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- Brilliant battery life
- Slim, lightweight build
- Outstanding performance
- Some minor display flaws
- HyperOS is still wonky
- Mi Canvas is undercooked
Mobile tech has been trending bigger for a while now, with most tablets offering large displays for media and productivity, but the Xiaomi Pad Mini is here to remind us that sometimes less is more.
This compact, lightweight tablet packs some serious power into its tiny frame, with zippy performance, impressive gaming capabilities and a bright, responsive display that lends itself nicely to digital art and streaming. Battery life is also among the best you can get from a tablet at this price.
Xiaomi’s software continues to confound and the native drawing app is woefully ill-equipped for complex digital art, but even these issues aren’t enough to detract from just how compelling the Pad Mini is. Which makes it all the more confounding that Xiaomi has eschewed release in the UK and European markets.
Xiaomi Pad Mini: What do you get for the money?
The Xiaomi Pad Mini is only launching in Asia and the Middle East, with a price that’s equivalent to $429 (somewhere in the ballpark of £319).
Size-wise, its most obvious rival is the iPad mini 7, which starts quite a bit higher, at £499 for the 128GB model. The screen here is a slightly smaller 8.3in and only supports a 60Hz refresh rate, but the iPad mini is more attractive for portability, weighing an airy 293g.
There are plenty of other tablets in this price range, but none are this compact and all have larger displays. My favourite Android option is the 12.1in Honor Pad 10, which costs £300 and gets you a keyboard case and stylus bundled in for no additional cost at the time of writing.
We also have the entry level iPad (2025) around this price, with the 128GB model starting at £310. This has an 11in display with a squarer 3:2 aspect ratio that’s better for productivity than the more media-focused displays of the Xiaomi and Honor, but the accessories are very expensive. You’re looking at a minimum of £607 with the keyboard case and stylus included, and even then you’re only getting the base 128GB storage configuration.
The Xiaomi Pad Mini has a smaller 8.8in LCD screen with a resolution of 3,008 x 1,880 and a nippy peak refresh rate of 165Hz. There’s an 8-megapixel front camera set into the short bezel to the left of the screen and over on the rear is a 13-megapixel main camera in the top-right corner.
Inside, we have the powerful 3.73GHz MediaTek Dimensity 9400+ chipset running the show (the same as in the Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra), backed up by 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The battery is relatively small by tablet standards, at 7,500mAh, but it at least supports speedy fast charging up to 67W.
Lastly, there are a couple of optional accessories that you can pair with the Pad Mini. The protective case feels decently robust and has a rigid carry strap that doubles as a kickstand – this only works in landscape mode, however, which feels incongruous with the placement of the front camera, which seems to favour portrait use.
And then there’s the Xiaomi Focus Pen, which snaps neatly onto the top of the tablet for pairing and charging. This stylus has three buttons, allowing you to click and drag to create screenshots and add annotations, quick launch Mi Canvas for notes and cycle through brush and pen options. The placement can be a problem though, and I often found myself pressing the buttons by accident while trying to sketch or write.
What did we like about it?
True to the Mini name, this is one of the smallest tablets that I’ve ever tested. Between the compact 205 x 6.5 x 132mm (WDH) dimensions and the 326g weight, it’s a breeze to use one-handed, and can easily be tucked away in a handbag or backpack. Despite having a larger display than Apple’s iPad mini, it’s actually narrower, which means it’s a tad easier to hold in one mitt.
The Pad Mini also feels wonderfully robust; the unibody aluminium build is solid as a rock and also looks nicely stylish. There are three colour options to choose from, with a standard black joined by the far more eye-catching purple reviewed here and a green variant.
The selfie camera being on the left side is a little inconvenient for facial recognition – several times I’ve waited impatiently for it to recognise me, only to realise I’m covering the lens with my palm – but otherwise, both facial and fingerprint unlocking are nice and efficient.
One interesting design feature of the Pad Mini is that there are two USB-C ports, one on the long bottom edge and one on the right side. The latter is a USB 3.0 port and supports faster 5Gbits/sec data transfer than the USB 2.0 port on the bottom edge but both work with the 67W wired charging and having the option to easily charge with the tablet in either orientation is a great touch.
The 3K display gets nice and bright, hitting a peak of 663cd/m2 on automatic brightness with a torch shining on the light sensor, and colour accuracy is excellent, as well. Of the six colour profiles available in the tablet’s display settings, I found the Advanced sRGB profile was, unsurprisingly, the most accurate versus the sRGB colour space. Here, I recorded an sRGB gamut coverage of 96.2% and a total volume of 99.9%, with the 1.08 average Delta E score indicating excellent accuracy.
