Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro Review – Looks Fine, Works Fine, Performs Fine

Product Name: Pad 8 Pro

Brand: Xiaomi

Offer price: 2699

Currency: MYR

• Appearance - 8/10
  8/10
• Efficiency - 8/10
  8/10
• Features - 8/10
  8/10
• Materials - 8/10
  8/10
• Performance - 7.5/10
  7.5/10
• Portability - 8/10
  8/10
• User Experience (UX) - 7.5/10
  7.5/10
• Value - 8/10
  8/10

Summary

The Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro is a small iteration over the Pad 7 Pro, with very limited changes on its hardware. For what it’s worth, it’s not going to impress anyone, but it works as it (mostly) should.

Overall

7.9/10

7.9/10

Pros

+ Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset upgrade
+ Bright and smooth display
+ Slightly bigger battery, despite slimmer profile

Cons

– Fingerprint sensor is separated from power button
– Little improvement over predecessor

Unboxing

12 months has passed since the launch of Xiaomi Pad 7 Pro, and that means we now get the new iteration, aptly named Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro. On paper, this new tablet is a minor upgrade over the previous generation, though we’ll have this review to find out of this is the case.

It’s worth noting that Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro continues to lack cellular network support, so you won’t be finding any SIM ejector pin inside the packaging. Instead, you’re only given these items:
– 67W charging adapter (Europlug)
– USB-C cable
– Quick start guide
– Warranty card
– Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro tablet

Walkaround

Xiaomi hasn’t made any changes in terms of screen size from its predecessor, meaning the Pad 8 Pro gets the same 11.2-inch IPS LCD display that maxes out at 800 nits across the display. While that might sound like a small number relative to several-thousand-nit figures thrown around in flagship smartphones, keep in mind that IPS brightness values covers the entire screen, so there’s no localized brightness to speak of. All in all, we can verify that it is quite useable even in outdoor conditions.

On the rear side, changes are limited too. The pogo pins remain on the top-left corner for connecting compatible keyboards, while the rear camera bump features only one 50MP sensor, accompanied by the new ring-shaped flash LED. The front-facing camera remained unchanged, too, using the same 32MP sensor found on the Pad 7 Pro.

The side profile views shows the tablet’s features on its frames, comprising four Dolby Atmos-certified speaker grilles on both sides (relative to horizontal tablet orientation), with the power button on the top-left side of the frame, a microphone on the left, plus a USB-C port on the right.

Up top you’ll find the volume rocker on the left, while the fingerprint sensor is situated in the middle – not sure why it’s not directly integrated into the power button though. Down the bottom, where some tablets opt to feature the pogo pins here, you’ll find nothing but a flat slab of aluminum material. Note that Xiaomi also shaved a few hair’s thickness of the tablet, down from 6.2mm to 5.8mm, whilst increasing its battery capacity from 8850mAh to 9200mAh too.

For the purpose of this review, Xiaomi also provided two bonus accessories for a quick look, and they include the keyboard module (left), and the cover module (right). Note that the keyboard module doesn’t offer touchpads, so you’ll need to bring your own mouse if you prefer mouse-based control scheme. Both accessories are also compatible with the non-Pro model as well.

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Specifications

Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro (25091RP04G, 8GB + 256GB)

Full specifications available on product webpage.

Performance

System

Xiaomi has given the Pad 8 Pro what is likely considered the second-best Snapdragon today, the year-old Snapdragon 8 Elite, for its processing capabilities. While not necessarily the latest and greatest, it’s capable of providing very respectable performance on its own.

CPU

Similarly in Geekbench, we see the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro ranking second in the multi-core test. Its single-core performance did edge out the sister brand POCO’s recent flagship model, and is a magnitude above the models we compared against in this chart.

GPU

Same trend continues into the GPU test, where the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro once again ranks second against other models on average. However, we did notice a major anomaly – the tablet could not complete the stability test, on both occasions we tried, as the error below greets us:

Given that on both occasions the test failed at 6th run of 20, we believe this is not erroneous and suggests that the tablet isn’t adequately cooled to handle extremely high heat loads (which seems to only happen when this and AnTuTu tests are performed). Just as a sanity check, we did try gaming on this tablet, but the chassis is so much cooler to the point that this error is unlikely to be a concern.

