Oppo has unveiled a compact tablet that aims to take the fight directly to Apple’s iPad mini, squeezing flagship hardware into a device small enough to hold in one hand. The Pad Mini, built around an 8.8-inch OLED screen, pairs a top-end processor with a large battery in a body just 5.46 millimetres thick, and it is due to go on sale on October 29 at a price of around $1,001.
The screen is the centrepiece of the pitch. It offers a 2.5K resolution of 2520 by 1680 pixels, a 144Hz adaptive refresh rate for smooth scrolling and gaming, and peak brightness of up to 1,600 nits, while a matte finish is meant to cut reflections and give a more paper-like feel when writing with a stylus. That combination is unusual in a tablet this small, where makers usually trade screen quality for portability, and Oppo is clearly betting that buyers who want a premium display will not want to carry a full-sized slate to get one.
Underneath, the Pad Mini runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chip, built on a 3-nanometre process, with ColorOS 16 based on Android 16 and Wi-Fi 7 support. In practice that should mean the device handles games, streaming and everyday productivity work without the lag that often holds smaller tablets back, and it positions the Pad Mini as a genuine small alternative to larger flagship tablets rather than a cut-down companion device.
Elsewhere, the tablet carries a 13-megapixel rear camera and an 8-megapixel front camera for photographs and video calls, and its 8,000mAh battery supports 67W wired fast charging, a generous capacity for something so thin. It will come in a single configuration with 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage. Whether buyers are willing to pay around $1,000 for a compact Android tablet remains the open question, but Oppo has at least made the case that small no longer has to mean second best.
