The last Mi Pad 4 was introduced back in June of 2018 – that’s more than 3 years ago. And now, the company returns with the new Xiaomi Pad 5. With it comes a modern design and equipped with the latest specs, is the Xiaomi Pad 5 any good?
The Xiaomi Pad 5 has a pretty nice-looking design overall but I do understand that this design is not for everyone. It’s rather thin and has a shimmery back with the power button at the top and the volume rockers at the side.
There are also a total of 4 speakers – two on each side – and this tablet can kick out some good sound. However, there is no microSD card support so you’re stuck there.
Moving on – the display. This is an 11-inch IPS LCD screen with 120Hz refresh rate at 2560×1600 pixels in resolution. That’s pretty good in terms of specs. And honestly, this screen looks good overall. The bezels are also adequately sized so I can hold the tablet without actually touching the screen.
But let’s move on to the more exciting parts of this tablet – the performance.
The Xiaomi Pad 5 that we have here comes equipped with the Snapdragon 860 chipset with 8GB RAM and 128GB of storage. Because that the Xiaomi Pad 5 is so much bigger than a phone in terms of surface area, this tablet isn’t constrained in terms of thermals.
From our gaming test, we found out that the Xiaomi Pad 5 can run Genshin Impact at the highest graphical settings with at least 40-ish FPS and it is only at around 40°C!
I just hope that games like Genshin Impact support controllers on Android – then it’ll be a great tablet for gaming.
Moving on to the software experience. Oh, dear MIUI. It’s still the same in terms of user experience but the tablet version has a few more inconsistencies compared to their phones. The Xiaomi Pad 5 is currently running MIUI 12.5.2.0 that’s the latest version but for some reason, the button to go into the settings menu is missing. I have no idea where it went.
Then I thought – okay, Xiaomi phones have the option to change to Google’s quick settings menu so I can have my settings menu back. But unfortunately, that option is not present on the tablet. But both the Xiaomi 11T and Xiaomi 11T Pro have that option. What the hell?
That aside, let’s talk about the Xiaomi Smart Pen then. This is a separate accessory that does not come with the tablet. At the time of filming, I am unsure about the price of the Xiaomi Smart Pen – I think it’s RM399? I’ll update this review if the official price is not RM399.
Anyway, this is an active stylus and you need to charge this pen before using it. It charges by snapping onto the side of the tablet and charges wirelessly, then connects to the Xiaomi Pad 5 with Bluetooth Low Energy, or BLE for short.
However, the Xiaomi Smart Pen seems to be unoptimized as there is a noticeable delay while writing. The pen seems to have issues registering the pen input too, as we had an extremely difficult time trying to write a dot.
The features that you can do with the Xiaomi Pad 5… are quite limited. The two buttons on the Xiaomi Smart Pen are hard-locked to only do these two features.
There is no additional feature like Samsung’s Air Command and I find that to be disappointing. But, since the Xiaomi Smart Pen is connected via BLE, we can use this pen as a clicker for presentation controls! That’s convenient!
However, talking about presentations, the Xiaomi Pad 5 does not have HDMI output over USB-C, so it’s not so easy to plug and play if you want to use the tablet to do presentations.
With that said, the desktop mode for the Xiaomi Pad 5 is still not available publicly and requires sideloading. But the desktop mode is very barebones and pretty buggy in terms UI and also has a lot of translation errors. Still, I’ll say this feature is not ready.
Then the battery life – the Xiaomi Pad 5 comes with an 8,720mAh battery and it lasts for quite a long time in our battery life test so I really don’t think there’s any issue to use this Xiaomi Pad 5 for a full day.
It can definitely last throughout a day of usage issues so I’m okay with it. As for the charging time, it’s rather confusing. I think our charger is faulty? Our wattmeter says 20.5W but for some reason, it takes like 8 hours to reach 99% battery and I just gave up waiting for it to go to 100%. I have no idea what happened here, but it just takes forever to charge with its stock charger.
Then, we changed to our Ugreen 100W GaN charger and it takes about 2.5 hours to charge from 15% to 100%. At least with the Ugreen charger, it can reach 100%.
Should you buy the Xiaomi Pad 5?
The base model of the Xiaomi Pad 5 is starting at RM1,399 and for the tablet alone, I think it’s a good option. We can play games and watch movies on this tablet – and it is able to provide a magnificent experience.
But, if you want to use a stylus to draw on the tablet, then I suggest you buy some other tablets instead. The Xiaomi Smart Pen is quite disappointing in terms of features available, and again – according to the leaked price, it should be RM399, hence totaling up the entire tablet + pen price to RM1,798. It’s just not worth that price.
If you want to buy a tablet with a stylus, then I suggest you get the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE instead. The S Pen is included in the box, and its software is much more refined and matured than what Xiaomi has to offer, yet its price is very similar – at RM1,899.
We also have a comparison between the Xiaomi Pad 5 vs the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE that’s coming soon – so stay subscribed for that.
Where to buy?
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