The Android Tablet Problem

(upbeat music) - So, in the wake of probably the biggest update to iPadOS in its entire history, I've also been testing this amazing Android tablet, and it's kind of reminded me that now, more than ever, these things kind of have a problem. I just wanted to get all of my thoughts into one video.

Now, the reason I bring up the iPad is because it actually has a version of the same problem: we have smartphones, and we have computers. And so very few people actually need a device in between a phone and a computer. And this could be addressed if maybe there was something special that you could do on a tablet that you can't do on a phone and can't do on a computer. But that is really niche.

So, take the Apple version of this, right? Obviously, the iPhone is extremely popular. Most developers make their apps for the phone because it's easy—one version of the app, millions of customers. And so there are very few, actually good, dedicated iPad apps, like built from the ground up for the iPad.

Now, of course, it's not zero. There are some really cool ones. I love Pixelmator for iPad, for example. Procreate is amazing, and there are a few others that are really dialed iPad apps, but that is a minority. Many, many iPad apps are just gently scaled-up iPhone apps, and they're fine at this point. And many others are literally just iPhone apps with no changes made at all, with just the little 2x button to the side to make 'em bigger. It's actually been a running joke on this channel how long there has been no iPad app for Instagram, which, like, think about that. It's 2025, and this is the absolute best this trillion-dollar company with tens of thousands of employees is willing to do. It's actually making headlines now that Meta has actually made a WhatsApp app for iPad, that they might also make an Instagram app for iPad. Either way, the point is, even on the most popular tablet in the world, most of the apps that work on it are just fine, and a tiny fraction of them are really, really good.

So that's why so many reviews of the highest-end Pro iPads for years have kind of all been along the same lines: which is like, this hardware is amazing, the chip is incredibly powerful, again, the screen is so nice, but I can't actually do anything special over a base iPad or even an iPhone because iPadOS is still iPadOS, and the app situation is still exactly what it was before. You can go back and watch even my own iPad Pro reviews. That's what I was saying; I was not the only one. And now this new iPadOS 26 does feel like a game changer, but we'll get to that in a separate video; subscribe to see that. But the point is, the value that you can get out of an iPad has always felt limited. It felt capped.

But you clicked on an Android video. So this here is the newest and latest and greatest, best Android tablet that I have used. It's ridiculously good; this is the OnePlus Pad 3, and every possible thing you could want out of a high-end Android tablet, this thing's got it. Crazy powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite chip paired with 12 or 16 gigs of RAM and up to half a terabyte of storage. It's super fast, ultra-responsive, and it has a 13.2-inch, 144-hertz display. These bezels are, you know, pretty thin and even all the way around; it hides the selfie camera. It's a 7:5 aspect ratio, so it's a little taller than a 16:9 widescreen, and it's a super sharp 315 pixels per inch. It's almost 3.4k tall. The whole thing is also just under six millimeters thin. So it's visually just as impressive as any other piece of thin, powerful tech. And yet somehow, inside this, they've packed a 12,140 milliamp-hour battery.

And this battery is so awesome. This thing just lasts and lasts forever. Just for context, the last two OnePlus Pads both had around a 9,500 milliamp-hour battery, and they had pretty good battery life. The large 13-inch M4 iPad Pro has about a 10,000 milliamp-hour battery. This is 12,000. So it just lasts and lasts for hours and hours of use, plus has been optimized for some particularly impressive standby time, which is actually important for tablets 'cause you know how they sometimes go a while without being used, and then you go to pick it up again, and it's dead, which is annoying. So their stat is if you charge it to 100% and then turn it off, then two years later turn it back on, it will still have power, which is ridiculous and maybe also a little bit of proof of the Android tablet problem. But my stat is I put this in my backpack with 85% after using it for a bit, and then the next day, 24 hours later, took it out of my backpack to use it again—84%. So that's without any sort of battery saver features or anything like that. And the cherry on top is it fast charges at 80 watts, and it still somehow has room for some of the best speakers I've heard in any tablet, including iPad Pros. It's actually eight speakers in total, quad woofers and quad tweeters. They get really loud with very little distortion. Kind of seems to bend physics a little bit that so much sound can come out of this thing. And this whole thing, the price—$699, which is sick—and that includes the 80-watt charger in the box.

