The screen isn’t OLED, but at this price that’s not surprising, and during testing I was surprised how well it performed. The ace up Xiaomi’s sleeve in making its Pad 5 a useful work device is MIUI for Pad, the software it uses. This is a fork of MIUI, the software used in Xiaomi phones, which in itself is a fork of Google’s Android.

The Xiaomi Pad 5 is a swish Android tablet both inside and out. It’s a relatively simple construction, but despite this, looks quite elegant, with chamfered clean-cut edges, minimal screen bezels and a premium reflective finish on the rear. It matches the more expensive iPad Air in terms of looks, with the basic iPad continuing to look rather dated by comparison.I’m also still not convinced about Android on tablets in general. The OS and its apps are all optimised for phone-sized devices and its creative offering doesn’t come close to matching what you’ll get on iPad OS, which has cool services like Affinity Photo and Designer. Hopefully this will be fixed when Google’s tablet focussed Android 12L software gets rolled out to general consumers. The 8,720mAh battery in the Xiaomi Pad 5 sounds rather average for a slate of its size, but during our time with the device we learnt to appreciate the actual lasting power of this tablet. As we've mentioned, the Xiaomi Pad 5 supports (at least) 22.5W fast charging and ships with such power adapter. It refilled 27% of the dead battery in 30 minutes. It doesn’t have the lofty goals of replacing a laptop, instead it’s being marketed as a device for people that want a tablet to watch Netflix and manage their day-to-day life on.

The screen aspect ratio of 1.6:1 means the slate is suited for work, as you can split-screen two different documents while ensuring both get a roughly A4 shaped slice of display. Those estimates are already a little north of Apple’s equivalents for its iPad, and we found ourselves consistently impressed by the battery power of the device. This battery will make it great for a student who needs to carry it round to loads of different lectures in a day, then settle in for a movie in bed after.The Xiaomi Pad 5 has a premium four speaker setup with support for Dolby Atmos. All four speakers are rather large at 16mm x 20mm and are symmetrically placed on the shorter sides behind dotted grilles. But out of the box, like Samsung devices, it tries to push Xiaomi’s services a little bit too hard. The initial shortcut to the video app takes you to the Xiaomi store, not the Play Store. The same is true for files, calendar and pretty much everything else. This is easily fixed, but it’s an annoyance nonetheless. We also measured the minimum brightness at point white and it's incredible - just 1.9 nit. Display test