OnePlus Pad Go 2 Review

Design

• Remarkably similar to most iPads
• Shadow Black and Lavender Drift colours
• Rectangular shape for taller portrait and wider landscape

The OnePlus Pad Go 2 is clean. There’s no two-tone effect seen on last year’s OnePlus Pad Lite, and its rear camera has gone back to being a smaller portrait-position sensor tucked away in the corner.

In dim light, the matte finish of the Shadow Black model is smooth like midnight (but is a bit of a fingerprint magnet), leaving the Lavender Drift version to catch bright light in the best way. It’s solidly constructed, and while not entirely rigid like a machined iPad, it feels far from flimsy. Though it is quite a bit heavier.

If the OnePlus Pad Go 2 were slightly bigger, I’d have a very hard time distinguishing it from my monstrous M1 iPad Pro. Not only do they both share similarly rounded corners, but the OnePlus even sports the prized quad speaker setup of Apple’s own slab, immediately putting it leaps and bounds above most other budget tablets.

At 88.5% screen-to-body ratio, the bezels come in shockingly close as well. In fact, if it weren’t for its uniquely wider 7:5 aspect ratio screen, the OnePlus Pad Go 2 would sit flush with the smaller 11-inch iPad Pro. In short, it’s a tall (or wide) tablet that clearly doesn’t agree with Apple’s productivity-focused display philosophy.

Display

• Bright 2.8K LCD display
• 7:5 aspect ratio
• 30/60/90/120Hz support

While compromises are few and far between with the OnePlus Pad Go 2, the screen is certainly not one of them. In fact, it’s a literal head turner, with myself and others frequently looking back to bask in the glory of its bright and punchy 12.1-inch pane. And no, this isn’t a glossy AMOLED display.

At 2800×1920, no pore or bead of sweat is safe from the sheer number of pixels available to work with here. And due to its wide 7:5 aspect ratio, there’s plenty of space to work with if you’re the chronic multitasking type – it’s even certified for IMAX-style movies. Is the rest of the hardware down to churn through multiple tasks simultaneously? We’ll get to that.

For now, 120Hz support at this resolution makes the OnePlus Pad Go 2 quite the value proposition. Sure, it can’t crawl down to 1Hz (or even 24Hz) to suit every situation, but that’s fine.

At the end of the day, it’s an LCD panel that gets bright enough to fend off indirect sunlight and offers the sort of contrast ratio most other tablets around this price range could only dream of. Chuck some HDR content on this, and you might actually prefer it to your TV.

Performance

• MediaTek Dimensity 7300-Ultra SoC
• 8GB system memory
• 256GB variant includes 5G support

Powering this £350 hunk of an almost pocketable computer is MediaTek Dimensity 7300-Ultra: a chip that’s a little hard to compare to the usual Snapdragon brains hiding under the hood of OnePlus’ handsets.

In Geekbench, we’re looking at a single-core score of 1003. This rises to 3085 in the multicore test, with neither being particularly impressive. 3DMark’s Sling Shot Extreme climbed above 30fps in one test, but dipped to 17 in another, with its taxing Wildlife Extreme test managing no more than 6fps.

Those results put the OnePlus Pad Go 2 at around 25% slower than the comparatively priced Lenovo IdeaTab Pro, which also sports a sharper display, similar quad speakers, and pen support (with handy magnets, no less) But the OnePlus Go Pad 2 is a 5G-capable slab that’s lighter, gets brighter, and is a smidge easier to stuff into your bag. So that’s something.

Is it going to be gaming with the best of them? No. But that unique aspect ratio makes multitasking a joy. You can squeeze an older adventure like Runescape on one side and watch content on the other during more hands-off activities. Need a hand? Swap to a handy Wiki page, or doodle notes with the pen instead. But enough about 3D performance.

