OnePlus Pad 4 hands-on review

Accessories

The OnePlus Pad 4 launches alongside three new companion accessories.

The first is the OnePlus Pad 4 Smart Keyboard, which now features a single, cantilevered design similar to Apple's Magic Keyboard for the iPad, instead of splitting into a keyboard and back cover with a kickstand like the OnePlus Pad 3 Smart Keyboard. It features a standard keyboard design along with an integrated trackpad. However, there is no USB port on the keyboard, so the charging cable for the tablet has to be plugged directly into the tablet, even when connected to the keyboard, causing it to stick out the side at an awkward height. There is also no backlighting.

The other accessory is the OnePlus Pad 4 Folio Case. Aside from fully protecting the tablet and providing a place to hang the stylus, the Folio Case also features a kickstand that can be set to different positions to adjust the angle of the tablet.

Finally, there's the Stylo Pro. It comes with two different tips, one meant for drawing and the other for writing. It feels well-built and well-balanced in hand. You can squeeze it to activate certain functions on screen, and it even provides haptic feedback for things like recreating the feeling of writing on paper. There is also a built-in speaker that recreates the sound of different drawing pens in the OnePlus Notes app. The latency and responsiveness of the stylus seemed good, although professional artists may have different opinions.

As for palm rejection, the touchscreen can ignore your palm on the screen for the stylus input. However, if you continue to keep your palm on the screen and try to, say, select another tool with your other hand, then the screen will ignore that as well. It can only accept one touch input and one stylus input at a time.

Battery and charging

The OnePlus Pad 4 has a 13,380mAh battery, most likely of the Li-polymer variety. This is a 10% increase in capacity over the previous generation model without changing the dimensions of the device. The device continues to have the same 80W fast charging as before.

Starting with the charging tests, the OnePlus Pad 4 can be topped up reasonably quickly. The numbers are close to those of the Pad 3 from last year, with the newer model being understandably a bit slower since it's filling up a larger battery with the same charging system.

In terms of battery life, you can expect similar results to the Pad 3. The bigger battery of the Pad 4 is also powering a more powerful chipset and a slightly brighter display, so the result should be broadly comparable to last year's model.

Speakers

The OnePlus Pad 4 has the same eight-speaker system as the Pad 3. This includes four woofers and four tweeters placed along the shorter sides.

Unfortunately, we don't have the Pad 3 with us to compare, and without having both devices side by side, it's difficult to say if the speaker performance has changed from last year's model, despite having the same hardware.

Looking at it in isolation, the OnePlus Pad 4 has good speaker performance. The speakers get plenty loud and sound reasonably spacious, although the latter quality is not as good these days since OnePlus abandoned Dolby Atmos. The sound is on the warmer side, but neither the low-end nor the high-end is especially notable. The sound also loses all its warmth at the highest volume level, as it's more focused on delivering maximum loudness than anything else.

One limitation of the speakers is that the stereo effect only works in landscape. You can hold it either way, and as long as the device is in landscape mode, the left and right channels will align correctly. However, if you hold the device in portrait, the speakers no longer offer proper stereo imaging, as now one channel is at the top and the other on the bottom, like with a phone, even though the tablet has a speaker grille near every corner. This is likely due to each speaker grille having a different woofer/tweeter configuration, and it would sound imbalanced if the stereo effect was maintained in portrait mode.

For wireless audio, you get support for all major codecs, including LHDC and aptX Adaptive. However, OnePlus still does not offer aptX Lossless on any of its devices. We couldn't even get bitrates higher than 500kbps to work on LHDC using OnePlus' own earbuds with this device.