Artist Review: OnePlus Pad with Stylo

Find out whether the OnePlus Pad and pen are good for creating digital art in this review.

The OnePlus Pad was released in 2023 with three accessories: the USD 39 folio case, $149 magnetic keyboard case and the $99 OnePlus Stylo digital pen. The 11.61-inch tablet itself is priced at USD 479 and comes with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage without microSD card slot. From what I've read online, there's a variant with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage sold in some countries, but not from OnePlus USA online store.

By the way, OnePlus Pad is the same tablet as Oppo Pad 2 which is available in more configurations, 8 - 12GB RAM, 128 - 512GB storage. OnePlus not giving customers more storage option is such a shame.

This is OnePlus' first tablet and since it supports a pen, I'm particularly interested to find out how good it is at drawing.

I actually contacted OnePlus to see if they have a review unit I could borrow but did not get a reply. So I bought the tablet, magnetic keyboard case and the pen from the OnePlus store on Shopee SG for SGD 830 (USD 614) which I think is an okay deal. In Singapore, OnePlus Pad is SGD 699, the 10th gen iPad with 64GB storage is SGD 685 and Samsung Tab S8 with 128GB storage and pen is SGD 750.

Bottom line

The hardware is great but I find 128GB storage lacking when there's no microSD card slot.

The pen performance is good enough for note taking, but there are some issues with drawing, such as line not tapering correctly and issues with tilt with certain apps.

This tablet works well as a portable digital sketchpad.

The main thing OnePlus needs to improve is to add more features to OxygenOS so that it can match the competition because companies like Apple and Samsung has several years of head start with their tablets. Right now, at least with OxygenOS 13.1, there are many quirks, and some features I want but are missing, e.g. the most important being the integration of the file system with Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. I'll give more examples later.

At the price of USD 479, SGD 699, this is competing with the entry level iPad 10 and Xiaomi Pad 6 and Pad 6 Pro by giving your more value with the hardware. Samsung Tab S8 is still more expensive, but you also get more, e.g. S Pen included, microSD card, Samsung Dex, Samsung One UI which has more features.

As to whether it's worth the, you can decide based on my findings below.

What's included

• OnePlus Pad
• SUPERVOOC 67W Power Adapter
• Type-C Cable
• Quick Start Guide
• Safety Information and Warranty Card

The OnePlus Stylo is sold separately and comes with only one extra pen nib.

The charger may not be included in certain countries.

Design

OnePlus Pad is available only in a dark olive green which looks alright to me. The folio and keyboard case are sold also in only green.

On the back is a 13MP camera with concentric circles coming from the circular camera bump. The metalic back is quite susceptible to fingerprint smudges but easy to wipe off.

Build quality is solid. Weight is 555g.

Design of the tablet looks beautiful. The bezels are thin and corners are rounded off. The sides are also rounded so this is a tablet that's really comfortable to hold, more so compared to the iPad and Samsung tablets with the flat sides.

The front 8MP camera located on the long end in landscape mode can be used for face unlock which is effective and fast. There is no fingerprint unlock.

The 7:5 aspect ratio for the display is unusual because most Android tablets come with 16:10 or 16:9 displays. iPads have displays that are around 4:3 and Microsoft Surface Pro tablets use 3:2.

I love the 7:5 aspect ratio and those used by the iPads because it makes the tablet usable in both landscape and portrait orientation. 16:10 or 16:9 aspect ratios are more suited for landscape use, watching videos and gaming. If you use your tablet mostly for watching videos and gaming, there are big thick black bars at the top and bottom to deal with.

There's unfortunately no anti-reflective coating on the glass.

I use my tablets mostly for work and drawing and the 7:5 aspect ratio is more productive to me. I use portrait orientation quite often for writing because I get to see more lines.

