Oppo Pad Air review: Handy slate

The Oppo Pad Air is a lightweight 10-inch tablet that looks, and feels more premium than its Android rivals. Its performance is decent, but it can't quite compare to Apple's iPads. Battery life, though, is good. Oppo's interface also offers several multi-tasking and productivity features, like a split-screen mode, and the ability to link with an Oppo smartphone.

Quick specs

10.36-inch IPS display (2,000 x 1,200 pixels)
Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 with 4GB RAM and 128GB storage
7,100mAh battery
440g

Given its Air moniker, this Oppo tablet seems to have the Apple iPad Air in its sights. We're splitting hairs here, but Oppo managed to make its tablet slightly lighter (440g) compared to the iPad Air (461g). However, Apple's tablet is still fractionally thinner at 6.1mm compared to the Oppo (6.94mm). The back of the Pad Air has a 3D textured band running across its top half. It feels nice, and makes the tablet look less bland. The Oppo feels balanced in either portrait or landscape orientation. In addition, it's not at all tiring to hold because of its weight.

However, I'm not a fan of the Pad Air's display. While this IPS screen is crisp enough with a 2K resolution, and has relatively slim bezels, it's reflective, and picks up a fair amount of fingerprint smudges. I also noticed that tilting the display even slightly will cause a colour shift that's rather annoying. It's something that I usually notice on lower-quality screens. Oppo says the screen has 2,048 dimming zones that adjust automatically based on ambient light. I found the screen brightness to be average at best. Coupled with its reflective nature, this display isn't the most usable outdoors under the sun. On the other hand, the Pad Air has Dolby Atmos quad speakers that sound better than the ones in budget tablets. Pity that the display doesn't support HDR in streaming apps like Netflix.

Powering the Pad Air is a mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 chip, which is also found in 2022 tablets from Lenovo and LG. This mid-range chipset scores around 386 (single-core) and 1,676 (multi-core) in Geekbench 5. It's definitely not in the same performance tier as the Apple iPad Air. But the Oppo runs apps and games smoothly enough. The tablet comes with 128GB of internal storage, but you can add a microSD card (up to 512GB). Battery life is good, thanks to a 7,100mAh battery. The Pad Air lasted around 10 hours in our video-loop test at maximum brightness. Charging, though, could be faster. It takes over two hours for the tablet's 18W fast-charge (via USB-C Power Delivery) feature to replenish the battery fully.

Besides the hardware features, Oppo's ColorOS interface offers several multi-tasking features. For instance, a two-finger swipe from the top of the screen splits the screen so that you can run two apps side by side. Except for the Camera app, most apps I tried together (e.g. Marvel Snap and YouTube) seem to be supported. If you have an Oppo phone, you can also connect the Pad Air to the phone, and mirror the phone's screen on the tablet. Overall, the Oppo Pad Air (S$399) is a handy tablet that feels more premium than the usual Android slate. Battery life is good, and the performance is decent. Personally, I don't like the display, but I'm also probably more picky about this than the average consumer. But if you can spend a bit more, the (S$449) Xiaomi Pad offers better value. The Pad Air is available now on Lazada and Shopee.

Note: Review unit provided by Oppo.

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