Following the return of the Xiaomi tablet to the market, Redmi also launched its first entry-level tablet PC, the Redmi Pad. So whether this product can provide users with a richer entry-level tablet experience, let’s take a look.

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Appearance Design

The workmanship of the Redmi Pad’s shell surprised me a bit, with a matte textured unibody metal body design on the back. However, Redmi did not make some special texture and pattern decoration for this tablet, and the overall style is simple.

A Redmi logo is printed on the upper left corner of the Redmi Pad, and the upper right corner is a black lens module. The long-shaped lens module is covered with black glass, and it is stepped up from left to right, and the thickness is relatively restrained.

The part on the left without a lens is also coated, and there will be a grid-like radial texture under the light. The lens part has a square frame and the specification is 8 million pixels.

The shape of the Redmi Pad is relatively square, and the edge of the back shell is not chamfered with a large arc, which continues the family-style design style. The overall weight is 445g and the thickness is 7.05mm. There are two speakers on the left and right sides of the tablet, which together form a four-stereo speaker system, with a completely symmetrical layout and the logo of Dolby Atmos.

The left side of the Redmi Pad has volume buttons and is equipped with dual microphones. The microphone supports vocal enhancement, allowing everyone to hear clearer vocals during online classes and video conferences. There is also a TF card slot on the side, which is a card slot that supports standard Micro SD cards, which can support up to 1TB.

There is no antenna strip on the side of the tablet, and the Redmi Pad hides the antenna part under the cover of the rear lens module, which strengthens the integrity of the fuselage. However, the tablet is not equipped with a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Display

The front of the Redmi Pad is equipped with a relatively rare 10.6-inch LCD screen with equal width on all four sides and a black border width of 7.9mm. A layer of plastic brackets is sandwiched between the edge of the screen and the middle frame. The screen adopts a full lamination process, and the arcs of the rounded corners and the physical rounded corners of the screen are consistent. Also supports Rheinland hardware low blue light and SGS low visual fatigue certification.

The Redmi Pad has a screen ratio of 15:9, a resolution of 2000×1200, 90Hz refresh rate, 400nit brightness, and 10bit color depth. From the perspective of basic parameters, the screen quality is relatively balanced among entry-level tablets. The Redmi Pad also adds an 8MP 105° wide-angle camera at the top center of the horizontal screen to support the portrait centering function. It is helpful for scenarios such as frequent video calls, online meetings, and online classes.

Configuration & Performance

In terms of configuration, the Redmi Pad is an entry-level tablet equipped with a MediaTek Helio G99 octa-core processor and LPDDR4x + UFS2.2 storage specifications. The storage size is optional 4GB+128GB and 6GB+128GB, and supports 2.4G+5G dual-band Wi-Fi.

MediaTek Helio G99 is a new 4G mobile processor released in May this year, based on TSMC’s 6nm process. Equipped with 2 large Cortex-A76 cores clocked at 2.2GHz and 6 small Cortex A-55 cores clocked at 2GHz. The GPU is Mali-G57 MC2. In terms of performance, the CPU performance of the MediaTek Helio G99 is about 3.5% higher than that of the Helio G96, and the GPU performance is about 18.5% higher than that of the Helio G96. The improvement in energy efficiency is 30%. How does it actually perform? Let’s take a look at the benchmarks first.

The overall score of AnTuTu is 343568, of which the CPU score is 89869 and the GPU score is 84974.

In the GeekBench 5 test, the MediaTek Helio G99 scored 531 in single-core and 1787 in multi-core.

Below we simply test the actual performance of the Redmi Pad in the game. Open the game settings in “Honor of King”, the Redmi Pad can turn on high frame rate and ultra-high resolution, and the picture quality can be selected to the extreme. In the case of the highest selection of all pictures and special effects, in an indoor environment of 25°C, connect to Wi-Fi for game testing. The average frame rate of the Redmi Pad is 59.3 fps, the frame rate curve is stable at 60 fps, and the CPU power consumption is 2.9W.

Battery Life & Operating System

The Redmi Pad has a battery capacity of 8000mAh, supports 18W fast charging, and comes standard with a 22.5W charger. With the excellent power consumption performance of Helio G99, it can achieve about 2 days of moderate use.

The Redmi Pad is pre-installed with the stable version of MIUI for Pad 13.1.1. After more than a year of iterations, is the MIUI for Pad system functionally improved and updated?

The first is the 90Hz refresh rate combined with MIUI13, the overall operating experience is very smooth. In terms of pre-installed system applications, MIUI for Pad has been fully adapted to the horizontal screen UI, and third-party applications that natively adapt to the horizontal screen UI are also increasing.

Some design details of the MIUI for Pad system that were criticized by users before have been resolved. For example, in the past, the length of the horizontal bar at the bottom of the tablet was limited in the horizontal screen state, and the vacant area on the left and right sides could not be used to slide up to enter multitasking, return to the desktop, etc.

There are now two semi-transparent Assistive Touch strips next to the small horizontal bar. The Dock bar can be called out on the App interface through the auxiliary touch bar, but the small horizontal bar is still required to trigger the gesture. According to this logic, you can only choose one of the Dock bar and the slide up gesture, otherwise it will be mistakenly touched.

Conclusion

As the first tablet computer released by Redmi, Redmi Pad has a good grasp of product strength. The appearance and texture are not cheap, the screen has a high refresh rate, the external sound is loud, and the battery life is not bad. The performance of the MediaTek Helio G99 CPU is sufficient for light document office, online video, ordinary mobile games, online class meetings, video chat and other usage scenarios. If you just use a tablet to do these things, the Redmi Pad may be for you.

• $230 – Check latest price on AliExpress, Amazon US, Amazon Germany, other Amazon countries or Banggood