New budget Android tablet beats Samsung on screen, battery and price

If you’re thinking you need a new tablet in your life, you might rightly think some of the most well-known are far too expensive. Apple’s iPad is a household name, so much so that many of us simply say “iPad” when referring to any tablet computer, but the cheapest iPad Apple sells still rings up at £329.

If all you want to do is stream Netflix or Disney+, browse websites, find recipes and send emails, I have good news for you: Android tablets exist!

One of the newest Android tablets to be announced is the OnePlus Pad Lite, a £199 device that’s hitting the on August 14, and will go up for pre-order on OnePlus’s UK website from August 4.

£199 is a more reasonable price to pay for a new streaming screen, and a glance at the Samsung Galaxy A9 tablet that currently costs the same amount in the UK shows OnePlus is doing well to undercut that famous Android rival, offering more for your money with the new Pad Lite.

The OnePlus Pad Lite has a generous 11-inch IPS LCD screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio suitable for propping up and settling into the latest blockbuster. You get a pixel density of 1200 x 1920, which is HD, and a 90Hz refresh rate means text and apps will scroll smoother than on the 60Hz Galaxy Tab A9, whose RRP is £239 but is currently on sale for £199.

The Samsung tablet’s screen is also smaller at 8.7-inch, which is a win if you want to hold it in one hand, but amounts to a significantly diddier screen for watching videos on. Despite being smaller, the Tab A9 is also a smidge thicker than the 7.3mm OnePlus Pad Lite at 8mm, but in reality you won’t notice.

OnePlus also has Samsung beat when it comes to speakers. Though the Galaxy Tab A9 does well to pack two stereo speakers into its small frame, the Pad Lite offers four speakers, with the added bonus of Hi-Res audio support. That means that with the speakers or with Bluetooth headphones it can play the SBC, AAC, aptX, aptX HD and LDAC audio codecs.

That said, there’s no headphone jack, one thing the Tab A9 has over the OnePlus tablet.

In terms of longevity, it looks on paper as though OnePlus easily wins the fight. The Pad Lite has a 9,340mAh battery, not far off double the size of the A9’s 5,100mAh cell. Not only that, the Pad Lite can charge at 33W speeds compared to the 15W speeds of the Samsung, though there’s no charging brick in the box, only a USB-C cable.

The OnePlus Pad Lite also has a lot going for it when it comes to software, launching with Android 15 and OnePlus’s Oxygen OS 15.0.1 skin. This includes Open Canvas, a clever multitasking feature that makes it easier to flit between several open app windows. It also includes Google Kids Space, great if you want to share your tablet with the little ones but don’t want them to be able to access unsuitable content online.

The OnePlus Pad Lite comes with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage in its Wi-Fi only model for £199, which is £30 less than the Samsung Galaxy Tab A9 retails for.

You can pay £30 more - the same £239 RRP as the A9 - and get the Pad Lite with 8GB RAM, 128GB storage and LTE compatibility so you can access mobile networks (for a fee) when you don’t have access to Wi-Fi.