Xiaomi Pad 5 6GB 128GB Wi-Fi Cosmic Gray

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The tablet doesn’t have a formal IP water resistance rating, which is rarely standard on tablets, but I’ve been impressed with its build quality during testing. These figures match some of the more expensive tablets I’ve tested, like the Lenovo Yoga Tab 13 and make the Xiaomi Pad 5 a great option for anyone who wants a tablet primarily for streaming video. The highlights of the Pad 5 display include 120Hz refresh rate, 10-bit color support, as well as HDR10 and Dolby Vision capabilities. Let's not forger the Smart Pen compatibility with 240Hz sampling and 4,096 pressure levels recognition.

The Xiaomi Pad 5 has three predefined Color presets - Vivid (previously known as Auto), Saturated, and Standard - each representing a specific color space. You can also enable Adaptive Colors - the same thing Apple calls True Tone - adjust the colors depending on the ambient light.We used the Pad 5 to test out several mid-range and top-end games, like Tropico, Northgard and Call of Duty: Mobile, and found they ran well. We could bump up the graphical settings to max in games that had them, and rarely found stutters or lag that affected the gameplay at all. In short, the not-quite-top-end chipset didn’t matter much. The Redmi Pad and Xiaomi Pad 5 both provide Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, and Wi-Fi Direct support. In terms of actual sound quality, rather than loudness. Side-by-side, the Xiaomi Pad 5 has the edge with a slightly better bass response and a richer overall sound. The Chinese version of the Pad 5 supports up to 33W though and we saw no reason why the international version should be limited to 22.5W. We had a Xiaomi 33W charger, so we decided to test if this global tablet still supports 33W and just ships with a slower power adapter, or if it's a hardware limitation. Well, it turned out the Pad 5 charges faster with the 33W adapter - the tablet reached 37% in half an hour. 30min charging test (from 0%)

When not side-by-side, I don’t think most people would notice a difference. They both score a solid 4/5. But out of the box, like Samsung devices, it tries to push Xiaomi’s services a little bit too hard. The initial shortcut to the video app takes you to the Xiaomi store, not the Play Store. The same is true for files, calendar and pretty much everything else. This is easily fixed, but it’s an annoyance nonetheless. When it comes to audio loudness, the Redmi Pad is rated at -23.9 LUFS (Very Good), while the Xiaomi Pad 5 has a rating of -24.4 LUFS (Very Good). This setup is quite loud with incredibly balanced output - the Pad 5 scored a Very Good mark on our loudness test. The 8,720mAh battery in the Xiaomi Pad 5 sounds rather average for a slate of its size, but during our time with the device we learnt to appreciate the actual lasting power of this tablet.

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The Xiaomi Pad 5 has a large enough battery of its 11-inch caliber - it's a 8,720mAh cell. The global version ships with a 22.5W charger though we are not sure if this is the maximum charging support as the Chinese version can do 33W but it has no bundled charger. Still, app supply is the key reason we recommend the Xiaomi Pad 5 over the Huawei MatePad 11 - both have similar specs and designs, but with the latter unable to access the Google Play Store (and thus relying on other, less reliable methods for installing apps), the Xiaomi gets points for ease of use. Battery life I’m also still not convinced about Android on tablets in general. The OS and its apps are all optimised for phone-sized devices and its creative offering doesn’t come close to matching what you’ll get on iPad OS, which has cool services like Affinity Photo and Designer. Hopefully this will be fixed when Google’s tablet focussed Android 12L software gets rolled out to general consumers. It’s not often I finish writing an Android tablet review where I’ve had plenty of nice things to say about it. Tablets running Google’s mobile OS that are actually worth recommending are few and far between, but the Xiaomi Pad 5 has hit its brief and then some.

In contrast, the Xiaomi Pad 5 is equipped with the more robust Qualcomm Snapdragon 860 (7nm) chipset, featuring an octa-core CPU setup (1×2.96 GHz Kryo 485 Gold & 3×2.42 GHz Kryo 485 Gold & 4×1.78 GHz Kryo 485 Silver) and an Adreno 640 GPU. The 8MP front-facing and 13MP rear cameras are both… well, this is a tablet, so you shouldn’t come in expecting smartphone-level imaging. Saying that, there’s clearly some of Xiaomi’s image post-processing at play: snaps looked fairly bright, with colors that looked bold for tablet photography, though some selfies could look overexposed. Software A full charge requires 2 hours sharp, not bad for a tablet. If you own the 33W charger, the full charge time drops down to 1 hour and 38 minutes. Time to full charge (from 0%)

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The screen isn’t OLED, but at this price that’s not surprising, and during testing I was surprised how well it performed. This is the kind of tablet you can definitely use two-handed or prop up in a stand or case, but unlike your iPad mini, it’s not ideal for holding in one hand and navigating with the other, due to its size. Display This, of course, presents a few problems. The first of which is that the app icon layout on the homescreen utilises a lot of blank space, especially in landscape orientation. There’s not a lot in the way of widgets, either, and I also would have liked to see a makeshift desktop mode akin to Samsung’s Dex, which could have helped alleviate some of these problems. Xiaomi Pad 5 review: Verdict If you want to do creative work on the Pad 5 and don’t mind the limited app offering be warned: I had some issues when I tried to do more hardcore digital creative work on it. Loading Krita and creating a large scale, multi-layer digital project the device ran, but it did on occasion chug, with there being a minor, but frequent delay between me enacting a command and it being rendered on screen. At this price that’s hardly surprising, however. The Redmi Pad is fueled by a non-removable Li-Po 8000 mAh battery, compatible with 18W wired charging.