Oppo Pad 5 Pro Review: More than just a big screen for Netflix

Design

• 289.7 x 208.8 x 5.9 mm, 672g
• Glass front, aluminium unibody rear
• Smart Keyboard and Pencil 3 Pro support

The Oppo Pad 5 Pro is a fairly large tablet with a 13.2-inch screen. Its dimensions are very similar to the 13-inch iPad Air, although it’s significantly heavier at 672g (compared to 616g).

The tablet feels extremely premium, with an all-glass front and a metal unibody rear. It has some heft to it, but that just reinforces the quality feel, and I didn’t find it too fatiguing to use for extended periods.

The Pad 5 Pro only comes in one colour, and weirdly, it’s not black or white – it’s Mocha Brown. You don’t see too many brown tablets, so it does help differentiate it, and for what it’s worth, I think it looks very sophisticated.

There’s no fingerprint scanner on this model, but it does support basic face unlock. It’s not the secure 3D type, so you won’t be able to log into banking apps with your biometrics, but for quickly unlocking the slate, it works quite well.

Otherwise, there’s a power/lock button on the top (when held vertically), volume buttons on the side and a USB-C port on the base. There’s no cellular option available, only a Wi-Fi model, so there’s no SIM card tray.

The rear panel has three pogo pin contacts to enable connection to Oppo’s Smart Keyboard. This is a pricey accessory, with £299 MSRP in the UK, and it’s extremely similar to Apple’s Magic Keyboard, which retails for about the same price.

The keyboard case is super high quality, which makes the high asking price somewhat understandable (and it’s currently on offer with 40% off). It has a soft-touch coating on the palm rest, deep key travel, a stiff deck and a responsive glass touchpad. It’s also backlit, which makes it much easier to use in the dark. There’s also a simple folio case, which can be had for about £30.

The Oppo Pencil 3 Pro is an optional accessory that retails for about £80, and it might be the best active stylus I have ever tried. It has all the usual features, including the ability to squeeze the pencil to access different features, and wireless charging when the stylus is magnetically attached to the tablet. It also has an impressive 16,000 levels of pressure sensitivity.

What sets it apart, though, is the X-axis linear motor. This vibrates to simulate the feeling of drag when drawing on paper, and it can even simulate different types of pens, pencils, and brushes. It works astonishingly well, and it has to be tried to be believed.

I’ve always had a hard time drawing on tablets, because the plastic-on-glass motion creates barely any friction. For this reason, I’ve previously praised Huawei’s MatePad tablets with their textured PaperMatte displays, which give you some tactile feedback when sketching.

After demoing them side-by-side, though, I found I actually preferred the simulated vibrations of Oppo’s stylus to the real friction of the Huawei screen. It’s an amazing achievement.

Screen

• 13.2-inch 144Hz 3392×2400 IPS LCD
• 100% DCI-P3 coverage
• 1000 nits peak brightness

The Oppo Pad 5 Pro has a spacious 13.2-inch IPS display with a super speedy 144Hz refresh rate. It has rather chunky bezels on all sides, but they’re still slimmer than the iPad’s, and I actually prefer having somewhere to rest my thumbs.

Of course, an OLED panel will beat this IPS number when it comes to contrast, but that would likely drive the price up significantly. This panel still looks great, with respectable black levels and good colour accuracy. It covers 100% of the DCI-P3 colour space, so if you plan on using it for creative tasks, you’re in good hands.

1000 nits of peak brightness mean that this tablet remains usable outdoors and in bright environments. It won’t look amazing in direct sunlight, but stick to the shade, and you’ll be absolutely fine.

The screen has HDR support, including Dolby Vision, and streaming content from apps like Netflix and Prime Video looks fantastic. That’s especially true thanks to the sheer scale of this tablet; when held at arm’s length, it’s almost like having a portable TV with you.

Cameras

• 13MP main camera
• 8MP selfie camera

No one buys a tablet for its cameras, and with this one in particular, that’s more true than ever. There’s only one camera on the back, one on the front, and neither has a particularly high resolution.

In my view, that’s absolutely fine. Realistically, these will be used for video calls, face ID, QR code scanning, and not much else.

I like that the selfie camera is placed in the centre, when held horizontally, as it means you have a natural eyeline when on a conference call. It’s not the widest camera around, though, and it doesn’t have autofocus.

The camera on the back is much higher quality, and it does have autofocus. I feel like Oppo has got this backwards, as the camera on the front will likely be used more frequently.

The camera app gives you more options than you might expect, including some nice picture styles, and even a night mode, panorama mode and time-lapse options. If you’re trying to get nice shots from this, rather than using your phone, you might want to reconsider, though.

