Technology

OnePlus Pad Go Review: Affordable Media-Focused Tablet

Published

2 months ago

May 18, 2024

At a glance

Expert’s Rating

Pros

Decent 90Hz display
Strong quad speakers
Classy and distinctive design
Cellular connectivity

Cons

Only one storage option
Performance blips
Two years of OS updates

Our Verdict

The OnePlus Pad Go is a solid full-sized tablet with a laser-like focus on media playback, with a decent screen, strong audio, a nice design, and LTE connectivity. It’s not useful for much more, however, and there are more expansive options for a little more money.

Price When Reviewed

Unavailable in the US

Less than a year on from the OnePlus Pad, which introduced the brand to the cut-throat world of Android tablets, the ‘Never Settle’ firm is back with the OnePlus Pad Go.

Interestingly, this isn’t a direct follow-on from the original Pad, and it doesn’t seem to be trying to do anything massively different to the OnePlus Pad. Rather, the OnePlus Pad Go tries to do a similar at a cheaper price.

It’s another full-sized media-focused tablet, but one that makes judicious cuts to the core specs in order to hit a sub-£300 price tag.

Find out what rivals the Pad Go must face in our best tablet chart.

Design & Build

Aluminium and plastic build
Only available in ‘Twin Mint’
No fingerprint sensor, just insecure face unlock

OnePlus has broadly stuck to a similar design language as the OnePlus Pad for the Pad Go. This is another sagey-green (‘Twin Mint’, in fact) tablet with rounded corners and a centrally placed camera module that’s way bigger than it needs to be.

It’s a pleasant looking piece of kit, albeit not as premium feeling as its big brother. New to the Go is a split between a classic aluminium frame and a shiny plastic strip along the top, where the camera is.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

The latter looks fine right up until you first touch it with your fingers, at which point it turns into a greasy nightmare. Why do manufacturers persist with this sort of thing, I wonder?

At 532g, it’s a little lighter than the OnePlus Pad, though still not what you’d call lightweight – especially given that its 11.35in display is ever-so-slightly smaller. It’s a tad thicker at 6.9mm.

The OnePlus Pad Go lives up to its name and one-ups the pricier Pad by including a SIM tray on its left-hand edge. This means you can access the internet whilst out and about simply by dropping a SIM card in.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

What you don’t get is the OnePlus Pad’s pogo connector, meaning there’s no keyboard cover option this time around. Nor do you get a 3.5mm headphone jack, just the usual USB-C port on the right-hand edge.

Given that the original Pad ditched the fingerprint sensor, it’s perhaps no surprise to learn that the Pad Go doesn’t have one either. It’s no less of a bummer, though, as the alternatives – an insecure face unlock or a laborious pin code system – are unsatisfactory.

Screen & Speakers

11.35in LCD display
90Hz refresh rate
Solid quad stereo speakers

OnePlus has gone a little smaller and less smooth with the Pad Go’s display, but it’s still a decent effort.

You get an 11.35in 2408 x 1720 IPS LCD panel, with the same unusual 7:5 aspect ratio as before. It feels well-suited to a broader range of media than your average widescreen Android tablet, and it means that the tablet feels way more natural and usable in portrait orientation too.

The Pad Go’s display doesn’t get as bright as the regular Pad’s, with a stated top brightness of 400 nits (vs 500 nits). Using a colorimeter, I recorded it at 382 nits with autobrightness off, which is a good 100 nits short of our OnePlus Pad reading.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

It’s also nowhere near as smooth as its big brother, with a 90Hz refresh rate dropping well short of the Pad’s 144Hz. The latter always felt a little like overkill, however, especially in a less-than-Pro tablet, and the Pad Go feels plenty smooth enough in general use.

It’s worth noting that this is the maximum setting for the OnePlus Pad Pro’s screen refresh rate and that it’ll automatically select the appropriate refresh rate for the task. You can’t choose to force this, though you can select to fix it to 60Hz if battery life is a priority.

This is a reasonably colour-accurate display too, particularly if you switch away from the default Vivid mode and activate Natural. True to its name, it reigns in the extra pop and makes everything look a lot more, well, natural.

Audio output is handled by a healthy set of four speakers

Jon Mundy / Foundry

OnePlus makes a point of highlighting the Pad Go’s eye care credentials, with intelligent brightness and Low Blue Light technology promising to reduce eye strain. Given its positioning as a tablet to curl up in a darkened room with and watch a film, it’s a smart (if far from unique) inclusion.

Audio output is handled by a healthy set of four speakers, two on either edge as you hold it in landscape mode. With Dolby Atmos support, high quality movie content from the likes of Disney+ sounds good – loud, clear, and spacious, if not the best with bass.

Specs & Performance

Mediatek Helio G99 chip
8GB LPDDR4X RAM
Adequate performance

OnePlus has scaled back on performance for the Pad Go, switching to a pretty humble (and ageing) Mediatek Helio G99 chip.

This is the same processor that can be found in the Poco M5, an affordable smartphone from a couple of years ago. More recently, Acer plumped for this chip in the Iconia P11, a £249 Android tablet.

As that suggests, it’s not a particularly impressive performer, dropping well short of the Xiaomi Pad 6 with its Snapdragon 870 and the Google Pixel Tablet with its Tensor G2 in benchmark tests. Naturally, it’s much slower than the OnePlus Pad with its MediaTek Dimensity 9000, too.

