Xiaomi Pad 5 review

Display

One of the Xiaomi Pad 5's key features is its 11" LCD screen. To be precise, it's a 10.9-inch IPS LCD panel of 2,560 x 1,600 pixels making for 16:10 aspect ratio. The pixel density is 274ppi, in line with the competition.

The highlights of the Pad 5 display include 120Hz refresh rate, 10-bit color support, as well as HDR10 and Dolby Vision capabilities. Let's not forger the Smart Pen compatibility with 240Hz sampling and 4,096 pressure levels recognition.

Let's start with the panel. It's a bright and colorful IPS LCD with native 10-bit color support. This means it can show up to 1 billion colors.

Then we have HDR10 and Dolby Vision support and you can enjoy the maximum quality from all streaming services. We've put this to the test, and yes, you can. The Pad 5 comes with Widevine L1 DRM and is recognized as HDR10 and Dolby Vision devices by all popular apps from the get-go.

Finally, there is also 120Hz refresh rate support. It's not ideal though as it is static. You can choose between 60Hz and 120Hz, but even when you select 120Hz there is no adaptiveness. Everything but videos and video apps run at 120Hz all the time. Note that the Settings page suggests dynamic switch, so maybe that will be improved via a firmware update.

We measured a very good 478 nits of max brightness in our tests. Unfortunately, there is no Sunlight Boost even if the settings page suggests that. Maybe it will be enabled with a future firmware update, maybe not. Still tablet can be much brighter when watching HDR content, of course, and we had no issues in the brightest of days, in case you were wondering.

So, the good brightness combined with the nice deep black levels made for a very good contrast ratio if 1270:1.

We also measured the minimum brightness at point white and it's incredible - just 1.9 nit.

The Xiaomi Pad 5 has three predefined Color presets - Vivid (previously known as Auto), Saturated, and Standard - each representing a specific color space. You can also enable Adaptive Colors - the same thing Apple calls True Tone - adjust the colors depending on the ambient light.

The Vivid (Auto) option is tuned to reproduce DCI-P3 faithfully, and we found it to be indeed fairly accurate, excluding the slightly bluish white and gray hues. If you want even more faithful color presentation, just opt for the Warm Color Temperature - that fixes the bluish whites.

Saturated makes for punchier colors on top of Auto. Standard should be accurate to sRGB and it is indeed with an average deltaE of 1.5.

Battery life

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 Xiaomi Pad 5 scored excellent numbers on our battery tests. It lasted 14 hours and 31 minutes on our web browsing test. Then it clocked north of 14 hours when before its battery dropped to 10% when playing looped videos in fullscreen. These are some great numbers for a tablet, indeed.

Video test carried out in 60Hz refresh rate mode. Web browsing test done at the display's highest refresh rate whenever possible. Refer to the respective reviews for specifics.

Charging speed

As we've mentioned, the Xiaomi Pad 5 supports (at least) 22.5W fast charging and ships with such power adapter. It refilled 27% of the dead battery in 30 minutes.

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%)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Pad 5 (33W)
  36%
• Huawei MatePad 11
  36%
• Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6
  33%
• Xiaomi Pad 5
  27%
• Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2018)
  20%
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE
  18%
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+
  18%

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%)

Lower is better

• Xiaomi Pad 5 (33W)
  1:38h
• Huawei MatePad 11
  1:50h
• Xiaomi Pad 5
  2:00h
• Huawei MatePad Pro 12.6
  2:10h
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE
  3:05h
• Apple iPad Pro 12.9 (2018)
  3:30h
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+
  3:35h

We cannot really complain of the charging speed, but we would have liked the Pad 5 better if it came with a 33W adapter instead of 22.5W - it clearly supports faster charging.

Four Dolby Atmos speakers

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.

This setup is quite loud with incredibly balanced output - the Pad 5 scored a Very Good mark on our loudness test.

Dolby Atmos is turned on by default and you should keep it that way. It doesn't change the loudness but makes for a much better sound with more bass and mid-tones. Without Dolby Atmos the audio is shallow lacking in bass.

Just play our audio test sample - you can hear the deep sound with noticeable bass and well-presented mid- and high-tones. The high-pitched tones could have been a bit better, but once again we are going into nitpicking mode. We enjoyed the Xiaomi Pad 5 speakers very much.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.