Battery

Battery-wise, it’s okay-ish. Tablets generally don’t last as long as smartphones as the display’s power demands scale up with size, but with nearly 10 hours of runtime on a single charge, it should last a school day or a work day with a tiny bit of juice to spare. This can be quickly topped up via the included 67W USB-C charger.

User Experience

Software

By default, the HyperOS 3 (Android 16) opts for a home screen that looks pretty similar to iPadOS, which isn’t a surprise. The most recently accessed three apps will be shown on the right side of the dock, and that applies to the windowed “workstation” mode that you must enable in the Settings app (under the ‘Features for tablets’ menu). In standard mode, apps are opened in full screen, and you can open two apps side-by-side; workstation mode allows you to open them in stacked windows, like how desktop operating systems behave.

I’m nitpicking slightly here, but I initially was confused by the term “active visual perception” under the same settings section, which sounded like some kind of visual accessibility settings. Turns out, it’s what everyone else calls user presence detection, user sensing, or similar names – maybe Xiaomi needs to get English translation sorted out for this one?

Camera

Given that tablets are not really used as a photography device, the feature set on this Pad 8 Pro does look fairly rudimentary. I do find it slightly annoying that the buttons are directly overlaying the viewfinder, which made them initially hard to find when you’re shooting photos in bright daylight. Also, it’s not at all intuitive to scatter buttons on random corners of the screen – simply put them on one edge would’ve improved UI quite a lot.

To say the photos end up oversaturated would be an overstatement. The two examples above pretty much is what happens if you crank your photo editor’s saturation value to the max – colors look unnatural, and bright spots look blown up. It’ll be fine for taking photos of documents and work sites, but for anything that demands some levels of color accuracy, best skip this one.

Same issues persist in night photos, where the lion’s head has a much stronger shade of orange than what it’ll look with a good camera, or a good ol’ plain eyeball. This sensor struggles against low-light conditions that the lion head test already required longer exposure times to compensate (and that means anything that moves will end up in motion blur). For what it’s worth, it did somewhat fine on the ‘TERRACE’ sign tests.

Gaming

Like all Xiaomi smartphones, the Pad 8 Pro comes equipped with Game Turbo to manage the tablet’s gaming features, which is comparatively limited against some of the offerings on the market. We ran through an hour-long gaming session on Asphalt Legends and found no issues in framerates (although it’s locked to 60FPS due the the game not playing nice to the hardware, we think), and as mentioned earlier, not showing signs of overheating either.

The Good

While the upgrades shown in the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro is limited, the main upgrade is the chipset, which now uses Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC that brings the tablet in line with modern-day performance standards. It can handle demanding apps and games with relative ease, and owing to its slightly larger battery over its predecessor, it’ll now last a bit longer than before, too.

While not using OLED displays, the 11.2-inch IPS panel is still solid for content consumption. It’s bright enough to not be overpowered by bright room lighting and even outdoor environments, and 144Hz is plenty smooth for a tablet display too.

The Bad

While the tablet is generally solid all-around, there are some minor details worth improving next time. First, the fingerprint sensor should just be integrated directly into the power button for convenience’s sake – there’s really no point of putting the sensor separately when that’s likely where your fingers will touch first before you open up the device.

Secondly, and this is more generally-speaking, the tablet really could do with more changes over the predecessor. A camera upgrade here, brighter display there, and some other big improvements could make this a lot more enticing over the Pad 7 Pro, which a good discount would easily make it a more valued choice if performance isn’t of your utmost priority.

Verdict

The configuration we tested (8GB+256GB) is the cheaper variant at RM2,699, where the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro offers a fairly solid value considering the sum of its parts. You can go for the one with bigger RAM and storage at RM2,999 right now, but whichever variant you choose, just know that it’s not necessarily a game-changer, but it has all the things to make this a tablet that works just fine.

Special thanks to Xiaomi Malaysia for providing the Pad 8 Pro tablet (plus keyboard and cover accessories) for this review.