Tablets are known for their portability and can offer the best of both worlds: a smartphone and a laptop. Having established itself with the Redmi Pad and the Redmi Pad SE, Redmi is now making its move into the Pro segment. With the new tablet, the brand seeks to blend power and portability along with 5G capabilities. But can it really provide a Pro-level experience? While I’m still working on the full review, here are my initial impressions of this tablet.
Redmi Pad Pro 5G First Impressions: Design and Display
The Redmi Pad Pro has a sleek design but feels tall and wide in my hands. It features two cameras on the back. The Pad Pro 5G is available in two colourways: Mist Blue and Graphite Gray. I have the Gray version, which reminds me of the Super Silver colourway of the OnePlus Nord CE4 Lite. The tablet includes a quad-speaker setup and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Weighing at 571 grams, it comes with a smart keyboard and a stylus, both sold separately. The tablet is on the heftier side of things, so adding on the keyboard cover increasing the numbers on the weighing scale. That said, the keyboard is quite useful when performing productivity tasks.
The tablet features a 12.08-inch LCD display with a 2.5K resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. The size in itself is going to make movie and TV show fanatics extremely happy. To add more context, it’s barely an inch smaller than my Macbook Air 13-inch. The bezels are also uniform on all four sides, so that’s good.
Redmi has provided 600 nits of High Brightness Mode for the Pad Pro 5G. Visibility when reading articles or watching movies in the balcony was great. The display is made of Corning Gorilla Glass 3, which makes it tough and scratch-resistant.
Redmi Pad Pro 5G First Impressions: Hardware and Software
This tablet is equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 SoC, the same chipset found in the Motorola Edge 50 Fusion, Redmi Note 13 Pro 5G, and the Realme 12 Pro Plus.
This chipset uses 4nm process technology and supports speeds up to 2.4GHz. Redmi offers two variants of this tablet: one with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, and another with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. It features LPDDR4X RAM and UFS 2.2 storage.
After using this tablet for a day, I found it handles daily tasks quite well. But is it truly productive? Wait for my full review to find out. One feature I’m excited to share is that this tablet supports 5G, so you can insert a SIM card and use for calling. Plus, the Xiaomi interconnectivity helps you to do more productivity tasks if you have a Xiaomi phone. Shared Clipboard helps you copy a text or an image on your phone, and paste the exact thing on your tablet. This really eases up most of the work stuff.
Similar to Xiaomi and Redmi’s recently launched smartphones, this tablet runs on Xiaomi HyperOS, based on Android 14 out of the box.
As for the battery, this tablet packs a 10,000mAh battery and supports 33W charging; the adapter comes in the box, which is good. Considering the chunky battery pack, Redmi maintains a slim form factor, which is commendable.
Redmi Pad Pro 5G First Impressions: Cameras
The Redmi Pad Pro 5G features an 8-megapixel rear camera with an f/2.0 aperture. While the camera capabilities are quite basic, it’s important to remember that a tablet’s primary function is productivity and portability, not photography. Therefore, even if the cameras aren’t outstanding, it does the work well.
However, the selfie camera is crucial since it will be used frequently. This tablet has an 8-megapixel front camera with an f/2.28 aperture, which is ideal for video calls and attending important meetings.I’ll share more details about this in my full review, along with more camera samples.
Redmi Pad Pro 5G First Impressions: Verdict
The Redmi Pad Pro 5G features a sleek, attractive design and supports both a keyboard and a pencil. The brand has clearly aimed to balance productivity with portability.
The key question is: if you were to replace your primary laptop with this tablet, could it truly serve as a replacement, or will it simply function as a large phone? I’ll answer this and many other questions in my full review. So, stay tuned to MySmartPrice.
