Redmi Pad Pro review
Redmi Pad Pro is a very good value for money product. It has a decent design with the aluminium build that adds that premium touch to the build quality. It has a pretty good display which is sharp, responsive, and sufficiently accurate at the same time, and the performance is good enough for all kinds of users.
So tablets is a space where Android brands are yet to make a significant dent. While still far away from where Apple’s iPads stand in the market, there are quite a few very good Android tablets in the market. Xiaomi is one brand that has brought pretty decent tablets to India. Starting with their first tablet in the market, Xiaomi has consistently offered a very good value for money, leading up till the last device in the market, the Xiaomi Pad 6.
Last year, the Xiaomi Pad 6 was a nice addition to the Android tablets lineup in the market. It brought a nice combination of premiumness and practicality at a decent budget of under Rs 30,000. This year, Xiaomi aims to bring the same look and feel at a more affordable price tag with the Redmi Pad Pro.
Now, I have been testing the Redmi Pad Pro since the last few days and even used it as my work device for a few days, and I have many thoughts. In this review, I will try and give you a fair idea as to how the Redmi Pad Pro looks, feels, and performs – both as a work device and as an entertainment device.
The design of the Redmi Pad Pro is very standard. It looks like any other tablet out there from the front. There are slightly thick but symmetric bezels all around. The display is bigger than last year’s Xiaomi Pad 6 at 12.1 and the front camera is placed in a horizontal orientation, which is ideal for video calls and online conferences.
On the back, we get an aluminium build, along with two large circular camera cutouts, but one is for the LED flash. Slightly deceiving since from a distance, you’d easily mistake it for having two cameras. I like the finish on the back panel. The metal build feels very premium to the touch, and the weight of the Redmi Pad Pro is also fine. It’s not the lightest tablet at 571 grams (for the 5G variant), but it’s also not the heaviest I have used. Holding it for longer does get uncomfortable.
We are also getting speaker grilles on both the top and the bottom of the tablet, and there is the “Dolby Vision Atmos” branding on the frame, which we have seen earlier. The frames are also made of aluminium, and we are getting Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection with the Redmi Pad Pro.
So overall, there is nothing special in terms of the design. I like that there is a certain premium feel to this. Given that it is a product from Xiaomi’s Redmi line of products, the premium look and feel is pretty good.
Coming to the display, we are getting a 12.1-inch IPS LCD display with the Redmi Pad Pro. This comes with a 1.5K resolution (1600 x 2560 pixels) and a 120Hz refresh rate. On top of that, we are getting Dolby Vision HDR along with Dolby Atmos. So in the numbers game, the Redmi Pad Pro has things covered. But how was my experience? Let me quickly tell you.
So watching movies and TV shows on the Redmi Pad Pro was a great experience. Despite an LCD panel, the contrast is pretty decent and you can see some of the finer details in all your HDR movies and TV shows. Yes, dark scenes don’t look as good as an AMOLED panel, but it’s not much of a deal breaker.
Even the brightness is pretty good for a tablet. I tested the Redmi Pad Pro in bright sunlight and the tablet showcased a maximum luminance of 459 outdoors, which is good enough for a 12.1-inch LCD display. So even though chances of the Redmi Pad Pro being used outdoors are less, the sunlight visibility is decent.
Coming to colour accuracy, this is again an area where the Redmi Pad Pro is pretty decent. It may not be the best, but it represents colours with a certain level of accuracy, so it’s good. I put the Redmi Pad Pro through the Calman ColourChecker Analysis and the tablet was able to achieve an average DeltaE of 2.2 and a maximum DeltaE of 6.1, which was the value for dark blue. This means that the display on the Redmi Pad Pro doesn’t represent dark blue colour accurately.
However, on average, the colour representation is pretty decent. So yes, this is a good enough display for a mid-range tablet. It’s very good for watching movies and TV shows, it is super responsive with the 120Hz refresh rate and it also represents colours pretty accurately.
The Redmi Pad Pro is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 chipset paired with 8GB of RAM and up to 256GB of internal storage. I tested the performance and ran multiple benchmarks on the Redmi Pad Pro and the tablet came consistently ahead of its closest competitor, the OnePlus Pad Go, which comes with a MediaTek Dimensity 9000 SoC.
Now, since there aren’t many options to compare the performance with, the Redmi Pad Pro does well in terms of day-to-day performance. I did pretty much everything a person would do on a tablet. Be it work, entertainment, gaming, or just creative stuff like sketching and writing notes. To me, this seemed pretty decent for all these tasks. But of course, nothing is perfect.
So during my usage of the Redmi Pad Pro, there were a few things that especially bugged me. First and foremost, the tablet heats up while running multiple apps at once. Now, if you’re using it for work with the keyboard, you won’t notice the heating but if you’re gaming or anything that requires you to hold the tablet, you will notice the heating. But then again, the form factor only allowed me to hold it on different sides and most of the heating was happening in the middle of the device.
Furthermore, despite a 10,000mAh battery, I found the Redmi Pad Pro to have a rather disappointing battery life. During one day’s extensive work usage, the Redmi Pad Pro drained half of its battery in about 2 or 3 hours, meaning an on-screen time of about 6 to 7 hours overall. Now, this is a pretty average score in the overall set of things, but in our tests, the Redmi Pad Pro didn’t do all that well.
The tablet drained 16 percent of its battery while navigating on GPS for an hour. Further, it drained 6 percent battery while playing a YouTube video on the highest possible resolution for 30 minutes, while a Call of Duty: Mobile gaming session of 15 minutes drained 7 percent of the battery. Now again, these are decent numbers if we look at the overall picture, but the Redmi Pad Pro has a bigger battery than many other competitors and with Xiaomi’s claimed battery optimization with HyperOS, this disappointed me a little bit.
But despite the rather average battery life and decent performance, the Redmi Pad Pro is a very good tablet at its price. I was able to use this as my work machine for about 3 to 4 days and I must say that despite a few things here and there, it did serve the purpose rather well. Yes, I wouldn’t use it as my primary work device, but it can very easily be my work device during travel. It is portable, it is fast, and it can run multiple apps at once.
Even the keyboard cover that Xiaomi sent with the Redmi Pad Pro is very good quality. Yes, it is a bit small for typing long documents and I did experience a lot of mistypes with this keyboard, but that could be because of my typing speed, which is somewhere around 65 to 70 words per minute. Everyone else around me in the office or at home really liked how the keyboard felt. Even the key travel is better than most tablet keyboards that I have tested and is very close to that of a conventional laptop. However, the lack of a trackpad takes away a few points in terms of using it as a work machine.
So overall, I’d have to say that the Redmi Pad Pro is a very good value for money product. It has a decent design with the aluminium build that adds that premium touch to the build quality. It has a pretty good display which is sharp, responsive, and sufficiently accurate at the same time, and the performance is good enough for all kinds of users.
Yes, making it my work machine for a few days did involve a lot of getting used to and I really missed a trackpad on the keyboard that Xiaomi has given. But the multi-tasking options, the stylus support, and the ease of use, all at a price of under Rs 25,000, make this a brilliant value for money offering. The Redmi Pad Pro scored almost 75 out of 100 in our Digit Test, and that is a very good score so I have numbers to back my thoughts here.
