Design and Display: Familiar Look, Serious Upgrade in Usability
The OnePlus Pad 4 sticks to a clean, minimal metal unibody, but hides major upgrades under its familiar aesthetic. At just 5.94 mm thick and 672 grams, it feels surprisingly light for a tablet housing such a massive battery, making it most at home on a desk or couch. The slim, even bezels contribute to an immersive experience while still leaving enough frame to grip without accidental touches. Its 13.2-inch 3.4K LCD panel is a standout for work and play. With 315 PPI, text and UI elements look crisp, while the 7:5 aspect ratio gives extra vertical space that suits documents, web browsing, and split-screen multitasking. The panel reaches up to 1000 nits in high brightness mode, which helps in bright environments. Although it lacks OLED-level deep blacks and Netflix HDR, the 12-bit color depth, wide DCI-P3 coverage, and adaptive refresh up to 144 Hz make everyday content consumption feel sharp and fluid.
Flagship Tablet Processor: Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Power
The headline upgrade driving Android tablet performance on the OnePlus Pad 4 is its Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset. Paired with up to 12 GB LPDDR5X RAM and UFS 4.1 storage, this flagship tablet processor delivers snappy app launches, smooth multitasking, and consistently high frame rates in demanding games. Compared to the previous Pad, everything from loading large documents to juggling multiple apps in split-screen shows a clear speed bump. OxygenOS 16 takes full advantage of this hardware, with ultra-smooth animations and fast task switching that make the interface feel almost console-like in responsiveness. Even intensive workloads—photo editing, cloud-heavy productivity apps, or extended gaming sessions—run with little sign of thermal throttling in typical use. For users who’ve hit limits on older Android tablets, the combination of Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and tuned software finally delivers the level of performance expected from a modern flagship slate.
Battery and Charging: A True Long Battery Life Tablet
If the processor makes the OnePlus Pad 4 fast, the 13,380 mAh battery is what makes it truly practical. This huge cell is a major step up for a productivity-focused Android tablet, comfortably stretching into multiple days of mixed usage for many users. Streaming, browsing, note-taking, and some gaming spread across the day rarely induce battery anxiety, which directly addresses endurance gaps seen in many earlier Android tablets. When you do need to top up, 80W SUPERVOOC charging dramatically cuts downtime. It’s the kind of speed that lets you plug in during a break and come back with hours of extra usage, instead of camping next to the socket. The synergy of efficient Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 silicon, aggressive yet intelligent power management in OxygenOS, and that oversized battery makes the Pad 4 one of the most convincing long battery life tablet options currently available.
OxygenOS 16 and Live Space: Software That Finally Feels Tablet-First
The OnePlus Pad 4’s biggest leap over its predecessor is software. OxygenOS 16, based on Android 16, looks and feels purpose-built for a large screen rather than a stretched phone interface. System animations are notably smoother, the dock gains a refined frosted-glass style, and the app drawer’s cleaner layout makes navigation feel effortless. The new Live Space system rethinks notifications as interactive, dynamic cards that can be expanded or pulled into full-screen views. This ties directly into the redesigned media player, which transforms into a rich full-screen panel with fluid transitions, turning music and video control into a more immersive experience. Multi-window handling also benefits from floating window refinements and layout flexibility, letting you arrange icons, folders, and widgets differently in portrait and landscape. With a promised four OS upgrades and six years of security updates, the software foundation is not only polished today but built for long-term use.
Post-launch Update: OxygenOS 16.0.7.201 and Remaining Omissions
OnePlus is backing the Pad 4’s strong launch with active software support. The first post-release update, OxygenOS 16.0.7.201, is already rolling out and adds several OnePlus AI features along with quality-of-life improvements. Notably, it lets you set separate layouts for home screen icons, folders, and widgets in portrait and landscape orientations—an important tweak for a device often docked in landscape. It also enhances floating window behavior and delivers additional optimisations aimed at stability and day-to-day usability. Despite these advances, some omissions persist. There is still no fingerprint scanner for quick biometric unlock, something many users now expect on premium tablets. A cellular connectivity option is also missing, limiting always-on access to situations where Wi-Fi or tethering is available. Even so, for users who prioritise Android tablet performance, long battery life, polished software, and an improving feature set, the OnePlus Pad 4 stands out as one of the smoothest and most capable Android tablets you can buy.
