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Xiaomi Pad 7
Who doesn’t love a device you can wind down with, uninterrupted, at the end of the day? A smartphone sometimes doesn’t cut it. There’s always that annoying WhatsApp message buzzing, when all you want to do is rewatch FRIENDS and doze off into sweet slumber. That’s where you might want the perfect tablet to keep you company. The new Xiaomi Pad 7 is what I’ve been winding down with for the better part of January, and here’s whether you should too!
Crafted with aluminium and glass, the Xiaomi Pad 7 looks elegant at first sight. It’s sleek at just 6.18 mm thin, and weighs about 500 grams, fairly typical for 11/12-inch tablets. The tablet is available in three colourways — Graphite Grey, Mirage Purple and Sage Green — and I’ve got the first variant for review.
The Xiaomi Pad 7 has an 11.2-inch IPS LCD panel with 600 nits of maximum brightness. I couldn’t wait to revisit the first season of Squid Games after having watched the second season in January. I fired up the insanely gripping show on Netflix and dove right in. The pink jumpsuits, the cheerful playgrounds and the eerie-looking Red light, Green light doll popped to life on the display. I did need to zoom in to fill the display and avoid the vertical black bands on top and bottom. This also ended up in cutting out a few peripheral details which would have otherwise been visible to me. The only drawback is the screen was fairly reflective, and my own reflection got in the way of being fully immersed in the show.
Xiaomi Pad 7
Xiaomi does offer a reflection-free nano texture glass display option at an extra cost which I’ve added at the end of the review. The quad-speaker system is punchy and ensures watching movies, shows and also gaming is also fun on the device.
The brand shipped across the Focus Keyboard and the Focus Pen along with the tablet for review. Both these accessories are available at an extra cost. They don’t ship with the Xiaomi Pad 7. Having the Focus Keyboard hugely improved the tablet experience for me. It’s probably one of the sturdiest Android keyboard accessories I’ve used. It’s well built and the keys are almost as spacious as they’d be on a 14-inch laptop. Typing was a breeze on this, and the small but efficient trackpad made navigation easy.
The tablet has a 13 MP rear camera and an 8 MP front camera. I used the front camera to log in to my yoga class, and it does a decent job with live streaming visuals, although the video quality might not be the sharpest. The rear camera too delivered grainy results even at 2-3x zoom, and some very average results even otherwise. The only exception was when I took photos outside, during the day, but I doubt any of us would be using a tablet to snap photos as we go about the town.
The Xiaomi Pad 7 runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 chipset. The review unit had 12 GB RAM and 256 GB storage. Casual gaming was snappy on the device and multitasking and switching between apps never triggered any lags or stutters during my usage. The tablet runs on the Xiaomi’s HyperOS 2 (based on Android 15) and brings in functionalities including split-screen views and floating windows for multitasking. There’s also a unique ‘workstation mode’ which lets me have multiple floating windows open, mimicking the experience of working on a desktop. The overall user experience was also helped by the fact that the tablet had almost zero bloatware or ads, which was a refreshing change.
Xiaomi Pad 7
The Xiaomi Pad 7 features a dual-cell 8,850mAh battery, which means it’s also better with heat build-up and the rate of battery discharge. The device supports 45W fast charging. While the battery was slow to drain on the device, the charging time is long. It took almost 1.5 hours to charge the tablet fully from zero.
The Xiaomi Pad 7 is a solid all-rounder as far as media consumption and productivity are concerned. While the 11.2-inch display is nice, having non-reflective nano texture option would’ve really amped up the multimedia experience.
The addition of the Focus Keyboard and Focus Pen too aid the productivity potential of the tablet, however they do add a significant bulk to the final bill. So, if you’re on a tight budget and shopping for a good tablet to mostly consume media on, you can do without the extra accessories. However, if you don’t mind spending the extra bucks to really have a well-rounded tablet on which you can work and create, apart from just playing games and binge-watching, then the Xiaomi Pad 7 is certainly worth considering.
Published on February 6, 2025
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