Xiaomi Mi Pad 7.9 review: Up-and-comer

Two browsers

The Xiaomi Mi Pad 7.9 comes with the feature-rich MIUI Browser. It does a great job browsing, syncing with your MiCloud account, supports downloads, there is a night mode too.

Web browser

The browser looks very clean, has an intuitive pull down to refresh feature and is just as fast as Chrome. You can view your links from MiCloud, there's a search field which that defaults to the Chinese Baidu but you can always change it to Google.

There's no Incognito mode, where the browser doesn't save any history. That comes with Chrome, which was also preinstalled here. Chrome has seamless syncing with all the devices with your Google account and is very fast as well.

Other apps

The Xiaomi Mi Pad 7.9 offers a great file managing app called Explorer, but there is no document viewer/editor pre-installed. There are plenty for free in the Play Store though (even ones made by Google), so this shouldn't be a problem.

The Explorer app even comes with an FTP function allowing it to connect to an FTP and directly upload content to your online servers - pretty neat.

Explorer

The custom Calendar looks good, syncs with your accounts including Google, and offers Day and Month views. There's no Agenda view though on the ample Mi Pad 7.9 screen events aren't hard to spot. The Clock app is rather limited with only the ability to show you the time for the cities you've preset. There's no stopwatch or counter and no alarms functionality.

Calendar • Clock

There's no sound recorder or weather app on the Mi Pad 7.9 but you get the excellent Notes app. You can create notes with reminders and attachments in them and even organize notes into folders. There's no integration with services like Evernote, though. A pretty minimalistic calculator is here, too.

Notes • Calculator

Interestingly, the Mi Store isn't preloaded on the Mi Pad 7.9 and in its place we have the Google Play one. We don't see a reason why the tab can't have both.

Anything that isn't on the Xiaomi Mi Pad 7.9 can be downloaded for free from the Google Play store so if you see something missing you can easily add it in later.