These are the specs for the display:

• Size: 11.61" (measured diagonally from corner to corner)
• Type: LCD
• Screen-to-body Ratio: 88.14%
• Resolution: 2800 x 2000 pixels
• Refresh Rate: 30/60/90/120/144 Hz
• Touch Sampling Rate: 120 Hz/144 Hz
• PPI: 296
• Contrast: 1400:1
• Brightness: 500 nits (Typical)
• Delta E: 2

The display is bright, vibrant, sharp and has fantastic viewing angles with minimal to no colour shift or drop in brightness. There's no mention on the colour support but from what I can see, the colours look great out of the box and fairly accurately, relatively speaking compared to other tablets.

Refresh rate can go up to 144Hz so you can expect smooth animation, e.g. zoom, scoll. However, not all drawing apps can run at 120Hz or even 144Hz so those apps will still show latency.

The touch sampling rate up to 144Hz makes the tablet feel very responsive to your finger actions.

2800 x 2000 resolution on an 11.6-inch display produces sharp visuals.

This is an amazing LCD display. The only thing this display can't do is give you true HDR like an OLED display and that's a minor limitation. If you watch lots of HDR content, then this is a bummer.

The display is laminated so there's no gap between the glass and LCD. When drawing, there is no gap between the line and the pen tip.

The tablet is bigger than an A5-sized sketchbook but much thinner.

The display size is big enough for palettes by the two side and still have enough canvas space to work with.

OnePlus Pad is slightly larger than the iPad Pro 11. OnePlus Pad is 455g and can fit a 9510 mAh battery while the iPad Pro 11 is 466g with a 7538 mAh battery.

OnePlus Pad is noticeably bigger than the MatePad Pro 10.8 (2021) with a 16:10 display. The smaller MatePad Pro is 5g heavier than the OnePlus Pad.

This is a tablet that is lightweight enough to be held in one hand for drawing, without the case of course. The curved sides also make the tablet more comfortable to hold for long periods of time.

That's the magnetic keyboard (full review here) which can only deploy the tablet at one angle.

For drawing purposes, you may want to get yourself a proper stand. I'm using the Parblo PR100 which is an excellent stand. Otherwise you'll have to lay the tablet flat on the table with the camera bump behind, or with the case with the keyboard behind, or just hand hold the tablet.

The tablet is just 6.54mm thin which is impressively thin. Overall finishing is well done and this feels like a premium tablet.

There are four big thin holes for the speaker with Dolby Atmos and the sound quality is fantastic: loud, clear, rich and has depth.

The USB-C port is for charging and file transfer with sad USB 2 speeds.

Battery life is around 10 to 11 hours. So unless you use the tablet 10 hours a day, this tablet can be considered to have a 2-day battery life.

The battery capacity is 9510 mAh. The advertised charging speed with the 67W charger is 0 to 100% in 80 minutes. I did not bother to test the charging speed because getting a full charge (2 days of use) under 2 hours is fast enough.

Charging the OnePlus Stylo is by attaching it magnetically to the side and corner of the tablet. When attaching, charging and Bluetooth pairing begins. Since the pen is always attached, you don't have worry about the battery life of the pen.

OnePlus Stylo

OnePlus Stylo is sold separately for USD 99.

The pen supports palm rejection, tilt and 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity.

The pen has a matte textured surface and is comfortable to hold. It's cylindrical except for a flat side for attaching to the side of the tablet for charging.

The point is firm and tapered. This is a hard plastic tip so when writing or drawing there will be the tapping sound.

The pen nib is actually the white part connected to a long piece of metal you have to screw into the pen.

There's one replacement pen nib included. At the time of this review, replacement nibs are not sold online yet by OnePlus or third party sellers.

The pen nib is quite smooth on the glass so that will take some time to get used to.

The pen is advertised with 2ms latency which means you should not see the lines chasing after the pen tip while drawing or writing. In reality, you have to use apps that can take advantage of the 2ms latency or else you will still see latency.

