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Slowly building a base for itself in the budget bracket, POCO has recently launched the POCO Pad 5G tablet. I’ve been trying it out over the last couple of weeks, and here’s whether it makes me want to buy it!
Design
The POCO Pad 5G features an all-aluminium unibody metal back and looks well-built. However, the device tends to pick up scratches and smudges on the rear panel. A protective cover added in would have been nice. It’s available at a cost on the website though. I’ve got the Cobalt Blue colour variant, and there’s a Pistachio Green version too if you are bored of blue.
The camera bump on the top corner was fairly flat and thankfully didn’t make a wobble when placed on the table. It remained quite steady while I navigated videos and even typed my notes. Weighing in at 568 grams, the pad was light both to hold and use in hand, and pop in my bag for my daily commute.
Display
The POCO Pad 5G features a 12.1-inch IPS LCD display, featuring a pixel density of 249 ppi. There are adaptive sync refresh rates of up to 120 Hz. The display renders colours quite well in the Dr. House reruns that I was watching. The display is good enough for me that I want to watch a lot of web series and OTT content on this tablet.
The display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3, offering some protection from scratches and drops. It also comes with an IP52 rating, making it resistant to dust and water splashes. The screen was a smudge magnet nonetheless, requiring me to often hunt for a cloth to clean what is otherwise a great display for the package.
Sound
The POCO Pad 5G features a quad-speaker stereo setup, supported by Dolby Atmos which fared well. With my current earworm Mansilaayo from Rajinikanth’s Vettaiyan, I realised that even at medium volume, the beats and percussion instruments were super clear but lacked detail and depth. The acoustics are slightly better suited to movies and TV shows, where the ambient sounds and dialogues come through with some depth.
Performance
Powered by the Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 processor, the tablet delivers smooth performance and efficient multitasking. The unit I reviewed featured 8 GB RAM with 256 GB storage. The storage felt a bit dated in terms of storage speed, supporting up to only UFS 2.2.
The POCO Pad 5G features an all-aluminium unibody metal back and looks well-built. | Photo Credit: Bijoy Ghosh
On synthetic benchmarks, the device fared decently, scoring 1033 on single-core and 2,822 on the multi-core front on GeekBench 6 with the likes of Samsung Galaxy Tab A9 Plus and the OnePlus Pad Go being close competitors.
The tablet was able to game at high settings at 60 fps easily on Battlegrounds Mobile India, with the occasional stutter during extended gaming sessions. The cooling effectiveness on the Poco Pad 5G was fairly average with the metal body heating up while watching videos. Hence, hours-long gaming would be a strict no-no. I felt the device warm up quite a bit while gaming on Battlegrounds Mobile India.
Camera
The POCO Pad has a rear and front 8 MP camera. While it’s awkward to hold the tablet to snap photos, whatever images I shot during the day were just about good enough to share on social media. A dedicated document capture mode helped me auto-crop and save document scans in a jiffy.
Software
The POCO Pad 5G is based on Xiaomi Hyper OS, and the overall UI experience feels easy-going, with very little to no bloatware. There are apps such as Mi Canvas so users can use the stylus, which is also available to be bought separately. The usage experience was mostly smooth, other than the rare lags while switching apps or screens while multitasking.
Xiaomi’s interconnectivity features such as Homescreen+ lets users view apps - that are on their Xiaomi/Redmi smartphones - on the POCO Pad. The cross-device Notes app and Network Sync let me use a shared clipboard, where I could open notes that were stored on my phone, and continue working on them on the tablet. Of course, I had to sign in using the same Xiaomi account on both devices to be able to do this. The POCO Pad 5G is guaranteed to receive two Android updates and three years of security updates to keep the device secure and up to date.
Battery
The POCO Pad 5G has 10,000 mAh battery which can run about 3-4 days with mixed use of video watching, gaming playing for 1-2 hours daily, using the tablet to organise my daily routines and attend the occasional work call on the tablet. It supports 33 W fast charging. Using the supplied charger, it took about 1.5 to 2 hours to charge the device fully from zero.
Verdict
The POCO Pad 5G makes for a good budget tablet pick considering it has a great display, decent sound profile, and is priced starting at ₹19,900. Despite heavyweight competitors such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab A9 Plus and the OnePlus Pad Go in the same price range, the POCO Pad 5G edges ahead when it comes to how much power it brings in, at this price point.
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