So great screen, great chip, great battery, great speakers. It's got cameras, one on the back, one on the front, who cares? But this whole tablet is a great deal, and yet, who's gonna buy one? Because the exact same problem I talked about earlier is still true. Like, most people have a phone, and then for bigger tasks, a computer. So the tablet has to do something that both a phone and a computer can't do.

Now, I realize we are in the bubble here of tech YouTube videos. So there will be people in the comments of this video who are like, "Oh, this is, finally, this is the exact tablet I was waiting for. I can finally play this specific game on a bigger screen at 60 fps." Totally, that's valid. But if you think about the typical person who's maybe using a tablet for, you know, some web browsing, some light YouTube watching or Netflix or whatever and some work stuff, a couple of Zoom calls here and there, clearly this can do all that, but it's also definitely overkill.

So this is an amazing, super powerful, kind of beautiful razor-thin tablet that slots into a bag and can go anywhere with you and last forever and has great speakers. It's the whole package. And yet it kind of doesn't stand a chance to sell a whole lot and become mainstream. And that is the Android tablet problem in a nutshell. It's basically that no matter how great an Android tablet is, it will be incredibly niche.

I think it's actually kind of amazing how narrow I've seen the use case become for these tablets for the past couple of years. Like, I feel like 90% of the iPads I've seen since 2020 have been either at a point-of-sale system in a store where they like flip it around and ask you how much you wanna tip, or in the hands of a child who is just about to cry and now it's playing "CoComelon" at full blast.

So in the Android world, you know, I don't know if there's a solution to this problem. Obviously, this has been the double-edged sword of Android for a while. There's all the upside of all the huge variety of choices you have, of hardware, of aspect ratios, of foldables, flippables, tri-folds—it's all sweet. But that also means that no single one of them is easy to recommend to large groups of people, and that the experience across all of them is not gonna be as consistent.

Okay, so I think now that the casuals have probably tuned out at this point in the video and the true tech nerds are still here. For those of you considering actually buying this OnePlus Pad 3, I got a few more things that you might wanna know. So this display, like I said, it's huge and it's sharp and it's 144 hertz, which is awesome, but it's not AMOLED like those Galaxy Tabs. Those Samsung tablets, which are more expensive, definitely do have nicer-looking screens. So if you're in it for the media, you're gonna want to go AMOLED, but this is still a nice, fast LCD.

And then also, OxygenOS here, just like on the phones, there's a lot of great features. They've just added their AI stuff here, but there's also a lot of copying iOS left and right still. I think it's hilarious that they continue doing the Dynamic Island bit even though there's no camera cutout on the tablet. But hey, they've also gone the extra mile with all the accessories. There is a stylus, there is a keyboard dock, there is a magnetic folio case. You can look at it as copying, but it's also kind of just feels like offering as many equivalents as possible. So it makes the pain of switching from an iPad and a stylus and a keyboard dock as minimal as possible. The battery life is awesome, but if you use this tablet like I do, which is high brightness most of the time and a lot of high-energy stuff, or if you game a lot, you can still run through it in a day—seven or eight hours of screen-on time is what you should expect. But its superpower really is the standby time.

But anyway, I just wanna leave this video by closing out with a question for you guys. If you have a tablet, I just wanna know what you use it for? What do you use your tablet for? And if you don't have one, what would you use a tablet for if you got one? I kind of suspect a lot of the answers below are going to be like single-use things—things that the tablets we like to check out are very overpowered for. But yeah, it's cool. We can acknowledge that these are super awesome pieces of tech, but that also most people probably won't need to be buying them.

Thanks for watching. (chilled music) Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.