Oppo Pad Air was launched as the first tablet in India by the company. In the tab, the company has focused on its build quality. At a glance, the tab offers everything a user could expect with a touch of style. But is it enough to fight the competition? I used this tablet for a few weeks and read my opinion about it here.
Oppo Pad Air price in India
Oppo Pad Air comes in two configurations in India. The base variant that I found comes with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage and can be purchased for Rs 16,999. The second variant comes with 128 GB of storage, but the RAM is only 4 GB. Its price is 19,999 rupees. The tab can only be purchased in gray color.
Oppo Pad Air design
Despite being a budget tablet, it feels more premium. It has quite a solid texture and seems like it can withstand splashing water to some extent. It sports a metal case with a unibody design, which has an anodized finish and is non-slip for the hands. Its sides are flat and the corners are round in shape. Its build quality looks quite impressive with no sharp or rough edges.
Oppo Pad Air is very light at 440 grams. It is quite easy to use with one hand, but you will need both hands to operate. If anything has come off the body it’s its rear camera, but even after holding it down on a flat surface, it won’t lift the tab. The back features a plastic stripe that runs for a quarter and has a nice wavy pattern. For connectivity, it probably helps to receive the signal as well.
When held horizontally, the power and volume controls are located in the upper left corner. There is also a removable tray on the top, but it is only to support the micro SD card.
As for the tab’s display, it has slim bezels and round corner cutouts that match the curves of the tablet’s frame. The speaker grills are on the side, and the USB Type-C port is on the right side. Along with the tab, the company offers a unique accessory called the Oppo Life Smart Stylus Pen. It can be purchased by spending Rs 3,999.
Oppo Pad Air specifications and software
In this device, the company has used the Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 chip which is made with 6nm manufacturing process. On the tab, you get 4GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 128GB of UFS 2.2 storage. It also has an expandable RAM feature so that the storage space can be used as RAM.
For connectivity, you’ve been provided with Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.1, but there’s no GPS. Though basic sensors like accelerometer, ambient light, and gyroscope are available. Its battery is 7,100mAh with an 18W PD charger in the package itself. There’s no LTE support and no fingerprint scanner either. It has 2D face unlock which doesn’t always work well. In addition to the two storage options, the Tab also supports microSD cards up to 512 GB.
It runs on Oppo’s ColorOS 12.1, which is based on Android 12. It resembles the ColorOS 12.1 found on the smartphone. It’s a bit surprising that Oppo has included live wallpapers in addition to the many static ones, which look great, but the system found them a bit heavy to handle.
Lots of options for customization have also been given, including the automatic theme engine. This version of Color OS takes up 14GB of the Tab’s internal storage space, leaving around 47GB for apps, games, and photos. The only third-party app present in the tab was Netflix.
In the Settings app, I found a floating window feature called Flexible Window under Special Features. With its help, I was able to open compatible apps in a small floating window and was able to resize it as well. It was running smoothly, but you can only open a small app in a floating window with a full screen app running in the background. It also had a split screen option called Dual Window but I couldn’t adjust its size according to my needs.
Oppo Pad Air performance
Oppo Pad Air’s performance was good. Some slight delays were also encountered. Multitasking wasn’t great, but with the help of expandable RAM, I was able to keep a few apps open in the background. To put it bluntly, one in four apps was restarting on reopening, but loading was also getting faster.
Talking about the benchmark scores, the tab scored 2,53,080 points on AnTuTu. She scored 384 and 1618 points in Geekbench’s single-core and multi-core test, respectively. On GFXBench, she scored 37fps, 14fps, and 7.6fps on the T-Rex, Manhattan 3.1, and Car Chase tests, respectively.
The tablet is not designed for gaming, but I tried to play Asphalt 9: Legends on it. Pixels on default settings and textures looked broken, but the game was playable after skipping several frames. Casual games like Subway Surfers did well.
Oppo Pad Air has a 10.36-inch IPS LCD screen with a resolution of 2000 x 1200 pixels. Such a high resolution is rarely seen in this segment. The screen is sharp, with text and images looking good and colors appearing natural. The screen doesn’t do as well outdoors as it does indoors, as colors look washed out when you go outside. The glass on the cover is quite reflective and it is difficult to watch movies etc. under direct sunlight.
The Pad Air is Widevine L1 certified, which is good enough for FullHD video playback. SD content looks pretty sharp, but there was a lot of need to improve the black level. The quad speaker system gets pretty loud, so much so that I miss the 3.5mm headphone jack.
Talking about its camera performance, it is below average. The photos look quite dull and details are lacking even in daylight. Comparatively good photos come from the 5-megapixel selfie camera. The front camera proves to be good for video calls. Video recording from the main camera turns out to be very weak.
Since gaming was limited to simple games and the camera was useless, I mainly used it for watching movies, browsing the web, and for everyday social media apps. With so much use, the tab easily lasts a day and a half. And if I had watched the movie offline, it might have taken two days as well. In the HD video loop test, the Pad Air ran for 18 hours and 40 minutes, which is pretty impressive for a tablet. It took 2 hours and 34 minutes to fully charge the battery with the 18W charger.
our verdict
Oppo’s attempt to launch a tablet for the Indian market was very good. In addition to being an inexpensive machine, it ticks all the boxes for everyday use, and the price is very reasonable too. It lacks 4G/LTE radio, headphone jack, but expandable RAM and 128GB storage make up for it. Overall, it’s budget-friendly if you’re looking for movies, browsing the web, or checking email, but it’s not designed for gaming or productivity.
Unfortunately for Oppo, the Realme Pad offers the same specs in the same form factor for a lower price. There is also a 4G/LTE variant and the price starts at Rs 15,999. Realme’s software experience is also better than Oppo’s as it has been optimized for tablets. If you can spend a little more money, the Lenovo Yoga Tab 11 is also available in a good design and build quality. In terms of entertainment, this tab is very advanced in that the speakers are very good and loud enough for small rooms.