It’s got enough power to run most applications adequately

Jon Mundy / Foundry

There’s no escaping this limited performance in use, with tiny halts and stutters when flicking between home screens and delays when jumping into apps. It’s nothing too severe, however, and the provision of 8GB of RAM stops this being a serious issue.

Ideally, the OnePlus Pad Go should be treated as a single media app kind of a tablet. It’s got enough power to run most applications adequately, and you can even run lighter apps side by side without too much of a hit, but you wouldn’t want to rely on it for intensive multitasking.

Similarly, while it’ll handle simple games like Slay the Spire perfectly well, more advanced 3D titles like Wreckfest will require you to drop the graphical settings to medium or low if you want them to run reasonably fluidly.

In storage terms, you get 128GB as standard. There is a 256GB out there in some regions, but not the UK. There is also a dedicated microSD card slot if you need to expand that further.

OnePlus Pad Go benchmarks

Cameras

I should only make a quick mention of the camera set-up here, as such things are rarely a priority in a tablet – even less so in an affordable one. On the rear, you have an 8Mp sensor that perfectly suits the term ‘bog standard’.

Even in good daytime lighting, snaps taken with this camera betray a critical lack of sharpness and pop, with notable graininess in blue skies and poor dynamic range. The 8Mp front camera is similarly underwhelming, completely failing to make subjects pop.

Of course, none of this is remotely surprising, and such things can be said of virtually every cheap tablet in existence. I don’t expect even adequate camera provisions from such devices, so I’ll move on.

Battery Life & Charging

8000mAh battery
Multiple days of light usage
33W charger not included

The OnePlus Pad Go comes with a relatively small 8000mAh battery. It’s certainly a good deal smaller than the OnePlus Pad’s 9510mAh cell.

It generally lasts days and days on standby

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Sure enough, the Go scored much worse than its brother in our usual PCMark Work 3.0 Battery test, falling almost three hours short at seven hours and 57 minutes.

In practical terms, however, I have a few complaints. Across two and a half days of light to moderate usage, with a total of five hours and 20 minutes of screen time, the tablet was still going – albeit with a mere 7% left. It generally lasts days and days on standby, which is what you want from a casual tablet such as this.

The charging provision isn’t as impressive as the full OnePlus Pad, maxing out at 33W. You don’t get a charger in the box either.

You’ll need to be particular about the charger you choose for it. Using a 33W Xiaomi charger, it only got to 10% from empty in 15 minutes and to 21% in 30 minutes. Hooking up the OnePlus 12R‘s 100W charger, however, got it to 19% and 34% respectively.

Software & Apps

OxygenOS 13.2 on Android 13
Tablet-specific features work well
Lack of capable, optimised apps

If there’s parity with the OnePlus Pad in one area, it’s software. You get the same custom OxygenOS 13.2 UI layered on top of Android 13.

Yes, that’s Android 13, not the current Android 14 which has been available since October 2023.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

Still, OnePlus’s tablet software offering is pretty strong. The OS itself isn’t the prettiest, based, as it is, on Oppo’s busy ColorOS, but it’s very functional.

You can run two apps side by side, and another as a floating window (with performance limitations as mentioned earlier). There’s also a side menu, accessed by swiping in from the top right edge, which grants quick access to recent files and apps.

Swiping left gets you to Google’s always-useful Discover feed screen, where you’ll get pertinent news stories and articles, as well as media recommendations from your selected streaming apps.

Jon Mundy / Foundry

None of this is particularly innovative, but it doesn’t need to be. If you’re looking to do anything more productive, know that Android still trails iPadOS for properly tablet-optimised apps, and that the OnePlus Pad Go isn’t quite powerful enough to run advanced tasks anyway.

One other downer is the promise of just two years of updates. Given that one of those will presumably involve the belated switch to Android 14, that doesn’t offer a lot of hope for longstanding support.

Price & Availability

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

At the time of writing, OnePlus was selling it at a discounted price of £269 directly from its website. Amazon was also selling it at the same knock-down price.

In terms of similarly priced competitors, there’s the Samsung Galaxy S6 Lite (2024) for £349 and the Xiaomi Pad 6 for £369. The Honor Pad 9 is the same price while in the opposite direction, there’s the Amazon Fire Max 11 for £249, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab A9+ is £239 or the Xiaomi Redmi Pad SE for only £199.

Stretch up to £399 and you have the likes of the Lenovo Tab P12 £399 and newly decoupled Google Pixel Tablet. Plenty of choice, then.

Rather awkwardly, there’s also the original OnePlus Pad, a better tablet in most of the ways that count, which has been heavily discounted since its launch.

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

See our top picks in the best tablets and best Android tablets charts.

Should you buy the OnePlus Pad Go?

The OnePlus Pad Go doesn’t so much offer something different to the original OnePlus Pad as it does offer something broadly similar at a cheaper price.

It’s another stylish full-sized tablet with a focus on media playback, including a nice sharp 11-inch display and a capable set of quad speakers.

Other than cellular connectivity, it offers similar drawbacks too – including only offering one storage option and failing to include a fingerprint sensor. Performance and battery life have also taken a hit.

All in all, this is a solid pick for anyone looking for a neat and tidy tablet for media streaming and web browsing, but there are plenty of great options at similar or cheaper prices to consider.