Oppo Pad Air Review: Good for basic use
Oppo Pad Air has been launched as the first tablet from the company in India. In the tab, the company has focused on its build quality. At a glance, the tab offers everything a user can expect with a style. But is it enough to fight the competition? I used this tablet for a few weeks and read here what my opinion is about it.
Oppo Pad Air Price in India
Oppo Pad Air comes in two configurations in India. The base variant that I got comes with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage and can be purchased for Rs 16,999. The other variant comes with 128GB storage but the RAM is 4GB only. It is priced at Rs 19,999. The tab can be purchased only in grey colour.
Design of Oppo Pad Air
Despite being a budget tablet, it feels premium. It is solid in build and looks like it can withstand water splashes to some extent. It has a metal case with a unibody design, which has an anodized finish and does not slip from the hand. Its sides are flat and the corners are round in shape. Its build quality looks quite impressive, devoid of sharp or rough edges.
The Oppo Pad Air is quite light in weight at 440 grams. It is quite easy to use with one hand, but you will need both hands to operate. If there is anything sticking out of the body, it is its rear camera, but it does not lift the tab even after placing it on a flat surface. There is a plastic stripe on the back which extends to one-fourth of its area and has a nice looking wave pattern. For connectivity, it probably also helps in receiving signals.
When held horizontally, the power and volume controls are located on the top left corner. There is also a pull-out tray at the top, but it is only for micro SD card support.
Talking about the display of the Tab, it has thin bezels and round cutouts on the corners that match the curves of the tablet’s frame. Speaker grills are found on the sides and a USB Type C port is given on the right side. The company offers a single accessory with the Tab called 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 Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 chip which is made from 6nm fabrication process. In the tab, you get 4GB LPDDR4X RAM and 128GB UFS 2.2 storage. It also has an expandable RAM feature so that the storage space can be used as RAM.
For connectivity, it has Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.1 but there is no GPS. However, basic sensors like accelerometer, ambient light and gyroscope are available. Its battery is 7,100mAh with 18W PD charger in the package itself. There is no support for LTE and there is no fingerprint scanner either. It has 2D face unlock which does not perform well every time. Apart from two storage options, the tab also supports up to 512GB microSD card.
It runs on Oppo’s ColorOS 12.1 which is based on Android 12. On the face of it, it looks similar to the ColorOS 12.1 found in the smartphone. The surprising thing here is that apart from many static wallpapers, Oppo has also kept live wallpapers in it, which look quite good, but it felt a bit heavy for the system to handle them.
There are also many options for customization, including an auto theme engine. This version of Color OS takes up 14GB of the tab’s internal storage, leaving around 47GB for apps, games and photos. The only third-party app available on the tab was Netflix.
In the Settings app, I found a floating window feature called Flexible Window under Special Features. With this, I was able to open supported apps in a small floating window and I could also change its size. It ran smoothly but you can only open a small app in a floating window with a full screen app running in the background. There was also a split screen option called Dual Window but I was not able to adjust its size according to my need.
Performance of Oppo Pad Air
The performance of Oppo Pad Air was good. Some mild lags were also found. Multitasking was not very good but with the help of expandable RAM, I was able to keep some apps open in the background. To put it simply, every fourth app was restarting on reopening but it was loading quickly too.
Talking about the benchmark scores, the Tab scored 2,53,080 points on AnTuTu. It scored 384 and 1,618 points in Geekbench single and multicore tests respectively. In GFXBench, it scored 37fps, 14fps and 7.6fps in T-Rex, Manhattan 3.1 and Car Chase tests respectively.
The tablet isn’t designed for gaming, but I tried playing Asphalt 9: Legends on it. The pixels looked torn with default settings and textures but the game was playable despite a few skipped frames. Casual games like Subway Surfers ran fine.
Oppo Pad Air has a 10.36 inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of 2,000×1,200 pixels. Such a high resolution is rarely seen in this segment. The display is quite sharp in which text and images look good and colors look natural. The display does not perform well outdoors as compared to indoors, because the colors look washed out when you go out. The cover glass is quite reflective and it is quite difficult to watch movies etc. on it in direct sunlight.
The Pad Air has Widevine L1 certification which is good enough for FullHD video playback. SD content looks quite sharp but black levels needed a lot of improvement. Its quad speaker system sounds quite loud, so much so that I didn’t miss the 3.5mm headphone jack.
Talking about its camera performance, it is below average. Photos look quite dull and there is a lack of details even in daylight. The 5 megapixel selfie camera takes comparatively good photos. The front camera proves to be good for video calls. Video recording from the primary camera proves to be very weak.
Since gaming was limited to basic games and the camera was useless, I mostly used it for watching movies, browsing the web and everyday social media applications. With this much usage, the tab easily lasted a day and a half. And if I had only watched offline movies on it, it could have lasted two days. In the HD video loop test, the Pad Air lasted 18 hours and 40 minutes, which is quite impressive for a tablet. With the 18W charger, the battery took 2 hours and 34 minutes to fully charge.
Our decision
Oppo’s attempt to release a tablet for the Indian market is a good one. Being a budget machine, it does meet all the requirements for daily usage and is also quite affordable. It lacks 4G/LTE radio, headphone jack but the expandable RAM and 128GB storage make up for it. Overall, if you buy it for watching movies, web browsing or checking emails then it fits the budget, but it is not made for gaming or productivity.
Unfortunately for Oppo, Realme Pad It offers the same specifications with the same form factor at a lower price. It also has 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 then Lenovo Yoga Tab 11 There is also a Tab which has good design and build quality. In terms of entertainment, this Tab is far ahead in which the speakers are very good and loud enough for a small room.
