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 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.

The Xiaomi Pad 5 does support the Xiaomi active pen which offers palm rejection and pressure sensitivity.The Redmi Pad is fueled by a non-removable Li-Po 8000 mAh battery, compatible with 18W wired charging. The screen isn’t OLED, but at this price that’s not surprising, and during testing I was surprised how well it performed.

The Notes app works seamlessly with the Xiaomi Smart Pen, letting a user take notes akin to a pen on paper, or even switch to other tools like a pencil, paintbrush, eraser and more. For students who are in school or college, this app would be indispensable to take notes which include text, images, doodles and clips. All of these elements can be easily created and edited using the strong interaction between the pen and MIUI for pad. The Xiaomi Smart Pen attaches and charges magnetically with the pad. It weighs just 12g, and can charge to 100% in 18 minutes giving up to 8 hours of usage. 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. 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. 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 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 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%)

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 cameraWhen 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). 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.

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 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.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. 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%)