Oppo Pad 5 Review

Design

• Normal size for a large(ish) tablet
• Very heavy given it’s not a metal unibody design
• Where’s the stylus?

Tablet designers across the board seem to have pretty much waved the white flag and declared Apple’s iPad the winner, and Oppo doesn’t threaten to upset the status quo here.

The Oppo Pad 5 looks like every other iPad wannabe out there, with a familiar flat-edged body and curved corners – albeit with a slightly wider 7:5 screen aspect ratio.

It’s not the most premium-feeling tablet I’ve used in 2026, even within the £400-ish category. While its frame is metal, the back panel is plastic – and a fairly fingerprinty matte plastic at that.

Given this heavy use of plastic, I’m a little baffled that the tablet feels so heavy. While it’s reasonably proportioned for a 12-inch tablet, measuring 266.01 x 192.77 x 6.83mm, it weighs a not insubstantial 597g.

That’s significantly heavier than the 485g Xiaomi Pad 8. True, that rival tablet has a slightly smaller 11.2-inch display, but it also packs in a metal unibody design. The Lenovo Idea Tab Pro 2 is about the same weight, but also has a metal design, and also a larger display.

It’s also strange that the compatible Oppo Pencil 2R stylus wasn’t available to buy on the UK website at the time of writing, despite being mentioned in the Oppo Pad 5 blurb. Older Oppo styluses don’t seem to be compatible, either, which is annoying.

If you’re after a £400-ish tablet with a stylus bundled in, there’s always the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Lite or the aforementioned Lenovo IdeaTab Pro. Xiaomi, meanwhile, makes sure to sell its Focus Pen Pro as an optional accessory for the Xiaomi Pad 8.

Screen

• Punchy 12.1-inch 120Hz screen
• 2.8K LCD panel
• Quad speaker sound

Just like the OnePlus Pad Go 2, the Oppo Pad 5 is all about its display. Its biggest asset is its size, with a nice 12.1-inch 7:5 canvas on which to enjoy assorted visual content.

You won’t be getting an OLED display for this sort of money, but the LCD that’s been provided is surprisingly punchy. So much so, in fact, that I found myself popping into the Settings menu to switch from the default Vivid colour mode to the more muted Natural alternative.

It’s plenty sharp enough at 2800 x 1980, or 2.8K, though it should be noted that it falls short of the Xiaomi Pad 8 and the Lenovo Idea Tab Pro with their 3.2K panels.

It doesn’t get to the same elevated 144Hz refresh rate as the Xiaomi or the Lenovo IdeaTab Pro either, though in practice 120Hz is more than enough for any tablet. You won’t be hitting elevated frame rates in any 3D games here, after all.

A peak brightness of 900nits serves perfectly well, for indoor use at least.

Quad speakers provide a decent amount of clarity, spaciousness and separation. Make no mistake, video playback is definitely where the Oppo Pad 5 feels most comfortable.

Performance

• MediaTek Dimensity 7300-Ultra chip
• 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage
• Underwhelming performance

Oppo has fitted the Pad 5 out with a fairly humble MediaTek Dimensity 7300-Ultra processor, backed by 8GB of RAM. That’s the same processor that powers the Redmi Note 14 Pro.

We found it to be a perfectly decent component in the aforementioned £300 smartphone, released right at the beginning of 2025. It’s less impressive in a £400 tablet released more than a year later.

It’ll run the famously power-hungry Wuthering Waves at a so-called “smooth” level, but you’ll need to bump the graphical settings down to Performance (aka Low).

You might think it’s too much to ask for a higher level of performance from a £400 tablet, to which the Xiaomi Pad 8 and the Lenovo Idea Tab Pro 2 and their capable Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chip say hi.

Xiaomi’s similarly priced tablet literally scores around double in the Geekbench 6 CPU test, both single and multi-core. Elsewhere, I can’t report back on comparative graphical benchmark performance, as the Oppo Pad 5 wouldn’t run 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme test. Which is weird, given that the nigh-on-identical OnePlus Pad Go 2 managed the task.

Even the original Lenovo IdeaTab Pro, which as we’ve just mentioned has been superseded, runs on a more capable MediaTek Dimensity 8300 chip.

The Oppo Pad 5 performs adequately in general light tasks, zipping between home screens and menus just fine. Loading up busy web pages can take a beat longer than on more capable hardware, however, while rapidly hopping between multiple open apps seemed to cause it some trouble.

There’s 128GB of storage as standard, which is a pretty bog standard offering these days. It’s a shame there isn’t the option for more.

