Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro: Powerful tablet that costs like a laptop

Xiaomi's latest tablet arrives with a familiar promise: ditch your laptop. The Pad 8 Pro is an 11.2-inch device built around a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, a 144Hz LCD screen, and enough raw power to handle serious work. At €449 (roughly $530), it sits in a crowded market alongside the iPad, Samsung's Galaxy Tab S11, and tablets from Honor, OnePlus, and Huawei. But the real question isn't whether it can do what a laptop does—it's whether you'll want to pay laptop prices to find out.

The tablet itself is well-engineered. It weighs 485 grams, thin enough at 5 millimeters to slip into a bag, and wrapped in an aluminum chassis that feels genuinely premium. The 11.2-inch display is bright and vivid, with a crisp resolution and no visible pixelation up close. Xiaomi claims peak brightness that nearly matches the more expensive OLED-equipped Galaxy Tab S11, and in real-world testing, it delivers. The trade-off is obvious: this is an LCD panel in an era when competitors at similar price points offer OLED. The bezels are larger than you might want, and the minimum brightness sits higher than ideal because of the LCD backlight technology. Still, there's a fingerprint scanner embedded in the power button—a feature many tablets in this category skip entirely.

Where the Pad 8 Pro tries to become a laptop is through accessories, and this is where the math gets uncomfortable. The base tablet is one thing. Add the Focus Keyboard—a floating design that lets you tilt the screen between 0 and 124 degrees—and you're spending another €159 ($185). The Focus Pen Pro, with 16,384 pressure sensitivity levels and a squeeze-activated button zone, costs roughly $100 more. Bundle all three together and you're at over $700, which is MacBook Air territory. The whole package weighs 1.1 kilograms, already heavier than many actual laptops.

Performance-wise, the Pad 8 Pro has no excuses to make. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is a year old but still flagship-class silicon, rare in tablets. In benchmarks, it outperforms both the Galaxy Tab S11 and the 11th-generation iPad in single-core and multi-core CPU tests. GPU performance is even more impressive—the Pad 8 Pro doesn't just win, it sustains that performance under heavy load without thermal throttling. In daily use, the tablet feels snappy and responsive, with no lag or stutter. It comes in configurations ranging from 8GB RAM with 128GB storage up to 12GB RAM with 512GB storage.

The battery is genuinely impressive. A 9,200 mAh cell delivers 14 hours and 32 minutes of web browsing, 12 hours and 14 minutes of video streaming, and 10 hours and 2 minutes of gaming—numbers that beat the Galaxy Tab S11 and the iPad 11th gen by meaningful margins. Charging at 67W gets you to 52 percent in 30 minutes and a full charge in 1 hour and 11 minutes. There's no wireless charging, and no haptic feedback either.

Software runs Xiaomi HyperOS 3 over Android 16, a fairly clean installation with some bloatware you can uninstall. Xiaomi promises four years of major Android updates through 2030. The system includes Gemini and various Xiaomi AI tools—writing aids, art generation, translation, transcription—that work well enough if you want them, though you can ignore them entirely.

The quad-speaker Dolby Atmos audio system sounds genuinely impressive for a tablet, with decent stereo spread and convincing bass. The device supports Bluetooth 6.0 for fast, latency-free connections. The camera system is forgettable—a 50MP rear sensor that produces photos that look like they came from a phone several years old, with narrow dynamic range and limited detail. But then, nobody buys tablets for cameras.

The verdict hinges on a single tension: the Pad 8 Pro is an excellent tablet on its own. It's fast, bright, well-built, and has battery life that outlasts its competition. But the laptop-replacement fantasy only works if you're willing to spend an extra $285 on accessories, at which point you're shopping in a different category entirely. In a market this crowded, with so many capable alternatives and actual budget laptops available at similar prices, the Pad 8 Pro's value proposition becomes harder to defend. It's a great device searching for a clear reason to exist.