The Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro tries to be a laptop but at what cost?

The 11-inch tablet market is pretty crowded with players such as the iPad 11, the iPad Air, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11, and various other devices from Honor, OnePlus, and Huawei as well. However, for Xiaomi, the dream of replacing your laptop with a tablet device is still alive, and the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro is the latest attempt to make it a reality.

This 11.2-inch tablet comes with a powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, a 144Hz LCD display, and a price tag that will make you question your laptop choices. A slew of accessories tries to bridge that laptop gap, including a foldable keyboard and a stylus. 

The package is rounded up by a hefty battery, and Xiaomi managed to keep the weight of the device under 500 grams. Can the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro really replace your laptop and justify its €449,00 (~$530) price tag? Let's dive in and find out!

Let's start with an overview of the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro specs:

The Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro follows the design language of the previous generation, with a slim aluminum chassis and a square camera bump on the back. It's well-made and the aluminum unibody feels quite premium.

Xiaomi boasts that the tablet weighs under 500 grams (485 g to be precise), but for an 11-inch device that's also 5 mm thick, that's not all that impressive. And while we're on the weight subject, it's also worth noting that when you add the Focus Keyboard and the Focus Pen, the resulting weight bulges up to 1.1 kg.

The Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro also features a Dolby Atmos quad-speaker audio system and a side-mounted power button that's also a fingerprint reader.

There's also the usual USB-C port for charging and a place on the frame where the Xiaomi Focus Pen Pro latches on magnetically and charges wirelessly. The available colors are Pine Green, Blue, and Gray — nothing too extreme - just plain and stylish business-oriented hues.

First, let's get the elephant in the room out of it, so to speak. The Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro features an LCD display in a smartphone world where everything is OLED. I said "smartphone," but this goes for tablets as well. 

Granted, the OLED-equipped Galaxy Tab S11 and the iPad Pro are both more expensive, but there are other OLED options from Honor and Huawei, so using an LCD panel on a $500+ tablet is starting to look a bit... underwhelming.

But don't get me wrong, the LCD panel inside the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro is great, with a crisp resolution and good advertised peak brightness. To the naked eye, the tablet looks quite bright, the image is vivid, and you can't see individual pixels even from up close. The bezels are on the bigger side but nothing too extreme. Time for some lab tests.

Display Measurements:

The Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro can get quite bright indeed. It can't rival the OLED-equipped Galaxy Tab S11, but it gets quite close and also beats the 11-inch iPad from last year and its direct predecessor - the Xiaomi Pad 7 Pro - as well.

The color reproduction is also good, but the minimum brightness is a bit high, courtesy of the LCD backlight — there's no way around this. The Pad 8 Pro comes with a fingerprint scanner embedded in the power button - which is a plus. Many slates in this price range and category lack this kind of biometrics.

There's a slew of accessories available for the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro, all of which are sold separately. You can, of course, buy the tablet bundled with a keyboard case, a cover, and/or the Xiaomi Focus Pen, but doing so bumps up the price even higher.

Let's start with the Xiaomi Pad 8 cover — it's a lightweight cover to protect your tablet while you carry it around. This accessory starts at €59 (~$69), and it is made of polyurethane and faux leather. All in all, a useful cover with not much to write about, really.



Then we get to the first keyboard case — the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro Keyboard accessory. This one features a qwerty keyboard and starts at €99 (~$119). The keys are pretty big, clicky, and comfortable, but it lacks a dedicated trackpad. The tablet attaches to the keyboard via a pin connector, and when unfolded, it rests on the keyboard at an angle.



Finally, we have the star of the show — the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro Focus Keyboard. This one is great! It features a floating design — the tablet snaps on the backside of the keyboard with magnets, and you can tilt it 0°–124° to find the most comfortable working position.

This one also features a trackpad and gives you the closest experience to using a real laptop. The hinge is solid, but the tablet gets quite heavy — the whole package weighs over 1.1 kilograms, which is already MacBook Air territory. The Focus Keyboard is also pretty expensive at €159 (~$185), so the whole "PC productivity" idea starts to become expensive.