Most drawing apps don't run at high refresh rate so there will be latency. Medibang Paint seems to have lousy latency response. Clip Studio Paint, Sketchbook, Concepts, Infinite Painter have better latency response but there's still visible latency.

The pen actually supports shortcuts by tapping on the side but I don't know of any drawing apps that support that feature. That shortcut functionality currently only works with the default note taking app.

Drawing apps

Some popular drawing apps available from the Google Play Store are:

• Artflow
• Clip Studio Paint
• Concepts
• Infinite Painter
• Krita
• Medibang Paint
• Sketchbook
• Tayasui Sketches

There's no shortage of capable drawing apps on Android.

Drawing performance

These are line tests created with Medibang Paint.

1. Thin lines can be drawn easily even with a thick brush selected because the initial activation force is very low. This is quite a sensitive pen. Slow diagonal lines (red, hand-drawn) do not show obvious wobble or jitter. Interestingly, the black lines were drawn with a ruler actually show more wobble or jitter compared to the hand-drawn lines in red.

2. Lines are able to taper smoothly and sharply.

3. Line transition from thin to thick and back is smooth. There's no noticeable wobble or jitter with the diagonal lines here too.

4. Lines with consistent width can be drawn easily by maintaing consistent pressure.

5. Dots can be drawn easily.

These are the same line tests repeated with Clip Studio Paint. The results are similar.

For some reason, some brushes in Sketchbook do not taper smoothly and have the shoe-lace effect.

Some brushes in Infinite Painter also do not taper smoothly. Adding software smoothing can make the lines taper more smoothly and sharply but there will be more latency added.

So it seems like the pen performance may vary depending on the app and brush used.

This was drawn with Infinite Painter using the Coarse Inker brush and I did not face any issues while sketching this.

This was drawn with Medibang Paint. I like to draw vehicles to test drawing performance because there are many diagonal lines. I did not experience any issues while drawing this. There's no diagonal line wobble. I was able to join the lines properly with ease. Only downside with Medibang Paint is there's more latency compared to other drawing apps.

This exported JPEG file has dull red colour but the original drawing uses bright red. It turns out the display has two screen modes: Vivid and Natural. Vivid will enhance the vibrance for everything cause colour mismatch when you view your artwork on another display. If you want the colours from the tablet to match what you see on your computer screen or phone, you have to use the Natural screen mode (Settings - Brightness & Display - Screen Colour Mode - Natural)

This was drawn with Infinite Painter and the I used the Coarse Inker brush shown in the line tests above. I was able to drawn thin and thick lines I wanted without issues. This brush is still able to taper quite well. Look closely at how the strokes taper for the text.

This was drawn with Concepts app, my main illustration and sketching app. This app is extremely forgiving even if you have a lousy pen. This sketch was Soft Pencil for the lines and Pastel for the colours. I was able to join the lines without overshooting or leaving gaps. In other words, tracking for the pen is quite accurate, right up to the extreme edge. The line always appears directly under the pen tip regardless of how you hold the pen.

One downside or glitch with the pen is you can't vary the tilt effect while drawing and changing the angle of the pen. For example while drawing thin lines, you can't get broad strokes by suddenly tilting the pen low midway while drawing.

The overall drawing performance is better than I expected. There are some brushes or apps with glitches so you'll have to know the brushes or apps to avoid. If you're using drawing apps that have no issues, e.g. Medibang Paint, Clip Studio Paint, you can get predictable and consistent performance.

Performance

OnePlus Pad is equipped with the MediaTek Dimensity 9000, a 4nm processor for flagship 5G smartphones but unfortunately this tablet doesn't have 5G, cellular or even a microSD card slot.

I don't really care about benckmarks as long as the performance is smooth and there's no lag. OnePlus Pad has smooth performance and no lag even with loads of apps opened. The processor is good enough for smooth gaming with Genshin Impact at medium settings 60 FPS.

File management. Will you run out of storage?

