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

Product Information

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. It doesn’t have the lofty goals of replacing a laptop, instead it’s being marketed as a device for people that want a tablet to watch Netflix and manage their day-to-day life on. MIUI is often quite buggy on phones, but we’re happy to report that we didn’t have a single issue on the Pad 5. Sure, you use a smartphone a lot more frequently than a tablet, so it’s possible we just didn’t have the exposure required to notice this kind of issue, but it still felt like a smooth experience.

Both the Redmi Pad and Xiaomi Pad 5 are equipped with dual stereo speakers, incorporating a total of 4 speakers. Testing the tablet with its 120Hz screen mode and auto brightness settings active, the tablet generally made it past 10 hours with lightweight use, but wasn’t quite as capable of running demanding tasks. Streaming 1080p video on Wi-Fi with these settings active, the 8720 mAh battery shed an average of 9-11% of its charge per hour, which is slightly lower than what I’d expect from an 11-inch tablet. These specs are pretty bog-standard for a tablet at this price. The silicon was originally released in 2019. This means it’s not the most powerful you’ll find on the market, falling behind the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 and Apple’s A15 Bionic. As a result, you shouldn’t expect iPad Pro-level performance. 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

The immersive image is aided by the tablet’s Dolby Atmos-certified quad speaker system. Though it isn’t quite as loud as the system I tested earlier this year on the Yoga Tab 13, the speakers are a clear step up on cheaper tablets, like the Galaxy Tab S7 FE, offering suitable power and detail to happily binge movies on. I’m also pleased to report I didn’t detect any sibilance or distortion even when running the speakers at maximum volume. 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. The Xiaomi Pad 5 has a premium four speaker setup with support for Dolby Atmos. All four speakers are rather large at 16mm x 20mm and are symmetrically placed on the shorter sides behind dotted grilles.

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. The Xiaomi Pad 5 can achieve this milestone, but how long it lasts will be heavily informed by what settings you have active and how you use it.Gaming performance is also very good, although the Adreno 640 GPU isn’t quite powerful enough to take full advantage of that 120Hz refresh rate. An average frame rate of 65fps in the GFXBench Manhattan 3 onscreen test is pretty good, but it could be better. 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. Battery life is one of the most important areas a tablet really needs to deliver on. As a rule, I’d expect any tablet this size to survive a long haul flight to the US (from London), off a single charge. This means it should generally be able to run for at least 10 hours.

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. 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 does support the Xiaomi active pen which offers palm rejection and pressure sensitivity.The tablet covered 99.2% of the sRGB gamut, which is the most commonly used gamut. It covered 82.5% of the Adobe RGB and 93.6% of the DCI P3 gamuts, which are favoured by creatives and cinematographers. Most of the tablets I test this price cover 70% of the creative gamuts, at best, so these scores are impressive. 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 The screen aspect ratio of 1.6:1 means the slate is suited for work, as you can split-screen two different documents while ensuring both get a roughly A4 shaped slice of display.

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.When considering what tablet to buy, budget is king. And for this reason, I think the Redmi Pad wins as it’s easier to get a hold of one and for a lower price in retail. 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. Conversely, the Xiaomi Pad 5 houses a slightly larger non-removable Li-Po 8720 mAh battery, capable of 33W wired charging with PD3.0 support.