Software & AI

• ColorOS 16.1 based on Android 16
• Relatively clean, low-bloat UI
• Poorly implemented AI Gallery

The Oppo Pad 5 runs on the company’s custom ColorOS 16.1 UI, with Android 16 underpinning its various apps and functions.

I’ll say this for Oppo’s software – it’s always one of the faster and more responsive custom Android jobs out there. As we’ve just discussed, it moves through general home screen navigation and light app usage in a fairly serene manner despite the limited performance potential of the hardware.

There’s the occasional micro-pause, but our experience with more capable Oppo hardware suggests that this is a limited chipset issue rather than a matter of poor software optimisation.

It’s not my favourite Android UI aesthetically speaking, but nor is it scrapping away at the bottom of the pile. Oppo’s app and toggle icons are suitably crisp and unassuming, its Settings menu is reasonably easy to navigate, and it leaves the Google Feed where it should be to the left of the Home Screen.

The main home screen is a little overstuffed for my liking. There are technically two weather widgets on the main home screen by default, as well as the weather app icon. Yes, you can easily remove one or more of these, but it speaks to a certain lack of clarity.

Refreshingly, bloatware isn’t so much of an issue here as it is with some of Oppo’s rivals. On the third-party app count, only Netflix, WPS Office and LinkedIn come preloaded, with no ropey games or (shudder) Booking.com app in sight.

Most of the space is taken up by Google apps and Oppo’s own home-brewed efforts. On the latter front, I’m encouraged to note that Oppo resists the common temptation to include its own duplicate web browser app, realising that Chrome will do just fine, thank you.

The AI offering isn’t particularly intrusive, with just a few normal AI functions such as transcription, translation, and note enhancements.

There’s also a dedicated AI Studio app that can turn your loved ones into anime characters or an impressionist painting. You’ll need to have the necessary “star balance”, though, and supplying your picture will bring up an easy-to-miss message that the process has been moved to Oppo AI PlayLab.

Indeed, there’s no obvious way to follow your upload, and it turns out that it requires the download of a separate Oppo app from the Google Play Store.

Oppo promises to provide necessary security patches until May of 2032 – a solid six years. From what we can ascertain, however, it’ll only get two major Android updates.

Camera

• 8MP rear-facing camera
• 8MP selfie camera
• Bare minimum quality

Camera quality doesn’t matter much even with premium tablets, and it’s borderline inconsequential when it comes to cheaper examples like the Oppo Pad 5. So we’ll keep this brief.

The solitary 8MP rear camera here does not take good pictures. This is less a criticism than an observation of cheap tablet cameras in general, but it needs to be said.

Even if you feed this camera with plenty of natural light, it’ll still produce washed-out pictures lacking in contrast. When it’s not making scenes look dull, it’s exhibiting signs of overexposure – check out the sun glinting off those white houses in the background on one of these harbour pictures.

But like I said, that’s fine. Photos aren’t really the point here, and the Oppo Pad 5’s camera will serve adequately as a document scanner, as long as you can provide your own light source (there’s no flash).

Ditto for the 8MP front camera. It’ll serve you up an impromptu selfie if you insist – though when it would ever be easier or preferable to do so over using the smartphone in your pocket, I’m not entirely sure. Just know that the quality of that selfie will be mediocre at best.

Again, that’s not the point – such large tablet front cameras are intended for video calls. It’ll do such a job adequately, though again, you’ll need to flood your environment with plenty of light to avoid the telltale grain.

Battery Life

• 10,050mAh
• Lasts a full day of use
• Slow 33W SuperVOOC charging

Oppo has fitted its new tablet with a solid 10,050mAh battery that will see you through a full week of occasional use, which is really what a cheaper tablet such as this is intended for.

Use it over a longer period for mixed light productivity tasks like email, web browsing and word processing, and it’ll get you through a day without issue. After 30 minutes of light gaming, I found that it had dropped just 4% of its charge, which is a pretty solid result.

Naturally it’ll drop far quicker if you indulge in more intensive games and tasks, but as we’ve already established, this really isn’t the tablet you’d want to use for such things.

Charging is a little on the sluggish side, with Oppo’s own 33W SuperVOOC standard supported.

Using an Oppo-branded charger I had to hand (you won’t find one in the box), I found that it charged at a leisurely 1% per minute right up to the 1 hour / 60% mark, after which it tailed off somewhat. A full charge from empty took me 1 hour and 52 minutes.

Should you buy it?