One of the best tablets I've tested for entertainment is not from Apple or Samsung - and it's on sale

ZDNET's key takeaways

The OnePlus Pad 2 is the company's latest Android tablet with a premium design and flagship specs for $550. It's compatible with a keyboard and pen that OnePlus sells separately, so you can turn it into an Android-powered laptop. While the multitasking features are excellent, and the Pad 2 checks all the boxes when it comes to entertainment, it still suffers from the pitfalls of using Android on a big screen.

What's the deal?

You can buy the OnePlus Pad 2 at a $100 discount right now, bringing it down to just $450, and get either a free pair of OnePlus Buds Pro 3 (valued at $180) or a OnePlus Pad Smart Keyboard (valued at $150).

The Android tablet market has been in a weird place for a while. Companies either position them as regular iPad alternatives or try to add advanced productivity features to compete with the iPad Pro and Surface Pro. We've even seen tablets that turn into smart displays, such as the Google Pixel Tablet.

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There are many ideas about what an Android tablet can be. The new OnePlus Pad 2 combines some of these ideas while remaining moderately priced. With specs from the latest flagship smartphones, an aluminum design, quality speakers, and pogo pins for a keyboard, it aims to be both your next laptop and your go-to device for watching movies.

I'll give it to OnePlus; it crafted a beautiful device. The Pad 2 sports a high-end aluminum enclosure that feels as premium as you'd expect. It's sturdy, ice-cold when you pick it up in the morning and feels like it's worth twice as much. It's also impressively thin at 6.49mm and weighs just over a pound. 

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The speaker grilles are on both sides for stereo audio, and the pogo pins for the accompanying keyboard are on the bottom. OnePlus included a prominent camera bump on the back of the tablet, a brand identifier seen on most modern OnePlus smartphones. The company even says its smartwatch lineup was inspired by it. Inside the bump is a 13MP camera, which is best suited for scanning documents or QR codes -- not for replacing your smartphone camera.

The display is quite good for an LCD. It measures 11.61 inches diagonally and features a 2800x2000 resolution, a 144Hz refresh rate, and 900 nits of brightness. OnePlus did a nice job calibrating the colors to appear accurate and properly saturated, making everything from movies to games look great. While I still think Apple offers the best LCDs on any tablet -- the iPad Air is a perfect example -- OnePlus comes in a close second.

If you're enjoying that good-looking screen and forgot your headphones, the speakers will serve you well. OnePlus added a couple of extra speakers to the Pad 2 compared to the previous version, and they sound really good. Audio quality is full, gets really loud, and has plenty of rumbling bass for such a thin device. I played plenty of music on the tablet, and it all sounded great.

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The OnePlus Pad 2 delivers flagship performance. Powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, it offers blazing-fast speeds, smooth animations, and hiccup-free gaming thanks to OnePlus' HyperBoosted optimizations. I've yet to encounter anything that slows it down, ensuring it's powerful enough for today and years to come. The chipset is paired with 12GB of RAM, so you won't have to worry about apps crashing in the background.

I'm also happy to report that battery life is a non-issue. It's hard to mess up battery life on tablets since their large sizes can accommodate big batteries, and that's what OnePlus has done here. The Pad 2 ships with a huge 9,510mAh battery that can easily last multiple days if you use it lightly, or about a day and a half with mixed to heavy usage (e.g., watching a couple movies or TV shows, playing some games, and sorting through my inbox all day).

In classic OnePlus fashion, fast charging is also included on the Pad 2. The tablet comes with a 67W SuperVOOC charger in the box that juices it back up from zero to 100 percent in around an hour and a half, which is great considering the size of the battery.

OnePlus has done a lot of work to make multitasking easier. Through OxygenOS on top of Android 14, the Pad 2 supports Open Canvas, which originally debuted on the OnePlus Open last year. This set of software features lets you multitask like a champ. You can run three apps at the same time in a shifting tile-like layout, pull up more apps through the dock or floating app drawer, drag and drop files between apps, and more. It's the most useful multitasking system I've ever used on an Android tablet.

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OnePlus also includes special settings for optimizing apps that might not include tablet layouts by default. Of course, your mileage will vary, and some apps don't work well with these shoehorned layouts, but it's at least handy if a simple app like a calendar or to-do list needs to be expanded to fill the entire screen. 

What'll be most useful to OnePlus smartphone users is the tight integration between them and the Pad 2. OnePlus allows you to place calls, send texts, sync your clipboard and notifications, and even remotely use apps installed on your phone right from the tablet. This obviously only applies to the few people who have invested in OnePlus' ecosystem, but it's a nice bonus nonetheless.

OnePlus sent me the $119 Smart Keyboard and $32 Folio Case 2 to round out the multitasking experience, and I have to say, they're quite good. The keyboard offers a lot of travel and is reliably responsive thanks to those pogo pins, and the case adds some extra protection to your tablet. The $79 OnePlus Stylo 2 was also in the box, and it's equally good.

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Google has done a lot of work over the years to make Android on tablets a more pleasurable experience, but many apps still need to catch up to their iPadOS counterparts. Some are well-optimized for tablet layouts, while others insist on showing up as blown-up phone apps. Some are missing features, capabilities, and even a Play Store listing. Even Chrome refuses to load the desktop version of Google Search consistently, which is a royal pain when you're trying to get work done.

It's also really tough trying to do laptop things with the Pad 2. If you want to edit a video or touch up some photos, you're limited to the underbaked UIs and app layouts. In some cases, I would much rather use Lightroom on my Android phone than on my tablet.

One final note on software: OnePlus says the Pad 2 will receive three major OS upgrades and four years' worth of security updates, which isn't too shabby given the price.

ZDNET's buying advice

It's easy to say who should buy the OnePlus Pad 2 and who shouldn't. If you want a multimedia device with powerful performance, a nice screen, long battery life, and great speakers -- and you don't mind that it runs Android -- the Pad 2 is an excellent choice. 

If, however, you want a tablet that can turn into a laptop, you should consider more premium options like the iPad Pro and Surface Pro. Regardless, at $449 on sale, the OnePlus Pad 2 is a fantastic tablet that delivers on various fronts, and the company continues to offer competitive trade-in and bundling deals to help you round out the experience for less money.

This article was originally published on August 2, 2024, and was updated on November 21, 2024.