OnePlus Pad 3: In the evolving landscape of tablet computing, OnePlus continues to strengthen its presence with devices that combine thoughtful design with performance-oriented features.
The OnePlus Pad 3 represents the brand’s most refined tablet offering to date, building upon the foundation established by its predecessors while introducing meaningful improvements across hardware, software, and overall user experience.
Design Philosophy
The OnePlus Pad 3 embraces a sleek, minimalist design language that feels distinctly premium. With a thickness of approximately 6.5mm and weighing around 510 grams, the device strikes an excellent balance between substantial feel and extended portability.
The aluminum unibody construction provides structural integrity while creating a sophisticated aesthetic that aligns with OnePlus’s broader design identity.
Available in two distinctive colorways – Halo Green and Nebula Gray – the tablet offers visual options that appeal to different preferences.
The Halo Green variant features a matte finish with subtle metallic undertones that shift under different lighting conditions, creating a distinctive appearance without appearing ostentatious.
The symmetrical bezels around the display create a balanced appearance while providing sufficient area for thumb placement without accidental touches.
This thoughtful approach to ergonomics extends to the carefully positioned quad speakers and power button with integrated fingerprint sensor, ensuring comfortable usage in various orientations.
Display Excellence
The front of the device showcases an 11.6-inch LCD display with 3K resolution (2800 × 2000 pixels). OnePlus has prioritized display quality, with the panel delivering excellent color reproduction, sharp text, and good viewing angles despite using LCD rather than OLED technology.
The 144Hz refresh rate represents an upgrade from the 120Hz of its predecessor, ensuring exceptionally smooth scrolling and animations throughout the user interface.
The screen achieves a peak brightness of 600 nits, providing good visibility in most indoor environments though it may struggle slightly under direct sunlight.
The display maintains the distinctive 7:5 aspect ratio introduced in earlier OnePlus tablets, creating a more versatile canvas for productivity and content consumption compared to the more common 16:10 or 4:3 ratios.
This approach provides additional vertical space when viewing documents or browsing the web, while still offering a comfortable experience for media consumption.
Performance Powerhouse
Under the hood, the OnePlus Pad 3 is powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9300+ chipset, an octa-core processor featuring one Cortex-X4 prime core clocked at 3.4GHz, three Cortex-X4 performance cores, and four Cortex-A720 efficiency cores.
This flagship-level SoC delivers exceptional processing capabilities for both productivity tasks and entertainment.
The device comes with either 8GB, 12GB, or 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM paired with 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage, creating a responsive foundation for multitasking and media storage.
OnePlus has implemented memory management optimizations that help maintain performance during intensive multitasking.
Performance is further enhanced by a sophisticated cooling system that incorporates graphite sheets and a vapor chamber design, maintaining stable performance during extended gaming sessions or processor-intensive tasks like video editing.
This thermal management solution helps prevent the throttling that often affects thin tablets during demanding workloads.
Productivity and Accessories
The OnePlus Pad 3 is designed with productivity in mind, offering seamless integration with the second-generation OnePlus Stylo pen and OnePlus Smart Keyboard.
The Stylo features improved latency of just 2ms, 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity, and magnetic attachment for charging and storage, creating a natural writing and drawing experience for creative work and note-taking.
The updated Smart Keyboard provides a laptop-like typing experience with 1.5mm key travel, a multi-touch trackpad, and function row keys for quick access to common tablet functions.
The keyboard connects via pogo pins rather than Bluetooth, eliminating pairing issues and battery concerns while providing a stable connection for extended work sessions.
These accessories transform the OnePlus Pad 3 into a capable productivity device, supported by software optimizations that enable efficient multitasking.
The system supports up to four app windows simultaneously, with intuitive gestures for moving and resizing windows according to workflow requirements.
Audio and Multimedia
Audio performance receives proper attention with a quad-speaker setup tuned by Dolby Atmos, delivering impressive sound quality for a device of this size.
The speakers provide good stereo separation and reasonable bass response, enhancing the multimedia experience during video streaming and gaming sessions.
The spatial audio implementation creates an immersive soundstage that particularly benefits movie watching and music playback.
Volume levels reach sufficient heights for personal use in moderately noisy environments, though external speakers or headphones remain preferable for shared viewing in larger spaces.
For video calls and online meetings, the tablet incorporates a 13MP front-facing camera centrally positioned for natural eye contact during landscape orientation – a thoughtful detail that acknowledges the tablet’s role in productivity and communication.
This is complemented by a quad-microphone array with noise cancellation that ensures clear voice capture even in less-than-ideal acoustic environments.
Software Experience
The OnePlus Pad 3 runs OxygenOS 15 based on Android 15, offering a tablet-optimized interface with multitasking features designed specifically for the larger display.
OnePlus has committed to three years of major Android updates and four years of security patches, providing reasonable longevity for a tablet device.
The software experience includes several tablet-specific enhancements, including Content Sync that allows seamless transfer of files and clipboard content between OnePlus phones and the tablet, Screen Mirroring for using the tablet as a secondary display for OnePlus phones, and optimized split-screen functionality that maintains app states when switching between full-screen and multi-window modes.
OnePlus has worked with key developers to ensure popular applications are properly optimized for the tablet’s aspect ratio and screen size, addressing a common issue with Android tablets.
While some pre-installed applications are present, most can be uninstalled or disabled according to user preference.
Battery Life and Charging
Battery endurance stands out as one of the OnePlus Pad 3’s strengths, featuring a substantial 9,510mAh cell that easily handles a full day of mixed usage.
Screen-on time typically ranges between 10-12 hours with activities including video streaming, web browsing, and productivity tasks.
When it’s time to recharge, the included 67W SUPERVOOC charger replenishes the battery from empty to full in approximately 80 minutes.
This relatively fast charging capability represents a significant advantage for a large-battery tablet, providing meaningful convenience for users with busy schedules.
OnePlus Pad 3
The OnePlus Pad 3 successfully builds upon its predecessors’ foundation while introducing meaningful improvements that enhance the overall tablet experience.
By focusing on display quality, performance, battery life, and productivity features while maintaining competitive pricing, OnePlus has created a device that serves both entertainment and work needs without significant compromise.
In the competitive Android tablet market, the OnePlus Pad 3 distinguishes itself through its balanced approach and attention to user experience details that extend beyond raw specifications.
For consumers seeking a versatile tablet for both content consumption and productivity, the OnePlus Pad 3 represents a compelling option that maximizes value while delivering premium features where they matter most.
