Xiaomi Pad 7 hands-on review

Software

The Xiaomi Pad 7 runs on the company's latest HyperOS 2, which is based on Android 15. This means you don't waste one of your two promised major Android updates on simply getting your device where it should have been at launch.

HyperOS 2 on the Xiaomi Pad 7 is very clean and functional. As you'd expect from a modern tablet, there is a lot of flexibility in the way you can have apps presented on the display. You can have the usual split-screen view with two apps side by side, although they have to be two separate apps. You can't have, say, two Chrome instances open like you can on the OnePlus Pad 2.

HyperOS 2

But aside from having side by side windows, you can also open floating windows. These can be done by themselves or on top of existing side by side open apps. This way you can have up to four apps open on the screen at a time, with two being side by side and two in floating windows.

Multitasking

The Xiaomi Pad 7 also includes what the company calls a Workstation mode, which creates a more desktop OS like experience by opening every single app in a floating window. This lets you have multiple windows open and all stacked over one another like you would on a desktop operating system.

Workstation mode

Coming back to the clean part, HyperOS 2 on the Xiaomi Pad 7 was also surprisingly free of much bloatware and ads on our Indian review unit, which is usually not the case for the company's other devices. There were only a couple of third-party apps installed and the rest were just Xiaomi or Google apps. The Xiaomi Pad 7 also didn't have Xiaomi's own app store and a few of the other annoyances that can be found on the company's smartphones. This made the device seem much more professional and something you'd actually want to work on.

Performance

The Xiaomi Pad 7 runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 chipset. Our review unit also had 12GB of memory and 256GB of storage.

At this point, the 7+ Gen 3 is a tried and tested chip so we weren't expecting any real surprises here. Despite that, the chip handles the additional load of running four apps simultaneously on screen like a champ. Performance for applications and multitasking is always very good and it's only when you get a bit carried away and start opening a lot of tabs in Chrome does the device start running out of the 12GB memory. It would have been nice if there was an option for 16GB memory, something even the Pro model does not offer. That would have made this a proper workhorse of a device for productivity applications.

The Xiaomi Pad 7 also handles gaming reasonably well. Unfortunately, they all seem to run at 60Hz despite the 144Hz display (that runs at 120Hz most of the time).

The Xiaomi Pad 7 also handles heat dissipation quite well, with the device maintaining most of its performance even after extended stress tests.

CPU and GPU stress test