Oppo Pad 5 review: Genuine contender, or just another iPad clone?

The tablet world is dominated, inescapably, by the iPad. That's been the case for years, and while the market for Android tablets has come on leaps and bounds in recent times, you still can't get away from Apple's behemoth all that easily.

The Oppo Pad 5 is a great example of how living in the iPad's shadow can still be quite balmy. It's an Android tablet designed pretty clearly to look incredibly similar to Apple's, and on that front it succeeds nicely.

It's well built, does everything you'd expect – and looks good while that all happens. Whether that's enough for you might vary, but you can't really say Oppo hasn't achieved what it was aiming for.

Price and Availability

The Oppo Pad 5 is available now, depending on what region you're in, having first been unveiled last year in China.

Here in the UK it comes in at £329, with availability directly from Oppo's store. There's no availability in the USA, which is no surprise for an Oppo product.

Design and Features

The Oppo Pad 5 revolves around a 12.1-inch display, which makes it extremely comparable in size to the standard iPad (which is smaller, at 11 inches). In fact, this tablet's dimensions are incredibly similar, right down to the even bezels around the screen, with rounded corners to soften those edges.

This gives the Pad 5 a nice symmetrical and balanced look, but it's a bit of a shame that it's only available in a single colour: a dark grey. That's obviously nice and subtle, but it's not exactly much fun.

The back of the tablet houses a single camera and a subtly embossed Oppo logo, while the edges offer up a power button and two volume keys, along with a USB-C port for charging. The two shorter edges of the tablet house four grilles for speakers in total, two on each edge.

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Before we get to the tablet's actual features, I must say it's a nicely made bit of tech. There's a solidity to the build that impresses, although it also becomes one of the Pad 5's drawbacks, since it weighs a chunky 555g – which does feel quite heavy in the hand. I didn't have a stand to test it with, and it wasn't always comfortable to hold at a good viewing angle.

That 12.1-inch display is worth returning to. It boasts 2.8K resolution at 284ppi, which indeed does ensure that it's nice and sharp, but the panel itself is a mixed bag. On the one hand, I think most buyers at this price will be happy with its vividness and crispness, along with the 120Hz refresh rate ceiling for smoothness.

Then again, we've seen a lot of tablets bring OLED panels recently, and they're almost always a stunning upgrade, so it would be great to see Oppo push the boat out on that front. One other downside of the screen is that it can't be woken with a touch, so you'll be reaching for that power button all the time.

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Perhaps the biggest shortcoming, though, is the tablet's choice of chipset. The MediaTek Dimensity 7300 (with 8GB of RAM) simply isn't powerful enough to keep this tablet feeling as smooth as its display warrants, as I'll explore further down.

Back to more positive news, though, it's conversely impressive to see how much battery capacity Oppo has squeezed into the Pad 5. You get a 10,050mAh total here, which is really solid.

Finally, Oppo's store page for the Pad 5 features a huge amount of space dedicated to the optional stylus you can order with the tablet, and various AI doodahs it can help with, but I didn't have one of those on hand to test with.

Performance and Display

The core of the story when it comes to the Oppo Pad 5 is that chipset, as you might have guessed from my mention of it further up in this review. It's hard to argue that it's powerful enough for this sort of tablet.

While plenty ran smoothly enough during simple tasks, other apps frequently hitched a little in my testing, and it became normal to wait a couple of seconds after opening one before being able to do anything – and that's quite a shame.

I could even get the tablet to occasionally hitch while moving between home screens, and that's really no good. Sure, it's priced quite cannily, but this is a mid-range tablet, not a budget one, and it should feel more powerful than it does if Oppo really wants it to succeed.

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In some ways, that sentiment also describes my experience with the display. Unlike the chipset, it doesn't explicitly put a foot wrong, given that it has decent brightness and contrast, as well as solid detail. However, I also can't say it's from the top bracket in tablet terms, and it doesn't do enough on its own to redeem things.

At least that sizeable battery does good work, to give the Oppo Pad 5 something to be more proud of. In my testing, I found the advertised battery life pretty realistic – I routinely got well over a dozen hours of active use before needing a charge.

The camera, meanwhile, is technically decent, at 13MP, but surely only something you'll use in a total pinch. The webcam, meanwhile, is geared for landscape mode, and at 8MP it's similarly serviceable, but nothing special.

All of this means that the Pad 5 feels like a tablet that knows its own limits and won't last too long before revealing them to you, too. As a simple web browsing and streaming tablet, it's hard to fault it too much, since it can fulfil either of those jobs pretty handily.

However, when it comes to productivity, gaming, or anything that puts a little more of a strain on its chip, it's just not all that impressive, which makes its price feel a little dubious. Sure, an iPad is a good chunk more expensive, but it's also wildly more capable, and that performance gap is an issue for this Oppo.

Verdict

The Oppo Pad 5 left me fairly conflicted. It's serviceable in many ways, with decent build quality and a screen that you can't complain about (save pining for OLED), while its version of Android is perfectly slick and usable.

However, key issues bring it down, with the mediocre chipset at its heart being the biggest fault. It means that I can't feel confident the Pad 5 will age well at all, given it struggles with some material even now. The fact that the tablet is also pretty heavy, doesn't come with its stylus, and lacks an OLED panel all then start to rankle a little more.

If you want an Android tablet at this price, it's worth consideration, but I can't help but feel you'd be better off stretching to a higher budget and better specs, or spending even less for a more basic streaming-and-browsing option instead.

Also consider

The obvious elephant in the room for the Oppo Pad 5 is the latest version of Apple's iPad, which comes in at about £100 more but is significantly more powerful and reliable. Its design is very similar, and you'd have to swap to iPadOS, so the comparison isn't perfect, but in this case the real deal wins out.

If you're committed to Android, though, you could spend a whole lot more on the Honor MagicPad 4, which hugely impressed us earlier this year. It's far thinner and lighter, but much more powerful and with a far better display than Oppo's, making it the obvious upgrade in every department.