OnePlus has been making Android phones for almost a decade, but it has yet to dip its toe in the tablet market. That’s about to change, though. The company, a subsidiary of Chinese mega-firm Oppo, has posted a teaser on its website showing a very green tablet with a prominent rear-facing camera.
OnePlus has an event scheduled for Feb. 7 where we expect to hear all about the new OnePlus 11 and OnePlus Buds Pro 2, but the “OnePlus Pad” might make an appearance as well, reports TechRadar. The tablet has an aluminum frame with narrow bezels around the display, and if you look closely at the teaser, there’s a small front-facing camera at the top above the screen. Aside from that, we don’t know anything specific about the hardware — not even the size.
The “smooth without equal” tagline in the promo image suggests it will have a high-refresh display, but that could also just be a clunky translation referring to something like the internal specifications. OnePlus is known for always jumping on the latest Qualcomm chips. We expect the OnePlus 11 (see below) will be one of the first phones to ship with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip. A tablet with the same hardware could be very interesting, as we’re not expecting Samsung to refresh its high-end tablet lineup until later in 2023.
For years, we’ve seen Android OEMs getting out of the tablet market one by one as Google continued to ignore large form factors. Currently, only Samsung and Amazon have significant tablet offerings, with Samsung offering extremely expensive but powerful tablets while Amazon focuses on the low-end. The tablet market desperately needs something in between, and the OnePlus Pad might be it.
This is the right time for an OEM like OnePlus to take a risk on tablets, too. Google has finally started paying attention to large-format Android again. With Android 12L last year, Google added important multitasking and UI features for tablets and foldables, and Android 13 enhanced that support. That means OnePlus can build a tablet without creating its own tablet-optimized interface from scratch. Android still has a way to go before it catches up with iPadOS, but things are much better than they were just a year ago.
Now read:
