ASUS Pad Review: A pleasing OLED tablet that leaves its true potential untapped

Quick Take

ASUS isn’t the first name that comes to mind when I think about Android tablets. Its laptops certainly are, like ROG, Zenbook, and TUF series. But tablets? My mind tends to go toward Samsung, Apple, Xiaomi, or OnePlus. After around two weeks with the ASUS Pad, I can tell the company understood the hardware side of the equation rather well.

The 12.2-inch OLED is excellent, performance is comfortably above what I need from a mid-range tablet, and the speakers punched above my expectations. I also ended up using the ASUS GlideX software a lot more than I expected. But it has some problems hidden underneath.

The ASUS Pad can handle quite a bit of productivity, yet its software doesn’t always make those abilities easy enough to access. Multitasking works once you’ve arranged everything, but getting there lacks the immediacy and polish I expect from a tablet this capable.

The ASUS Pad isn’t a bad tablet with a nice display. It’s a good tablet whose software stops its strongest hardware from going as far as it could. I reviewed the Indian retail 8GB/256GB model, which ASUS supplied. During my test period, I was evaluating it at 38,990 INR (roughly $403).

ASUS Pad specs: A peek inside the shell

ASUS Pad design and build: Big, light, and thoughtfully put together

Quick take: The ASUS Pad is undeniably large. Still, its slim construction, premium materials, thoughtful 3:2 shape, and excellent included case cover a lot of ground.

At 12.2 inches, the ASUS Pad is a large tablet. Add another inch, and you’re firmly entering small-laptop territory. Even then, ASUS keeps the chassis to 6.5mm thick and around 523 grams, so carrying it around never becomes particularly burdensome. It’s not quite as thin as the iPad Pro or the Samsung Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra, but the difference is still worth pointing out.

The footprint is what you’ll notice more often. Holding it one-handed is possible, but doing so for a long time gets tiring.

Its 3:2 aspect ratio was a pleasant surprise. The extra vertical room is lovely while browsing sites, reading, working in documents, or scrolling through long pages. This makes the Pad more than just an oversized video player, giving the display a useful productivity shape.

My Pure White review unit also looks great. The construction combines lightweight materials with a reassuringly rigid chassis, and I didn’t notice flex, creaking, or poor panel alignment. ASUS includes a protective case in the box, and it ended up being one of my favorite parts of the package. It supports multiple orientations and adds just enough versatility that I kept it attached most of the time.

The symmetrical bezels deserve a mention as well, with the uniformity helping the Pad look considerably more expensive. I’d have liked a fingerprint reader. Face unlock was reliable enough during my testing, but integrating a fingerprint sensor into the power button would have made unlocking far more convenient. On the other hand, the microSD slot is excellent to have. I regularly moved my own 32GB card between the Pad and my Kodak Charmera, and expandable storage remains tremendously practical on a media-focused device.

Design score: 8/10

ASUS Pad display and audio: The reason I’d want one

Quick take: The 12.2-inch 144Hz dual-layer OLED is the star of the ASUS Pad, pairing excellent contrast and smoothness with speakers that are far better than I expected at this price.

The screen is one of the best aspects of the ASUS Pad. It’s a 12.2-inch, 2800 x 1840 OLED with a 3:2 aspect ratio and 144Hz refresh rate. ASUS India describes it as a dual-layer OLED. The company says the architecture stacks two OLED emission layers to improve brightness, efficiency, and panel longevity. If all of this sounds familiar, the global variant of this tablet is advertised with Tandem OLED. So it’s unclear if the tech remains the same here. But all you need to know is that it’s really good.

Blacks are properly deep, colors have plenty of punch without being blown out, and contrast is solid too. ASUS quotes 600 nits for typical brightness and up to 2,000 nits for HDR highlights, and visibility outdoors was generally strong during my testing. The glossy surface is highly reflective, so you’ll still see lamps and bright windows staring back at you.

The 144Hz refresh rate is more than a spec-sheet flourish. ASUS actually lets the interface run at 144Hz, and supported games can take advantage of it too. Scrolling, animations, and touch input all have the immediate response I want from a modern tablet. It isn’t an adaptive LTPO-style implementation, though.

The unusual aspect ratio cuts both ways. Browsing, documents, reading, and drawing benefit from the taller canvas, while widescreen video leaves noticeably thick bars. We also spent some time illustrating in Sketchbook. ASUS doesn’t ship the Pad with its compatible Pen, so the illustration produced was drawn entirely by hand. The experience made me want the stylus more, because the responsiveness and screen quality are absolutely good enough for casual creative work.

The quad-speaker system complements the display nicely. It gets decently loud and remains clear even in a busy cafe. Dolby Atmos helps create convincing stereo separation, vocals stay crisp, and there’s very little distortion near maximum volume. Bass doesn’t hit especially hard, but it avoids the muddy presentation inexpensive tablet speakers often fall into.

Display and audio score: 9/10

ASUS Pad performance: The Dimensity 8300 is plenty

MediaTek’s Dimensity 8300 is a good match for this tablet. Regular navigation is fast, applications open quickly, and the Pad had no trouble keeping several apps alive during my daily use. The 8GB of LPDDR5X memory isn’t extravagant, but I never found it restrictive for normal browsing, documents, media, and gaming.

My benchmark results looked like this:

The CPU result puts it slightly ahead of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S10 FE in our comparison, which returned 1,365 single-core and 3,895 multi-core. It also has a sizable advantage over the OnePlus Pad Go 2’s Dimensity 7300 Ultra. Meanwhile, Apple’s A16 remains substantially quicker.

The stress test tells how consistent the chip is. It retained 91.6% of its peak performance across 20 loops while only reaching 40 degrees Celsius. That’s a very respectable result for a thin tablet and matches my real-world experience: sustained loads didn’t turn the chassis into a hot plate.

Gaming backed that up. Call of Duty Mobile ran at up to 120fps, while Zenless Zone Zero generally hovered around 55fps at High settings before dropping closer to 50fps during heavier stretches. Medium settings delivered the smoother experience for longer sessions. The physical size was a bigger gaming obstacle for me than the processor. I’m simply more comfortable playing on a phone or controller. People accustomed to tablet gaming will probably adapt much faster.

Performance score: 8/10

ASUS Pad software: Where the ASUS Pad loses me

Quick Take: Android 16 runs smoothly and stays pleasantly light. Though ASUS makes multitasking harder to access than it should be on a tablet this large and capable.

This is the section that ultimately hurt the final scores. ASUS hasn’t buried Android under an enormous skin. Android 16 here is relatively light; there isn’t much bloatware, I didn’t encounter advertising, and elements such as the separated notifications and Quick Settings panels make reasonable use of the larger display.

You also get the rest of the Android goodies like Gemini integration and Circle to Search, which is handy when you’re looking at a big page full of information. The trouble starts when I want to move beyond one app. The Pad has sufficient processing power and screen area to make multitasking worthwhile. But unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to actually use more than one app at a time.

Samsung has spent years refining its split-screen workflow, and other Android manufacturers have developed gesture-driven options. So ASUS oddly falls behind in this aspect. I shouldn’t have to stop and think about how to get two apps onto a 12.2-inch screen. Multitasking should become muscle memory on a device of this size.

That said, I did still end up working on this tablet. I edited portions of this review on it, used long documents, browsed with multiple apps in play, and generally found the hardware comfortable for a couple of hours of productivity. The processor can handle it, and the display is practically built for it too. But the software simply needs to tap into this.

There are some rough edges elsewhere too. My prerelease software had several UI problems, and ASUS pushed a hotfix that cleared up most of them remarkably quickly. That’s encouraging, but I still couldn’t find a clear long-term Android and security-update commitment from ASUS.

Software score: 6/10

GlideX is the exception, and it’s excellent

If split-screen or floating window is something you don’t care about, ASUS has another option that keeps it in the productivity race. ASUS’s best productivity software isn’t really part of Android; rather, it built the feature itself. The GlideX app is a lifesaver. Through this software, you get access to screen extension, mirroring, cross-device control, file transfer, clipboard sharing, remote access, and several other PC/mobile integration tools through GlideX.

This immediately makes the tablet feel intuitive to use. The company also supports wired USB and wireless connections depending on the feature. I mostly used the ASUS Pad as a second display for my laptop and desktop, and it worked brilliantly. There was some latency wirelessly, but nothing disruptive for documents, browser windows, or secondary tools. A wired connection was noticeably smoother.

The best bit was how naturally my mouse moved between displays. Once everything was connected, the Pad simply became another screen on my desk with the added bonus of touch support. Another nifty feature was being able to drop files, apps, and media quickly between the ASUS Pad and my desktop PC.

File transfer and screen mirroring were useful too, and setup only required GlideX on the Windows machine. It’s one of those features I expected to test once for the review and then forget about, but I kept using it. It’s kind of ironic that GlideX shows that ASUS understands cross-device productivity extremely well. I just wish the Pad’s own multitasking interface had the same immediacy.

ASUS Pad battery life: Big capacity, reliable endurance

Quick Take: The 9,000mAh battery comfortably lasts a full working day and can stretch to two under lighter use, while 45W charging keeps downtime reasonable.

The 9,000mAh battery comfortably got me through a day, including days when I played plenty of games. Under more normal mixed use, I usually saw around seven to eight hours of screen time. Lighter usage stretched the gap between charges to roughly two days. Streaming video is particularly gentle on the battery, though games obviously hit harder.

ASUS bundles its 45W USB-C adapter, and I saw roughly the company’s claimed 50% charge in around 30 minutes. A full charge took me about an hour and a half. Third-party USB-PD chargers worked well during testing too. The numbers aren’t particularly impressive in the tablet market. It’s basically average, and I’m not really complaining.

Battery score: 8/10

ASUS Pad cameras: Keep your expectations sensible

Quick Take: Just good enough for quick snapshots and documents. So expect the usual tablet compromise.

Tablet cameras rarely determine whether I’d buy one, which is fortunate here. The 13MP rear camera is acceptable for scanning paperwork, QR codes, or taking an occasional reference photo. One of my outdoor portrait samples looked reasonable, with decent colors. Still, autofocus is hit or miss at times, so images can come out soft.

The 5MP front camera is weaker. It handled meetings adequately, and its landscape placement is sensible, but photos are visibly grainy even in decent lighting. The individual selfie I took showed limited fine detail. Face unlock, thankfully, proved quicker and more reliable than the camera quality itself suggests.

Should you buy?

For around $400, I think the ASUS Pad is a strong mid-range tablet contender. The Dimensity 8300 is fast enough for demanding games and genuine productivity. You also get reliable battery life, solid speakers, handy microSD card support, and an included case. GlideX is easily one of the best reasons to buy it if you regularly work from a Windows machine.

There are alternatives from established tablet makers like Samsung and Xiaomi. Though the software and polish are ultimately what limit the ASUS Pad from a higher score. I can open demanding games, edit long documents, turn it into another monitor, sketch on its OLED canvas, and work across multiple apps. ASUS has built hardware capable of doing all of those things.

So the software should make taking advantage of that capability easier. For gaming, especially competitive titles, document editing, reading, and lots of multimedia consumption, the ASUS Pad remains an appealing tablet. The OLED alone gives it something special in this segment. It just leaves enough potential unused that I can’t call it one of my favorite mid-range tablets… at least not yet.

Why not try?

Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE: Samsung’s tablet software is much more mature, and its split-screen implementation was one of the highlights of our review. You also get an included S Pen and a clearly defined software-support commitment. The ASUS Pad has a much nicer OLED panel and stronger benchmark performance.

OnePlus Pad Go 2: OnePlus offers another large-screen Android option with good battery life and capable everyday performance. Its LCD can’t compete with the ASUS Pad’s OLED, and Digital Trends also found its own large-screen software imperfect, so this is more of an alternative ecosystem choice than an outright fix for ASUS’s biggest weakness.

Apple iPad (11th Gen): Apple’s entry-level iPad sits surprisingly close to the ASUS Pad in price and makes a stronger case if you care about app quality, accessory support, and a more mature tablet ecosystem. The A16 chip also gives it plenty of performance for everyday work and gaming, but the ASUS Pad fights back with its smoother 144Hz OLED display, expandable storage, and more generous hardware package.

How I tested the ASUS Pad

I used the retail Indian 8GB/256GB ASUS Pad for approximately two weeks. My testing included web browsing, document editing, streaming, illustration in Sketchbook, video calls, GlideX screen extension and mirroring, microSD use, and gaming with Call of Duty Mobile and Zenless Zone Zero.

Synthetic testing included Geekbench 6, AnTuTu v12, 3DMark Wild Life Extreme, Wild Life Extreme Stress Test, Steel Nomad Light, and Solar Bay. I also tested charging with the bundled 45W adapter and third-party USB-PD hardware.

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

Does the ASUS Pad have an OLED display?

Yes. The Indian ASUS Pad T3201 uses a 12.2-inch 2800 x 1840 dual-layer OLED panel with a 3:2 aspect ratio and a 144Hz refresh rate. ASUS lists 600 nits typical brightness and up to 2,000 nits peak HDR brightness.

Is the ASUS Pad good for gaming?

Yes, particularly for a mid-range tablet. Call of Duty Mobile reached 120fps during my testing, while Zenless Zone Zero typically ran around 55fps at High settings before falling into the low-50s under heavier loads. Its 91.6% 3DMark stress-test stability is also encouraging for longer sessions.

Does the ASUS Pad support a stylus?

Yes. ASUS lists support for ASUS Pen 2.0 and newer compatible styluses, but a pen wasn’t included with my review unit. ASUS does include a protective case in the retail package.

Can the ASUS Pad be used as a second monitor?

Yes. ASUS GlideX lets the Pad work as an extended or mirrored display for a PC. I found the feature particularly useful, with wired operation producing the smoothest experience.

Does the ASUS Pad have expandable storage?

Yes. There’s a microSD slot supporting cards up to 1TB, which is increasingly uncommon and particularly valuable for a tablet used for media or creative files.

What is the biggest weakness of the ASUS Pad?

For me, it’s multitasking accessibility. Performance isn’t the problem. The interface simply doesn’t make split-screen and multi-app workflows as immediate and intuitive as the best tablet software from Samsung and some competing Android brands.