Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro – affordable Snapdragon 8 Elite tablet?

TechnologyGaming
13 Mar 2026 • 12:00 PM MYT
Nasi Lemak Tech
Nasi Lemak Tech

Malaysian tech reviews, unboxings, and guides. Simplifying tech for you.

Xiaomi’s tablets are actually very popular. Even in our comments section, a lot of people are always mentioning about the numbered Xiaomi Pad series of tablets. So, what we have today is the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro – the company’s latest and supposedly greatest available – the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro. It has also ben announced and released in September 2025 already, but the global version was only made official recently. 

Performance

Now, let’s talk about the performance first. That’s one of the main reasons why people choose the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro anyway. This tablet is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite. It’s not the latest chipset as the 8 Elite was released a year ago, but the performance is actually still very good and, in my opinion, more stable than the Xiaomi 17.

In Genshin Impact at the highest graphical settings, we can get near 60fps though there are some small dips here and there. It does take up around 6W of power and the temperature goes up as well, but it still offers a rather good gaming experience.

Wuthering Waves is definitely a disaster as the game is really unoptimized and Unreal Engine is just not that friendly to mobile devices. The performance is rather terrible in certain scenarios, and Vtools Scene will constantly get culled out. We had to restart Vtools Scene after a few minutes every time. Even without Vtools Scene, I recommend lowering the graphical settings if you want a good experience just because Wuthering Waves is terrible.

The same goes to Zenless Zone Zero as well. It lags so bad that Vtools Scene automatically got removed from existence. It happens every single time.

The RAM issue

So, what’s the issue here? We know it’s a problem with the RAM, but we also know that 8GB RAM is enough and it should be LPDDR5 – which means it is fast enough. You can watch our other video to know why the RAM speed matters more than the RAM amount.

So, what’s the actual problem? Something immediately crossed my mind – the feature called Memory Extension feature – or whatever the name they gave it for HyperOS.

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I disabled that thing, then restarted the tablet and tested once more. Immediately, the issue went away. I can play Zenless Zone Zero much more smoother than before, and Vtools Scene stayed on throughout the entire gaming test. It actually improved the gaming performance.

This is my first time experiencing this sort of virtual RAM feature negatively impacting the performance – and we can show you its impact clearly.

Battery life

Now then, let’s also talk about the battery life. This tablet comes with a 9,200mAh battery – no idea what’s the Wh value since it’s not publicly available – and it can last for around 13 hours and 30 minutes. It’s actually an okay battery life for a tablet with a screen of this size.

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Charging speed

Now, for the charging speed. The Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro does come with Xiaomi’s proprietary 67W charger in the box – and it can charge the tablet from 15% to completion in around 66 minutes.

Unfortunately, there is no “faster charging option” in the settings menu, so this is indeed the highest charging speed we can get on this tablet.

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And double unfortunately is that when we connected this tablet to our USB-PD PPS charger, it can only take in a maximum of around 13W. Seriously, 13W. This tablet took around 3 hours to charge from 15% to completion when we’re using our own USB-PD PPS charger. What the heck man, I thought we’re way past this sort of slow charging speeds?

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Since I had spare time, I also redid the charging test with our Anker Prime 250W GaN charger and that actually is a lot better. It can take in a maximum of 42W for a while, and it took around 101 minutes to charge from 15% to completion. Not the best still, but much better than the Ugreen 140W charger that we usually use.

I have no idea what the difference is here, as I cannot pinpoint anything – but either way, Xiaomi’s USB-PD PPS support is spotty at best.

Screen

The screen itself though, is actually quite okay. We have an 11.2-inch screen that has a resolution of 3200×2136 pixels and also goes up to 144Hz refresh rate. And yes, it is indeed an IPS LCD screen.

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The maximum brightness I can get from this tablet is around 825 nits while the lowest is around 2.3 nits. Pretty good, but I’ve seen other devices that can go down to 1 nit only.

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Either way, using the default Original Color PRO color profile, this Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro can cover around 97.6% of sRGB and a measly 70.66% of DCI-P3 color gamuts. the ΔE number is good, though.

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Then comes the Vivid color profile. Here, we can see that the color gamut coverage can shoot up to around 99.6% of sRGB and 96.5% of DCI-P3. Again, not the best as we’ve seen 100% coverage of DCI-P3 color gamut before – but this is considered quite good in terms of color saturation, while also maintaining a very low ΔE number.

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While some people might say Xiaomi should use an OLED screen for this tablet, I kinda disagree. IPS LCDs are better if we’re reading stuff off a screen – while OLED screen is better for watching videos or anything that is more enjoyable on a high contrast ratio. I personally can see two sides of the argument but ultimately, I am enjoying all my content on the Xiaomi Pad Mini that has an IPS LCD screen.

Speakers

But how’s the speakers on the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro? Well, have a listen by watching our video at the top of this review.

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Software

We now also brush through the software a little. It is equipped with HyperOS 3 on top of Android 16 and the features and everything… well, it’s the same as what we’ve experienced before. Nothing out of the ordinary and it works fine. Lots of fancy animations, has some ads here and there, but overall – it works well.

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Honestly, there are some missing features here and there – like themes are just not present on the tablet at all – but it’s not a big deal, in my opinion.

It’s just that HyperOS in itself needs to fix issues like the memory extension causing lags and crashes. It is not an issue on other devices, yet this is the first time I’ve experienced it negatively impacting performance.

Design

And all of these hardware and software are packed into this tablet design. Honestly, nothing much to say here since the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro looks like the previous generation.

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We do have it in the Sage Green color and honestly, it looks very grey in most lighting scenarios. The green is barely visible, though it is there.

There are also pogo pins at the back – so let’s talk about the accessories a little.

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Accessories

Xiaomi also sent the keyboard and origami case for this review, though I personally never use any of these accessories. The keyboard is a pretty simple accessory – snaps onto the tablet magnetically and the pogo pins connect to the keyboard, and we can immediately start typing.

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The keys have some good bounce to it and the actuation force is quite light – but every keystroke that we bottom out feels like I’m hammering the table. So yeah, it is indeed quite tiring to type on this keyboard. Also, the tablet can only snap on one angle. It’s… not ideal.

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Secondly is this origami case. I mean, it’s a very basic origami case that protects the tablet and the stylus if we have it – since there’s a flap here that secures everything in place. Other than that, the origami allows the tablet to stand in two angles – and that’s about it.

A few more things to mention

Alright – a few more things to mention, this Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro does have a USB 3 port at the bottom – and yes, there’s only one USB-C port unlike the Xiaomi Pad Mini, and it does have display mirroring via that USB-C port. Yeah, there’s no desktop mode or anything on Xiaomi devices.

This tablet also does not have any card slots – but it does have an IR blaster at the back. And that’s about it.

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Should you buy the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro?

So should you buy the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro? Well, I think the same consensus from the previous generation continues. If you want an affordable tablet with the highest-end Snapdragon chipset, then the Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro is for you. Yeah, there are no tablets with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 as of now – so this is the best you can get right now.

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As for the price, it’s at RM2,999 for 12GB RAM + 512GB storage. There’s only one configuration available in the Malaysian market and I do think that the price is quite hefty. Still, it’s one of those rare tablets with a flagship Snapdragon chipset. But the price is way above what the Xiaomi Pad Mini asked for.

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