Performance

• Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5
• 8GB RAM, 256GB storage
• 8 stereo speakers

The Oppo Pad 5 Pro is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC. It was the fastest chip in the Android market up until very recently, but the Gen 6 has now taken on the mantle.

It’s an incredibly powerful chip, and while Apple’s M-series processors are a step ahead, I’m still not entirely sure why they make iPads with so much horsepower under the hood. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is more than most will ever need.

This processor is paired with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of UFS 4.1 storage. The RAM is on the stingy side, but given the current shortage, it’s an understandable decision.

To put it through its paces, I played a good amount of NTE. It’s a visually beautiful anime-styled game with a large open-world city map, and devices with weaker chips have a very hard time running it.

For the most part, the Oppo Pad 5 Pro handled this game with finesse. I was able to push the graphics to their maximum settings and still maintain a mostly solid 60fps throughout. The tablet heats up a bit, but the large surface area helps with controlling the thermals well.

The problem I faced was with texture pop-ins, which were much worse on this tablet than on my other Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 devices. I believe the RAM is the culprit. Especially if you have apps running in the background, there’s just not enough left for all of these textures. It’s still perfectly playable, but it does detract from the visual appeal.

On the other hand, I’m talking about one of the most challenging games around. You’ll likely see no such behaviour with simpler titles, like CoD Mobile.

The tablet handles creative tasks well too. Photo editing and illustration were perfect, but you can expect the RAM capacity to be a bottleneck if you’re trying to perform complex video edits.

Outside of those specific scenarios, the tablet performed flawlessly. It always feels extremely quick and responsive, even when you have three apps on screen at once. It’s a great device for getting work done on the go.

Software & AI

• ColorOS 16, based on Android 16
• Compatible with PC and Apple ecosystem
• Lots of AI productivity features

The Oppo Pad 5 Pro ships with ColorOS 16, Oppo’s custom version of Android 16. The ColorOS 17 update should be right around the corner, but at the time of writing, it wasn’t available to me just yet.

I use an Oppo phone as my daily driver, so I feel right at home with this operating system, and in my opinion, it’s one of the best-looking and most full-featured Android skins around.

There’s a lot of Apple influence to the aesthetics, complete with Liquid-Glass-like effects, and a Dynamic Island-like feature (even without the punch hole camera cutout). There are also hints of Samsung, with the ability to have your notifications display at the base of the tablet, like the Now Bar.

Disregarding who did what first, ColorOS excels by bringing all of these features together in one place. Plus, if there’s anything you don’t like, you can easily change it, as the customisation options are extremely comprehensive.

With a large-screen tablet like this, multitasking is a key priority, and thankfully ColorOS handles this better than most. You can split the screen into three, with fully resizable windows, and you can add a floating app on top. You can also open multiple instances of the same app side-by-side, which can be handy more often than you might expect.

One of my favourite features, though, is O+ Connect. This is an application you can download on your Mac or Windows PC, and it allows you to use the Pad 5 Pro as a wireless portable monitor. Not only that, but you can share your clipboard across devices, and even control your tablet with your laptop, and vice versa.

Of course, there are loads of AI tools built in, including the usual Gemini and Circle to Search features. There’s also all of the usual stuff like transcription, translation, writing assistance, and my firm favourite “AI Speak” which reads websites to you in a natural-sounding voice.

This generation brings some new additions, too. The most exciting is AI Painter, which can turn your handwritten notes into charts or a table. You can also turn hand-drawn sketches into polished images with a tap. We’ve seen this kind of thing before, but when combined with a massive screen and a best-in-class stylus, it’s more useful than ever.

Battery life

• 13,380 mAh battery
• 80W wired charging
• No charger included

The Oppo Pad 5 Pro has a huge 13,380 mAh battery inside. Oppo reckons that’ll give you up to 20 hours of continuous video playback on a charge.

I tend to use tablets in shorter bursts, rather than relying on them for an entire workday. So I often found I could go three days or more without needing to reach for the charger (which doesn’t come included, by the way). The standby power drain is impressive, too. I could leave the tablet unused for a day or two, and the battery percentage would only fall by 1-3%.

The Pad 5 Pro supports charging at up to 80W with an official Oppo SuperVooc charger. This is an impressive figure, but with such a large battery inside, the tablet still takes over an hour and a half to go from completely flat to completely full.

Still, with battery life as long as this, that’s barely an inconvenience. I also love to see that Oppo has implemented a bypass charging feature, so if you want to game while plugged in, without worrying about thermal performance and battery degradation, you can.

Should you buy it?