The included 8GB RAM is sufficient for multi-tasking but 128GB storage feels lacking. Out of the box, the OS and files already take up 9GB out of the usable 111GB leaving you with only 102GB. Thank goodness the only bloatware included are Netflix and WPS Office so those don't take up much storage.

After installing the apps I use which took up 16GB, I'm left with only 95GB storage.

If you create artworks frequently, running out storage is a possibility in the future and you'll have to deal with the hassle of exporting your artworks out from the drawing app onto external storage or cloud drive. The tablet runs on Android 13 and all artworks that are saved locally are saved within the apps. You can't just copy a folder with your artworks and paste it to the external storage. Unless the drawing app has a way for you to export in bulk, the alternative is to export your artworks one by one and you really do not want to do that unless it's the last resort.

Internal storage has to be used by your artworks, installed apps, photos and other documents.

If you don't want to run out of space for your artworks, you may want to choose an app that supports cloud storage such as Medibang Paint Pro (subscription) or Clip Studio Paint (subscription). Krita (free) is good since you can save files into the folder directory. My main illustration app is Concepts which is based on vectors so the file sizes are small, that and backups are created to Google Drive.

Think about what's going to happen in the future if you want to upgrade to a new tablet, maybe a tablet from another company?

When I set up a spare Android tablet with data from the OnePlus Pad and only the artworks from Concepts app were copied over, but not those from Infinite Painter.

OxygenOS

This is OnePlus' first tablet so I can understand OxygenOS lacking in features. The company is marketing the hardware features so heavily that they didn't even talk much about OxygenOS on the tablet's product page. If OxygenOS has some killer feature, you won't even know, and seriously most people won't know what OxygenOS has to offer.

I'm gonna get the short list of pros out of the way first. OxygenOS looks good and runs smoothly and is stable. Direct file transfer with other Windows devices can be handled by Nearby Share. Smart Sidebar is a nice feature where you can swipe out from the right side to access your preferred apps.

Alright, let's talk about quirks and missing features:

1. The default file management app My Files has even few features compared to Google's basic Files app. There is no integration with Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox. However, it is possible save your artworks to cloud storage services. Krita for some reason could not save to Microsoft OneDrive.

2. When you Alt+Tab or swipe up, you get a huge preview of the app you were using seconds ago. I want to see more recent apps, not the app I was just using. And you can't Alt + Tab, Tab, Tab to move the focus to the next, next and next app.

3. There's no desktop UI mode like Samsung Dex or Apple Stage Manager. The tablet can't even output video signal, or do mirror mode, since the USB-C port only has USB 2 speeds. Shocking. It is possible to use the tablet as an external monitor via SuperDisplay and spacedesk.

4. The number of keyboard shortcuts provided for Android is fewer than what's provided by Samsung. I'm just nitpicking here since there are some keyboard shortcuts. But no shortcuts for Search, Settings, Page Up, Page Down, Home and End.

5. There's no way to rotate vertical Android apps to run in tablet landscape mode.

6. Only six apps can be added to the dock/taskbar even though there's clearly space for more.

7. Default screen recorder best settings is 1920 x 1372 resolution at 16Mbps. You can get better settings with apps such as REC - Screen Recorder for 1440P 48Mbps recording.

Many features are not available from apps from the Google Play Store.

Backup

OnePlus offers two backup options and both are not full backups. And this is probably enough reason to not buy the OnePlus Pad. I wish I'm kidding, but I'm not.

The first backup option allows you to backup Contacts, Preference settings and Apps (excluding data). This will create a backup file in this folder: Device storage/Android/data/com.oneplus.backuprestore/Backup. This backup allows you to transfer those files and settings to another OnePlus device.

The first backup option does not backup the data within the apps. Artworks saved within the drawing apps will not be backed up unless you're using cloud storage, or Krita where you can copy and paste the artworks elsewhere.

The first backup option does not backup your files and folders from internal storage. You'll have to copy and paste them out yourself.

