Beyond the usual range of cheap Android tablets, there’s a few names who keep producing more premium options, with the OPPO Pad a key option in this space. The OPPO Pad 5, announced earlier this year is the latest to hit stores and it’s time to take it for a spin.

According to the description, OPPO says the Pad 5 is your perfect companion for study, multitasking and of course streaming. 

Priced at $499, the OPPO Pad 5 is a pretty compelling tablet for all those use-cases, including a big 12.1-inch 2.8K resolution “Eye-Comfort” display with a 10,050mAh battery and immersive quad-speaker sound system making it a great content consumption device. 

To help with study, multi-tasking and more OPPO are including support for the OPPO Pencil 2R stylus for note-taking, sketching and more. 

The price is competitive against other more premium options, the spec list is impressive, as is the design. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now and here’s how it went. 

Hardware

The design of the OPPO Pad 5 is practical, yet elegant. The tablet weighs in at just under 600 grams, with a plastic panel on the back taking out a lot of the weight making it fairly easy to hold for long periods of time.

The unit itself isn’t too thick, just 6.83mm with speakers on either end alongside the power button with the volume rocker on the top edge easily accessible with your left hand. There’s also a USB-C port on the other end, which leaves it mostly out of the way if you need to charge it while using it.

The tablet only comes in one colour choice, Starlight Black. It’s more of a grey colour, but it looks good and doesn’t show fingerprints on the back. 

The large 12.1” display on the front dominates the conversation though.It sits nicely flush with the frame showcasing the excellent build quality with a solid feel to the tablet despite its light weight. 

There’s minimal bezels around the display, yet the tablet is comfortable to hold without many of the phantom touches we used to get on large tablets. 

The screen is bright, colourful and high-resolution, and comes in an interesting 7:5 ratio that OPPO says is ‘book-like’ – which really does feel like you have an open novel in your hands when you load up some ebooks.

The screen peaks at 900nits brightness, but it works surprisingly well in the sunlight if you want to sit around the pool, or just on the patio to catch up on news, the latest episode of your favourite show or get through the next level of your favourite game in the morning sun. 

OPPO has included both Dolby Vision on the display, as well as Dolby Atmos certification on the Quad-Speaker sound system which has two speakers either end of the tablet. 

The audio is good for a tablet, though is limited by size and while you can listen to a movie on the speakers, pairing some headphones with Atmos support offers a better quality audio experience. 

Powering it all is the MediaTek Dimensity 7300-Ultra SoC which is paired with 8GB RAM and up to 128GB UFS 3.1 storage.

It’s a pretty zippy combination all up. You can browse the web, catch up on your favourite shows or movies, read a book or jump into a game, or get some work done with very little effort.

There are of course cameras onboard the OPPO Pad 5, with an 8MP sensor with 77° Field of View used on the front and back. The rear camera works well – and the display is a massive viewfinder which makes it easy to frame the shot, while the front camera does the job on the video conferencing front, and while it’s not going to blow anyone’s socks off it is a decent sensor.

The one glaring omission from the laundry list of hardware specs on the OPPO Pad 5 is a fingerprint scanner. The OPPO Pad 5 simply doesn’t include a scanner in the display, or embedded in the power button, instead relying on face recognition.

The face recognition isn’t secure enough to support your banking apps, so you’ll need to login each time which can be an annoyance. 

Battery and Charging

There’s a 10,050mAh Battery with 33W SUPERVOOC fast charging on the OPPO Pad 5. There’s no charging brick included with the OPPO Pad 5, so you’ll have to supply your own.

OPPO says you can get up to 53 hours of online music playback, up to 15 hours online video playback or up to 6 hours of heavy game playback. 

I tried out a few mixed-use case scenarios, with video, some gaming and a bunch of work in Google Docs – with an average around 11-13 hours of use before going flat. 

On the charging side, the 33W SuperVOOC charging is present but still takes just over two hours to charge to 100%, quite a step down from the 80W SuperVOOC charging on their phones.  

Pencil 2R

One of the productivity use-cases is using the OPPO Pencil 2R stylus for sketching, note-taking and more. It is an additional $79 to nab one of these, but if you are into note-taking, sketching etc. it’s quite worth it.

The pencil is lightweight and feels, well, it feels like a pencil. The nib or tip has a flexibility which lets it feel just like writing on paper so it feels kind of natural when it glides across the display. 

The integration is good, with options to write in text fields, draw, annotate, take screenshots and more. I especially like the ability to tap the display even when it’s off to automatically launch into the notes app to quickly start taking notes at any time.

The pencil charges through a USB-C port with up to 20 hours of use in a charge. Charging takes 70 minutes – though you can get up to 12 hours of use from a 10-minute fast charge in a pinch. 

The Pencil 2R includes a spare stylus nib in the box, though no USB cable for charging – but it’s fairly easy to plug it into your laptop to get some action. 

Software

The OPPO Pad 5 comes with ColorOS 16.0 based on Android 16 running the  February 1st security update.

There’s no updates available for the tablet, though OPPO have committed to five major OS updates as well as six years of Security Maintenance Releases – very likely on a quarterly schedule based on the updates received so far.

Color OS and Flux

Color OS is ready to go when you load up the tablet, with what OPPO calls their ‘Flux Home Screen’ giving you a tablet mode with a more expansive grid layout and a dock. 

The flexible dock allows you to keep up to 15 apps on there, while the home screen grid lets you fit up to 60 apps – letting you easily get to your favourite apps and games in an instant. 

The Flux Home screen has a number of customisation options including theming, as well as letting you resize widgets and even the app icons if you want. 

Final Thoughts

The OPPO Pad 5 is a great tablet. It’s specced and priced well, letting you work, play and relax in comfort anywhere. 

The performance is great, even when playing higher-end games, though you may have to wait a couple of seconds longer to load than a flagship tablet, and if you add the Pencil 2R, it makes it a great device to get work done. 

The lack of fingerprint scanner is one of the only major omissions, though it would also be great to see an IP rating for dust/water resistance to ensure that time by the pool relaxing is worry free.

Overall though, the great battery life, performance and design make this a great tablet to check out. 

The OPPO Pad 5 is available now via OPPO Australia’s Online Store in Starlight Black for $499, and while you’re there you can nab the OPPO Pencil 2R for $79.