latter seems high-quality proper up till you first contact it along with your fingers, at which level it turns right into a greasy nightmare. Why do producers stick with this type of factor, I ponder?

At 532g, it’s just a little lighter than the OnePlus Pad, although nonetheless not what you’d name light-weight – particularly provided that its 11.35in show is ever-so-slightly smaller. It’s a tad thicker at 6.9mm.

The OnePlus Pad Go lives as much as its title and one-ups the pricier Pad by together with a SIM tray on its left-hand edge. This implies you possibly can entry the web while out and about just by dropping a SIM card in.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

What you don’t get is the OnePlus Pad’s pogo connector, that means there’s no keyboard cowl choice this time round. Nor do you get a 3.5mm headphone jack, simply the same old USB-C port on the right-hand edge.

Provided that the unique Pad ditched the fingerprint sensor, it’s maybe no shock to study that the Pad Go doesn’t have one both. It’s no much less of a bummer, although, because the options – an insecure face unlock or a laborious pin code system – are unsatisfactory.

Display & Audio system

• 11.35in LCD show
• 90Hz refresh charge
• Stable quad stereo audio system

OnePlus has gone just a little smaller and fewer easy with the Pad Go’s show, but it surely’s nonetheless an honest effort.

You get an 11.35in 2408 x 1720 IPS LCD panel, with the identical uncommon 7:5 facet ratio as earlier than. It feels well-suited to a broader vary of media than your common widescreen Android pill, and it signifies that the pill feels far more pure and usable in portrait orientation too.

The Pad Go’s show doesn’t get as vibrant because the common Pad’s, with a said prime brightness of 400 nits (vs 500 nits). Utilizing a colorimeter, I recorded it at 382 nits with autobrightness off, which is an efficient 100 nits wanting our OnePlus Pad studying.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

It’s additionally nowhere close to as easy as its huge brother, with a 90Hz refresh charge dropping nicely wanting the Pad’s 144Hz. The latter all the time felt just a little like overkill, nevertheless, particularly in a less-than-Professional pill, and the Pad Go feels a lot easy sufficient basically use.

It’s price noting that that is the utmost setting for the OnePlus Pad Professional’s display refresh charge and that it’ll routinely choose the suitable refresh charge for the duty. You may’t select to power this, although you possibly can choose to repair it to 60Hz if battery life is a precedence.

This can be a fairly colour-accurate show too, significantly for those who change away from the default Vivid mode and activate Pure. True to its title, it reigns within the further pop and makes the whole lot look much more, nicely, pure.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

OnePlus makes a degree of highlighting the Pad Go’s eye care credentials, with clever brightness and Low Blue Mild expertise promising to cut back eye pressure. Given its positioning as a pill to twist up in a darkened room with and watch a movie, it’s a sensible (if removed from distinctive) inclusion.

Audio output is dealt with by a wholesome set of 4 audio system, two on both edge as you maintain it in panorama mode. With Dolby Atmos help, top quality film content material from the likes of Disney+ sounds good – loud, clear, and spacious, if not the very best with bass.

Specs & Efficiency

• Mediatek Helio G99 chip
• 8GB LPDDR4X RAM
• Satisfactory efficiency

OnePlus has scaled again on efficiency for the Pad Go, switching to a reasonably humble (and ageing) Mediatek Helio G99 chip.

This is similar processor that may be discovered within the Poco M5, an reasonably priced smartphone from a few years in the past. Extra not too long ago, Acer plumped for this chip within the Iconia P11, a £249 Android pill.

As that implies, it’s not a very spectacular performer, dropping nicely wanting the Xiaomi Pad 6 with its Snapdragon 870 and the Google Pixel Pill with its Tensor G2 in benchmark checks. Naturally, it’s a lot slower than the OnePlus Pad with its MediaTek Dimensity 9000, too.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

There’s no escaping this restricted efficiency in use, with tiny halts and stutters when flicking between dwelling screens and delays when leaping into apps. It’s nothing too extreme, nevertheless, and the availability of 8GB of RAM stops this being a severe problem.

Ideally, the OnePlus Pad Go needs to be handled as a single media app form of a pill. It’s obtained sufficient energy to run most functions adequately, and you may even run lighter apps facet by facet with out an excessive amount of of a success, however you wouldn’t wish to depend on it for intensive multitasking.

Equally, whereas it’ll deal with easy video games like Slay the Spire completely nicely, extra superior 3D titles like Wreckfest would require you to drop the graphical settings to medium or low in order for you them to run fairly fluidly.

In storage phrases, you get 128GB as commonplace. There’s a 256GB on the market in some areas, however not the UK. There’s additionally a devoted microSD card slot if you want to develop that additional.

OnePlus Pad Go benchmarks

Cameras

I ought to solely make a fast point out of the digicam set-up right here, as such issues are hardly ever a precedence in a pill – even much less so in an reasonably priced one. On the rear, you’ve gotten an 8Mp sensor that completely fits the time period ‘lavatory commonplace’.

Even in good daytime lighting, snaps taken with this digicam betray a crucial lack of sharpness and pop, with notable graininess in blue skies and poor dynamic vary. The 8Mp entrance digicam is equally underwhelming, fully failing to make topics pop.

