It appears that OnePlus is either working on, or thinking of working on, a tablet to accompany its range of phone and wearable products.
Earlier this year, the company trademarked the term “OnePlus Pad” within the European Union in a listing first spotted by MySmartPrice. The filing doesn’t reveal much else, and on its own is no guarantee that the company is actually planning to release a tablet any time soon, but it does at least indicate some thought of moving into that space.
We’ve reached out to OnePlus to ask about the trademark, and will update this piece if and when we get a response.
In recent years, OnePlus has gone beyond its laser focus on flagship smartphones to offer a whole host of tech products. First, it created its own branded Bullet earbuds, before moving unexpectedly into the TV market. This year, it released the OnePlus Watch after previously spiking a fitness band all the way back in 2014, and it now has a whole range of smartphones catering to every budget from the cheap and cheerful OnePlus Nord N10 5G all the way up to the OnePlus 9 Pro.
The tablet market is notoriously hard to crack, however, and especially if you’re not Apple, with the iPad maker eating up over 30% of the market on its own. Samsung, Lenovo, Amazon and Huawei then share about 45% of the rest, leaving less than 25% of the market to everyone else.
To that end, it’s hard to know where OnePlus would be best served in the tablet space. Would the company be better off fighting Amazon’s Fire HD in the budget space, or going after the Apples and Samsungs of this world with a high-end product? And what exactly can OnePlus bring to a form factor that hasn’t exactly been notable for its innovation in recent years?
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We’ll have to wait and see. The company’s entry to the smartwatch space has certainly been a bruising one, however, with the OnePlus Watch receiving middling reviews across the board, including from us. “The forward thinking ideas and attention to detail that have come to define the company’s smartphones are just nowhere to be found here,” lamented our Buyer’s Advice Editor Thomas Deehan in his OnePlus Watch review.
Hopefully a tablet will fare better, if and when OnePlus enters the market.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.