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

Product Information

As in Xiaomi’s phones, and lots of other tablets for that matter, there is a range of modes for changing how the screen looks - you can adjust the color temperature, blue light and ambient light. Some of these can be used to simply make the screen look more appealing, but others are useful for people with sight problems to increase ease of viewing. Specs, performance and camera The Xiaomi Pad 5 does support the Xiaomi active pen which offers palm rejection and pressure sensitivity.

In terms of Bluetooth, the Redmi Pad features Bluetooth 5.2, A2DP, and LE, while the Xiaomi Pad 5 offers Bluetooth 5.0, A2DP, and LE. 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. Colour accuracy is solid. In the tablet’s out of the box settings, I detected a 6870k colour temperature, which is suitably close to the 6500k ideal, and means the colours are only slightly cool. The tablet also has calibration options in its settings which lets you tweak the temperature to your liking.

The Xiaomi Pad 5 is a powerful Android tablet which aims to let users 'Do it better', whether its Entertainment, Productivity or Gaming. 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 ace up Xiaomi’s sleeve in making its Pad 5 a useful work device is MIUI for Pad, the software it uses. This is a fork of MIUI, the software used in Xiaomi phones, which in itself is a fork of Google’s Android.

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 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. SoftwareThe 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. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 860 chipset handles the processing duties, and in the UK the Xiaomi Pad 5 comes with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of expandable storage. It has two cameras – one on the front above the screen and another on the rear – and you have a choice of two colours: Cosmic Grey and Pearl White. Xiaomi Pad 5 review: Price and competition Performance is exceptional for the price. The iPad and its A13 Bionic chipset still has the edge, but not by nearly as much as I was expecting. With a Geekbench 5 single-core score of 662 and a multi-core processing result of 2,773, the Xiaomi Pad 5 is rapid. Paired with the 120Hz display, this makes for a tablet that feels as smooth as its top-scoring benchmarks suggest – every other low-priced Android tablet we’ve tested is left languishing in the dirt. Gaming puts an even bigger drain on the battery. Streaming games over GeForce Now the tablet discharged an average of 22-25% of its battery. Taking things offline and playing games from the Play Store the tablet performed slightly better shedding an average of 18-20% per hour. This means you’re not going to want to rely on it as a mobile games station when travelling long distances. 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

The Xiaomi Pad 5 uses the Snapdragon 860 chipset - that’s not quite as powerful as the M1 in the iPad Pro (2021) range or the Snapdragon 865 Plus in the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 series, but it still provides lots of processing power, and beats out many other tablets.One of the Xiaomi Pad 5's key features is its 11" LCD screen. To be precise, it's a 10.9-inch IPS LCD panel of 2,560 x 1,600 pixels making for 16:10 aspect ratio. The pixel density is 274ppi, in line with the competition. I found the Pad 5 still offered solid performance with day-to-day use, however. The tablet’s smooth to use, and opens apps with no noticeable delays. Streaming HDR video via Wi-Fi ran smoothly and I never had any issue playing games on GeForce Now and Xbox Game Pass. The Redmi Pad is fueled by a non-removable Li-Po 8000 mAh battery, compatible with 18W wired charging. Let's start with the panel. It's a bright and colorful IPS LCD with native 10-bit color support. This means it can show up to 1 billion colors. This setup is quite loud with incredibly balanced output - the Pad 5 scored a Very Good mark on our loudness test.

Both tablets have excellent high-resolution displays, but… The Xiaomi Pad 5 is 25% brighter, has 120Hz refresh rate (+25%) and offers better colour accuracy. The extra brightness also helps colours to feel more vibrant when playing games in brightly lit rooms. 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 The Xiaomi Pad 5 is a well balanced performance Android tablet with an Qualcomm Snapdragon 860 Octacore processor based on a 7nm process technology, which makes multi-tasking quite effective on this platform. It comes with an Adreno 640 GPU which makes rendering of games and graphics intensive applications easy. With 6 GB of RAM and UFS 3.1 storage of 128 GB or 256 GB, installing and playing even heavy games like BGMI or COD mobile are simple - and they run without any hitches at high graphics settings. With a 120 Hz display, some games really deliver a very smooth experience, e.g. Altos Adventure. The large display helps the user comfortably handle the game on screen controls and the quad speaker setup with dynamic mapping as per orientation lets the user comfortably swap positions after long hours of play without affecting the game sound. There are other changes - it’s easy to open multiple apps at once, whether that’s as two apps side-by-side or as one app in a bubble appearing over another. In addition, the user interface has been redesigned to look better on a larger screen, and Xiaomi is reportedly optimizing top apps to work well on the bigger screen. The screen isn’t OLED, but at this price that’s not surprising, and during testing I was surprised how well it performed.When not side-by-side, I don’t think most people would notice a difference. They both score a solid 4/5. 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.