OPPO is back with a new tablet, another entry-level tablet, the OPPO Pad SE.
The OPPO Pad SE offers a lot for the price, including an 11-inch display and a 9,340mAh battery with 33W SuperVOOC charging support, which is ideal for playing movies or browsing the web all day.
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks using it around the house for various tasks and have a few thoughts on it I thought I’d share.
The specs on the Pad SE are nothing to write home about but they do the job. It is just 7.39mm slim and is powered by an octa-core MediaTek Helio G100 processor, with 4GB RAM and 128GB of on-board storage.
Most of what you will be using a tablet for is basic surfing around the house or on holidays and for that it worked great. Sure, Instagram is still one of the most poorly developed apps in the world (for Android tablets) but things like Relay for Reddit and others are great with a split screen.
Gaming, I was able to throw quite a few games at it. A device the size of a tablet is great for driving games but less so for FPS shooter games. I played my go-to for testing gaming on a tablet – Riptide GP2 and it breezed through it, handling all the graphics and animations like a breeze.
You would expect some of the more demanding games to cause the tablet to struggle due to the minimal specs, but I did not observe any such issues during my testing. Even with the basic MediaTek processor and only 4GB of RAM it was able to run the games I tested efficiently.
The tablet also includes a 5MP rear camera, as well as a 5MP front-facing camera for video conferencing and more. It worked well enough, and video conferencing is all it should be used for because at only 5MP, any photos you take with it will not be great by 2025 standards.
The OPPO Pad SE feels good in the hand thanks to its metallic frame, which is thin and relatively light. The bezels are bigger than many tablets but I don’t mind that on a tablet – it expands the area you can hold the tablet with without triggering a touch event.
The tablet’s thickness of just 7.39mm makes it extremely portable and easy to carry around, fitting comfortably into your backpack without occupying much space at all.
The Pad SE comes equipped with a quad speaker setup which produced decent enough sound for basic movie and media consumption. The quad setup allowed for good stereo sound, too, which was a nice effect. If you want better quality sound, grab your favourite headphones instead, but as they are, they will suffice, that’s for sure.
The display is an 11-inch, FHD 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution display with a relatively fast refresh rate of 90Hz. The display ratio provided a pleasant viewing experience across all formats and media consumption. A higher resolution would have been nice, but I dare say the processor would struggle to push that many pixels.
The display is reflective but so many tablets are, and you should expect that with any tablet or usual display in 2025. On the other hand, the colours were good with just acceptable sharpness, especially for an IPS display.
For ease of use, the Pad SE supports OPPO’s tablet display options such as floating window and split view. These are handy if you want to keep an eye on the footy score while surfing Reddit etc.
I’ve been impressed with the battery life with OPPO’s two-day 9340mAh Battery being a bit of an undersell, although I assume that is for folks using a lot more than I did. The battery will easily last a few movies and some gaming, but even if it runs out, you’ll be fine with the 33W SUPERVOOC flash charging support.
Unfortunately, OPPO do not include a SUPERVOOC charger with the tablet so you’ll have to pick up one of these elsewhere if you really want to charge fast. I would have liked OPPO to include the charger like they used to, but it seems that they’ve stopped doing so in select devices. The good news is, if you really want one, you can pick one up from the OPPO online store for $35.
If you don’t want to invest in an extra SUPERVOOC charger, the tablet supports QC and PD charging, both at 18W.
I have a tablet that I usually use — it’s also an OPPO tablet — and for me there is still a place in this world for tablets. Sure, phones are more powerful, they take better pictures and are much more portable but you know what they have that tablets don’t? A big screen. Foldables are attempting to fill the gap, but the display is still smaller — and the display ratio is not optimised for media consumption.
Most people do not need a tablet to do much. Play the odd game, watch a movie, listen to music, write a few emails and surf the web. For these sorts of things, you do not need high-end specs, which is why the OPPO Pad SE gets a big thumbs up from me. It has a big display, a big battery and can do all of the above with ease — oh, and it’s cheap at just $399. If this is all you need your tablet to do, then the OPPO Pad SE is perfect.
The OPPO Pad SE is available now at OPPO online store for $399. A compatible SUPERVOOC charger will set you back another $35 and an official OPPO folio case $50.
Scott is our resident open technology expert. If you can mod it, or want to use it your way, Scott has probably done it. From Laptops to phones, headphones and game consoles, he’s played with it and wants to see the next generation.
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