Finally, we have the Xiaomi Focus Pen Pro - the accompanying stylus accessory that every modern tablet should have. It features a button-free design; you just squeeze a zone on the stylus (that's shaped like a real pencil) to evoke customizable actions. It also has 16,384 pressure sensitivity levels, so you can draw with precision.

If you're into drawing or using styluses in general, you can get a lot out of this accessory, but otherwise, you'd be perfectly fine with one of the keyboard cases. Getting the Focus Pen Pro will set you back another $100 or so.

The Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro comes equipped with a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. It's a year old but also a true flagship silicon, which is rare in the tablet world. The predecessor used Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 9400+ chip.

In real-life scenarios the Pad 8 Pro feels very snappy and fast. There's no delay, lag or stutter, which contributes to that "laptop-like" experience. The slate comes in various memory flavors, starting at 8GB of RAM and 128GB of onboard storage and going up to 12GB/512GB.

CPU Performance Benchmarks:

Synthetic CPU benchmarks paint a very favorable picture for the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro. The tablet performs much better than its predecessor and also manages to beat the Galaxy Tab S11 and the iPad 11th gen — both in single- and multi-core performance.

The GPU benchmarks are even more impressive, as not only does the Pad 8 Pro come on top, but it also manages to sustain its performance under heavy load without thermal throttling. The Snapdragon 8 Elite and the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro are a match made in heaven, performance-wise.

In terms of software, the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro comes running Xiaomi HyperOS 3 over Android 16. It's a fairly clean installation with a touch of bloatware (which you can uninstall). You get Gemini and some Xiaomi AI tricks baked inside the system.

You're probably pretty familiar with these AI tools by now—there's a writing aid that helps you create texts of various kinds. There's AI art and creativity tools to help you with your creative endeavors, as well as a slew of AI translation, transcription, and subtitle tools. All of which work fairly well, and you can always just use Gemini for everything else if AI is your cup of tea.

In terms of software updates, the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro should be good for four years, receiving major Android updates until 2030.

The quad-speaker Dolby Atmos audio system inside the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro sounds very impressive. The stereo spread is pretty decent thanks to the four speakers, and the bass is also very convincing, despite the small size of the tablet.

There's no 3.5mm audio jack, but you can use USB-C headphones or an adapter or just pair Bluetooth headphones to the Pad 8 Pro. Speaking of pairing, the tablet supports the newest Bluetooth 6.0 standard, which guarantees fast and latency-free connection and also good bandwidth for lossless audio formats.

There's no haptic feedback on the Pad 8 Pro.

Tablets aren't famous for their cameras, and the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro is no exception. I doubt anyone would go around snapping photos with an 11-inch tablet in hand, but there's a 50MP wide-angle camera on the back, in case you need to snap some quick ones and your phone is not with you.

There's nothing to write home about the Xiaomi camera system; it gets the job done, but photos look like they were taken with a phone at least a couple of years old. The dynamic range is rather narrow, and there's not a lot of detail, especially if you try zooming in.

But then again, no one buys tablets for their camera capabilities, and the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro will get the job done if you need to make a zoom call or something, so we shouldn't put too much weight on this category.

 

Should you buy it?

The Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro is a great tablet. It's fast and bright, and it can do many things, especially with the aid of the Focus Keyboard and Focus Pen. Can it replace your laptop? Yes, definitely, but it comes at a price.

Getting the aforementioned Focus Keyboard and Focus Pen bumps up the price of the already pricey tablet to laptop territories, which kind of defeats the main idea. With all the said accessories, the price of the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro goes north of $700, and that's very close to a discounted MacBook Air.

In its own right, the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro is a very solid tablet with great battery life, fast performance, and a premium design. But with so many options in the 11-inch tablet market, I'm not sure this slate will have an easy time competing.