The second backup option involves using Google Drive and this will backup Apps (excluding data), Photos and videos (synced to Google Photos), device settings and Google account data.

The scond backup option does not backup data within the apps, and does not backup your files and folders.

The backup option provided by Apple is through iCloud which will backup everything. Samsung offers several backup options and one option allows you to backup everything onto external storage.

Clearly, the backup options provided by OnePlus is not ideal, at least for me.

Conclusion

I am pleasantly surprised by the good drawing performance of the OnePlus Stylo. The pen is sensitive and fairly accurate except for the few problematic brushes from some apps. The line quality you can get from this pen is almost similar to the Apple Pencil and Samsung S Pen. The drawing experience is quite similar to the Apple Pencil since both pens have hard pen tips, but there are so many third party options for the Apple Pencil pen tips that can vary the experience.

Drawing performance is just one aspect of this tablet.

The design of the tablet is beautiful. Build quality is solid and the finishing feels premium. The display is vibrant, bright and sharp. The display is large but still lightweight enough for one hand use and drawing and is very compact even with the keyboard case. Sound quality is fantastic. Performance is fast, smooth and responsive.

There are a few downsides that bother me.

First would be the limited 128GB storage included without any microSD card slot for storage expansion.

OxygenOS in its current implementation will need more features to compete with iPadOS and Samsung One UI. The tablet operating systems from Apple and Samsung have gone through so many iterations that OnePlus will have a lot to catch up on. Many of the missing features can't be replaced by just installing third party app.

At the USD 479 price point, I can recommend the OnePlus Pad easily over the $499 iPad 10 (64GB) to people who are mostly drawing. The pen performance and drawing experience can compete with Apple. iPad's main advantage to visual content creators are the graphic design apps available, more specifically apps that can handle vector, layout and text.

Comparing this to the Samsung Galaxy tablets is not so straightforward. For the same price, you can actually get the older Samsung Tab S7 (2020) which has a lot more features but that tablet is already 3 years old. The Samsung Tab S8 tablets are still more expensive but you do get more features such as the microSD card slot, Samsung Dex, cloud storage integration, proper backups and included S Pen. You pay more but you get more too. So it really depends on how much you want to stretch your budget. The Samsung tablet is the better Android tablet thanks to Samsung One UI.

Pros and cons at a glance
+ Beautiful design
+ Premium feel
+ Comfortable to hold in hand
+ Display is big, but tablet is still lightweight (555g) and compact
+ 7:5 aspect ratio is good productivity with landscape and portrait orientation
+ Fantastic sound quality
+ Fast, smooth, responsive performance
+ Good gaming performance
+ Vibrant, bright, sharp display
+ 144Hz refresh rate
+ Face unlock is effective and fast
+ At least 10 hours battery life
+ Full charge under 2 hours
+ Pen is sensitive and fairly accurate (see cons)
+ Pen has no wobble or jitter with slow diagonal lines
+ Pen can be attached to the tablet for charging and pairing
+ Palm rejection works well
+ 8GB RAM included
+ Android 13
+ Pricing is reasonable for the design and performance
- 128GB is the only storage option easily available
- Tablet is only available in green colour
- No headphone jack
- No full backup options
- USB-C port with USB 2 transfer speed
- No video output from USB-C
- Oxygen OS as a tablet OS has very basic features
- Pen is sold separately
- No microSD card slot
- Glitches with brushes from certain apps
- No integration with cloud storage services
- Not possible to change tilt effect halfway while drawing
- Most apps cannot take advantage of the 2ms pen latency
- 7:5 aspect ratio will have huge black bars at the top and bottom for 16:9 video content

Availability

The OnePlus Pad, Stylo and Magnetic Keyboard can be purchased from OnePlus online store.

If you want to support my blog and the work I do, you can purchase the tablet with these affiliate links from Amazon US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP.

If you're in Singapore, you can find the tablet on Shopee SG and Lazada SG

Or support me on Patreon.