Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro Review – Slim and Light Portable Productivity Tablet with a Twist

Alongside the Xiaomi 17 series, the brand also released their latest generation of Pad 8 Pro tablets that are intended to bridge the productivity gap between laptops and tablets.

Xiaomi kindly loaned us a sample for testing. After taking it for a whirl, here’s our Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro review where we suss if it’s worth your money.

Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro – Design and Specs

When it comes to productivity on the go, laptops remain the preferred  form factor as they integrate a keyboard, a display and , depending on how deep your pockets go, performance that ranges from handling everyday tasks to full on heavy video editing duties. Naturally, all this costs a pretty penny. They also tend to weigh quite a bit with the lightest laptops still weighing in around the 1kg mark. 

To address this, Xiaomi’s new Pad 8 Pro attempts to maximise the capabilities of a tablet to achieve as much of the capabilities of a laptop as possible though this requires additional accessories that are sold separately to fully realise its potential.

Out of the box, our Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro review sample is an impressively slim design that is just 5.75mm thin while weighing just 485g on its own.

The slimness and lightness of the design plus its dimensions that resemble a sheet of A4 paper make it ideal for reading an e-book on the go or just casual web browsing and movie watching.

The rear of our Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro review unit comes in a rather unique metallic khaki shade that looks attractive to the eye though it occasionally attracts smudges. The backplate hosts a set of magnetic pogo pins for their keyboard case as well as a large camera island that houses a single 50MP camera. 

While cameras are usually considered as an afterthought on a tablet, the large 50MP sensor that Xiaomi has mounted is rather well equipped with an f/1.8 aperture and a decently sized 1.28μm pixel size paired with phase detection autofocus to capture up to 4K@60fps video.

Intended primarily for use sideways in landscape mode, the sides of our Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro review unit are all finished in the same dark metallic green as the backplate with the left and right sides featuring grilles for the quad speaker setup tuned by Dolby Atmos with the left featuring a power button and the right hosting a USB-C port for charging duties.

While the base of the tablet is otherwise unremarkable, the top holds a volume rocker and a side-mounted fingerprint reader.

Up front, the tablet hosts an 11.2-inch IPS LCD display with 3.2K (3,200 x 2,136 pixels) resolution display with 800 nits peak brightness, up to a 144hz refresh rate and 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut support.

The bezels all around are somewhat thick but serve to hide the single front-facing 32MP f/2,2 selfie camera that is capable of 1080p@30fps video capture. Of note is that the display also has TÜV Rheinland Low Blue Light (Hardware Solution), Circadian Friendly and Flicker Free certification, vouching that it’s safe for extended viewing and filters out blue light.

Overall build quality is excellent and the design feels wonderfully premium. However, the design lacks any dust or water resistance and, based on official specifications, lacks any protective glass on the front display which means some care must be needed to protect it from potential mishaps.

That quibble aside, the design is slim enough to slip into a backpack without issue and also ships with a 67W wired charger and a USB-C cable.

Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro – Specs and Benchmarks

The Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro is rather well equipped as tablets go with the design packing a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset paired with 8GB LPDDR5X RAM and 256GB UFS 4.1 storage that is non-expandable. A higher end variant is available with 12GB RAM and 512GB storage. Regardless, all versions lack 4G and 5G LTE connectivity and feature Fast WiFi7 and Bluetooth 6.0. 

Running under the hood is the latest Android 16 with Xiaomi’s own Hyper OS 3.0 firmware. The Snapdragon 8 Elite processor isn’t the latest but still offers respectable single, multicore and graphics performance with a decent NPU. Here’s how our Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro review unit stacks up on paper:

Price	RM2,399 [8GB RAM/256GB] (Review unit), RM2,999 [12GB RAM/512GB], Cover (RM199), Focus Pen Pro (RM599), Keyboard case (RM499)
Display	11.2-inch 3.2K IPS LCD display, 3,200 x 2,136 pixels, up to 144Hz refresh rate, 800 nits peak brightness, 100% DCI-P3, HDR10, Dolby Vision
Processor	Snapdragon 8 Elite
OS	Android 16 w/ HyperOS 3
Memory	8GB LPDDR5X RAM, 256GB UFS 4.1
Camera	50MP f/1.8 w/ PDAF [rear] / 32MP f/2.2 [front]
Battery	9,200mAh w/ 67W HyperCharge wired charging
Size/Weight	251.22 x 173.42 x 5.75mm /485g

When subjected to synthetic benchmarks, here’s how it stacks up in synthetic benchmarks.

3D Mark Steel Nomad Light	2.402
3D Mark Steel Nomad Light Unlimited	2,366
3D Mark WildLife Extreme	6,128
3D Mark WildLife Extreme Unlimited	6,081
3D Mark Solar Bay Extreme	850
3D Mark Solar Bay Extreme Unlimited	850
Geekbench 6 Single Core	2,979
Geekbench 6 Multi Core	8,740
Geekbench 6 OpenCL	18,122
Geekbench 6 Vulkan	24,605
Geekbench AI (CPU quanticised)	3,334
Geekbench AI (GPU quanticised)	3,119
PCMark Work 3.0 Performance	19 ,251
PCMark Battery Life	10 hours 27 mins

In terms of benchmarks, our Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro review sample performed within the expected parameters of a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor with acceptable deviations. In practical field tests, the tablet handled everything expected of a slate save in one respect – cooling performance. 

When subjected to the 3D Mark Steel Nomad Light stress test, the tablet did not manage to complete the benchmark even after several test runs and the backplate is noticeably hot after every test run.

This infers that the tablet has inadequate cooling for sustained heavy duty tasks. To be fair, the scenario presented in the stress test benchmark is extremely unlikely to be encountered in real life.

Fortunately, our Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro review unit acquitted itself in a respectable fashion. Multiple open tabs in Chrome ran smoothly, paperwork in Google Docs and Microsoft 365 were opened without issue.

Gaming was a pleasant affair with the large, vibrant display making games like Genshin Impact and Call of Duty Mobile a visceral affair even under daylight conditions. The quad speakers offered good volume and a fair amount of detail and are among the better ones seen in tablets.

In keeping with its aspirations as a productivity related tablet, the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro has an optional Workstation mode that creates a taskbar at the bottom and the ability to activate resizable floating windows for apps you have like a traditional Windows desktop setup. 

We weren’t issued a keyboard case or stylus for our review but our Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro review unit paired up just fine with a third party keyboard – in this case the Epomaker Carbon60 that we tested recently for paperwork on the go. To be sure, you’ll need to invest in the keyboard case and a stylus to allow it to achieve its fullest potential.

Overall battery life was fair at about 10 hours 27 minutes in benchmarks and it managed to survive a full day of casual usage tethered to a WiFi hotspot on the move for web browsing, YouTube videos and some casual video editing on CapCut.

Should you buy the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro?

On its own merits, the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro is a gorgeous looking Android tablet with plenty of pixel crunching power under the hood paired with a vibrant display and decent battery life, all  shoehorned into a very light chassis that’s great for all-day carry. 

However, you’ll need to invest an additional sum in acquiring the stylus (RM599) and the keyboard case (RM499) for it to achieve its fullest potential.

Unfortunately, it also lacks any dust or water resistance which means you’ll have to be fairly careful with it when you’re out and about. While it won’t fully replace a laptop, it’s otherwise a decent choice if you need to travel light and your workflow can be accomplished with apps in the Android ecosystem.

Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro review sample courtesy of Xiaomi Malaysia. To purchase please visit https://www.mi.com/my/product/xiaomi-pad-8-pro/buy/?gid=4223724410