In fact, none of that is remotely shocking, and such issues could be mentioned of nearly each low cost pill in existence. I don’t anticipate even ample digicam provisions from such units, so I’ll transfer on.

Battery Life & Charging

• 8000mAh battery
• A number of days of sunshine utilization
• 33W charger not included

The OnePlus Pad Go comes with a comparatively small 8000mAh battery. It’s definitely a great deal smaller than the OnePlus Pad’s 9510mAh cell.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Positive sufficient, the Go scored a lot worse than its brother in our ordinary PCMark Work 3.0 Battery take a look at, falling virtually three hours quick at seven hours and 57 minutes.

In sensible phrases, nevertheless, I’ve just a few complaints. Throughout two and a half days of sunshine to reasonable utilization, with a complete of 5 hours and 20 minutes of display time, the pill was nonetheless going – albeit with a mere 7% left. It usually lasts days and days on standby, which is what you need from an informal pill resembling this.

The charging provision isn’t as spectacular as the total OnePlus Pad, maxing out at 33W. You don’t get a charger within the field both.

You’ll must be specific in regards to the charger you select for it. Utilizing a 33W Xiaomi charger, it solely obtained to 10% from empty in quarter-hour and to 21% in half-hour. Hooking up the OnePlus 12R‘s 100W charger, nevertheless, obtained it to 19% and 34% respectively.

Software program & Apps

• OxygenOS 13.2 on Android 13
• Pill-specific options work nicely
• Lack of succesful, optimised apps

If there’s parity with the OnePlus Pad in a single space, it’s software program. You get the identical customized OxygenOS 13.2 UI layered on prime of Android 13.

Sure, that’s Android 13, not the present Android 14 which has been accessible since October 2023.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Nonetheless, OnePlus’s pill software program providing is fairly robust. The OS itself isn’t the prettiest, based mostly, as it’s, on Oppo’s busy ColorOS, but it surely’s very useful.

You may run two apps facet by facet, and one other as a floating window (with efficiency limitations as talked about earlier). There’s additionally a facet menu, accessed by swiping in from the highest proper edge, which grants fast entry to current recordsdata and apps.

Swiping left will get you to Google’s always-useful Uncover feed display, the place you’ll get pertinent information tales and articles, in addition to media suggestions out of your chosen streaming apps.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Jon Mundy / Foundry

None of that is significantly progressive, but it surely doesn’t must be. When you’re seeking to do something extra productive, know that Android nonetheless trails iPadOS for correctly tablet-optimised apps, and that the OnePlus Pad Go isn’t fairly highly effective sufficient to run superior duties anyway.

One different downer is the promise of simply two years of updates. Provided that a kind of will presumably contain the belated change to Android 14, that doesn’t provide a variety of hope for longstanding help.

Worth & Availability

The OnePlus Pad Go is accessible now in a single 128GB configuration with an RRP of £299.

On the time of writing, OnePlus was promoting it at a reduced value of £269 immediately from its website. Amazon was additionally promoting it on the identical knock-down price.

By way of equally priced rivals, there’s the Samsung Galaxy S6 Lite (2024) for £349 and the Xiaomi Pad 6 for £369. The Honor Pad 9 is similar value whereas in the wrong way, there’s the Amazon Hearth Max 11 for £249, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab A9+ is £239 or the Xiaomi Redmi Pad SE for less than £199.

Stretch as much as £399 and you’ve got the likes of the Lenovo Tab P12 £399 and newly decoupled Google Pixel Pill. Loads of selection, then.

Relatively awkwardly, there’s additionally the unique OnePlus Pad, a greater pill in a lot of the ways in which depend, which has been closely discounted since its launch.

So far as I do know, OnePlus has no plans to launch the Pad Go within the US – it’s an Asia and Europe-only system for now.

See our prime picks in the very best tablets and greatest Android tablets charts.

Do you have to purchase the OnePlus Pad Go?

The OnePlus Pad Go doesn’t a lot provide one thing completely different to the unique OnePlus Pad because it does provide one thing broadly related at a less expensive value.

It’s one other trendy full-sized pill with a give attention to media playback, together with a pleasant sharp 11-inch show and a succesful set of quad audio system.

Aside from mobile connectivity, it affords related drawbacks too – together with solely providing one storage choice and failing to incorporate a fingerprint sensor. Efficiency and battery life have additionally taken a success.

All in all, it is a stable decide for anybody on the lookout for a neat and tidy pill for media streaming and net shopping, however there are many nice choices at related or cheaper costs to contemplate.

Specs

• Android 13 with OxygenOS 13.2
• 11.35in, 2408 x 1720, IPS LCD, 90Hz show
• Mediatek Helio G99
• 8GB LPDDR4X RAM
• 128GB/256GB storage
• 8Mp foremost digicam
• As much as 1080p @ 30fps rear video
• 8Mp front-facing digicam
• Dolby Atmos Quad Audio system
• SIM slot
• Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
• Bluetooth 5.2
• 8000mAh battery
• 33W charging
• 255.1 x 188 x 6.9mm
• 532g
• Launch colors: Twin Mint