While it’s not going to be enjoying the sorts of games you can play on a current-gen console on this, everyday performance is brilliant. Apps ping up as fast as needed, swiping around the homescreen is as smooth as you can expect, and browsing memory-intensive webpages is no bother. Honestly? It’s a dream.

Another reason why this is a perfect entertainment device? The speakers. The vast majority of budget-friendly tablets sour their chances of being solid series binging devices by skimping on the speaker setup, oftentimes settling for a tiny, tinny woofer where you’ll sometimes stick your hand, making a bad situation way worse.

Does that stop them from flaunting a meaningless Dolby Atmos badge on the box? Again, no.

OnePlus bucks the trend here by stuffing four speakers into the shell of the Pad Go 2, adding not only properly separated stereo sound to the mix, but solid bass response too. And it gets loud. This is a slab that will have no trouble walking you through a recipe in a noisy kitchen or entertaining a group in the garden.

Software and AI

• OxygenOS 16
• LinkedIn, WPS Office, and Netflix pre-installed
• Simple multitasking approach

Part of what makes the aforementioned “game and watch” scenario possible is OxygenOS 16, OnePlus’ own fork of Android 16.

A simple, no-nonsense flavour of Android is part of what put OnePlus on the map back when Apple wasn’t quite so far ahead in the race. And as Android installs balloon on bargain blowers, OnePlus continues to stick to its guns, offering a largely barebones version of the system without commercial apps gunking it up.

Unlike other skins I’ve had the displeasure of using, opening multiple apps at the same time is about as simple as it gets on OxygenOS.

A tiny light bar at the side signals how to get tiny apps to float above your main focus, with three dots atop the window of any other offering a way to quickly swap between full screen, a floating window, or to simply switch one app out for another.

It’s a lot easier to finesse than Apple’s long-awaited attempt to make iPadOS a little more macOS, not that macOS doesn’t have its fair share of annoyances when it comes to window management.

Now, AI implementation in the OnePlus Pad Go 2 is a little hard to explain. It has access to Google Gemini, which is pretty great as far as personal assistants go, but the majority of its AI-branded features lie where you expect them in a budget slab. That’s right: the camera.

Camera

• 8MP landscape selfie camera
• 8MP rear portrait camera
• Decent AI upscaling

You’ll find two 8MP lenses on the OnePlus Pad Go 2. The selfie camera is properly positioned on the longer side of the screen bezel, making it great for wide views and multitasking during video calls.

On the back, there’s a seemingly identical 8MP camera along the short side, making it best suited to scanning documents or quickly snapping shots of something you want to run through Google Gemini or your favourite “what is this?” app.

For general photography, the results are what you would expect from an 8MP camera on any other device.

Images in the viewfinder look unusable. That’s where some AI processing comes in. View the final image, and you’ll get a decently defined picture. Just don’t peer too close. Given there’s no depth sensor here, portrait shots rely on this techno wizardry post-processing element, too. Again, they’re fine, but you won’t be snapping your passport photo or one for the wall with this.

Battery

• Large 10050mAh battery
• 33W fast charging (around 10W charging on the average plug)
• Around 10 hours of heavy use

Battery is where the OnePlus Pad Go 2 falls off the wagon a little. And not because of battery life. Losing 7% of its charge during an average episode of a limited series on Netflix is well within the average. Likewise, a 5% drain when 3D gaming is perfectly reasonable. This is a 10050mAh cell powering a decently powerful chip with a bright and fast LCD panel. It’s in charging said larger cell where things get a little harder to stomach.

A 30W charger that’s perfectly capable of powering an M1 MacBook Air through just about anything can’t juice up the OnePlus Pad Go 2 by more than 32% per hour. It’s far from the end of the world, but with nothing better included in the box, it’s not even the most likely scenario for the average consumer, who might be stuck with something half as capable.

But it’s not like the OnePlus Pad Go 2 is capable of much more. Capping out at 33W, call it fast charging all you want, but juicing up the battery will take a good deal of time, especially while in use. It’s a big battery.

Should you buy it?