I mostly stuck with the default Original Pro colour profile for streaming and gaming, as I found the saturation level punchy enough without feeling overblown. And it’s important for gaming to look good on the display because, between the gorgeously smooth 165Hz refresh rate and the blisteringly powerful MediaTek Dimensity 9400+ chipset, the Xiaomi Pad Mini is one of the best gaming tablets around.
Just look at the comparison below to see how effortlessly the Pad Mini blows the competition out of the water. Even Apple’s notoriously powerful silicon pales in comparison to the Xiaomi Pad Mini’s results. This translates into beautifully fluid gaming – I tested it out with a few laps in Asphalt Legends and crisply rendered landscapes whizzed past without a hint of lag or stutter.
Unsurprisingly, the MediaTek chipset also performed excellently in the Geekbench 6 CPU tests. Single-core performance is roughly identical to the iPad (2025), so the two won’t feel particularly different for simple operations, but the Xiaomi scored 60% higher in the multi-core test.
Now, the argument could be made that it’s diminishing returns for Xiaomi to offer that much power for multi-tasking on a screen that’s too small to take full advantage. You aren’t going to be trading in your laptop for the Pad Mini anytime soon, so why would you need it to be this powerful?
If it had a higher asking price, I’d put more weight behind that concern but the truth is that the Xiaomi Pad Mini already feels like very good value for money, so a little excess performance is no bad thing.
Rounding out the impressive results of my testing, battery life is also keenly competitive. In our standard looping video test, the Xiaomi Pad Mini lasted 16hrs 43mins, which is great for such a small device. Only the Honor Pad 10 lasted substantially longer but that will have a much larger battery inside.
Once depleted, charging is reasonably quick, too. In my testing, 35 minutes brought the battery up to 50% and it achieved a full charge in around 1hr 20mins.
What could be improved?
My greatest criticism, naturally, is the lack of a UK release. After testing the Xiaomi Pad Mini, I’m fully convinced of this form factor’s appeal – we haven’t seen a viable Android alternative to the iPad mini in many generations, and this is both cheaper and more powerful than Apple’s offering. It had the chops to be the best compact tablet around, so the fact that it isn’t even bothering with our market is frustrating to say the least.
If this tablet is going to market itself as a portable doodling machine, Xiaomi will need to improve the native sketching app, Mi Canvas. It’s fine for note-taking and scribbling over photos, but for detailed digital art it’s woefully lacking. The brush selection is meagre and there’s no option to separate a piece into layers. My biggest issue, however, was that the canvas creation simply isn’t well-designed for digital art.
By default, you’re presented with an “infinite” canvas, allowing you to take notes as far down the scrollable page as you need to. However, if you want to set a specific aspect ratio with a finite space upon which to deliver your masterpiece, as I did, you’ll quickly run into problems. I set the canvas to a standard 16:9 and got to painting, making the most of the limited brush selection and playing around with the single layer.
Unfortunately, I got to a point (fairly quickly) where the tablet told me I’d made too many brush strokes on this page, and needed to create another to continue. That obviously was not conducive to what I was trying to achieve, so I ended up downloading another sketching app and starting from scratch.
Beyond my gripes with the Mi Canvas app, there are only a couple of issues to discuss. My main bugbear is the HyperOS software, which I tend to dislike on every Xiaomi device I review. There’s too much bloatware preinstalled upon boot and the control centre is a mess – most notably, the general settings button is shuffled in with the rest of the quick launch cards, and none of them are labelled.
And as much as I enjoyed the display for gaming, streaming and sketching (with the right app), there are a couple of technical points on which it could improve. In short, this isn’t an OLED screen, so the black and contrast levels are already on the weaker side but, even by LCD standards, the results of my testing were fairly mediocre.
The 1,158:1 contrast ratio is serviceable but far from the best you can get at this price – the OnePlus Pad Lite, in fact, is £100 cheaper but delivered a much stronger ratio of 1,925.6:1 – and the measured black level of 0.40cd/m2 produced shades that felt a little on the gray side, rather than the deep, inky blacks you get from OLED displays.
Finally, I would have liked to see an LTE variant offered. Such a portable device feels like a natural fit for 5G connectivity, giving users the option to leave their phone at home and just work from the tablet for the day.
Should you buy the Xiaomi Pad Mini?
Compact tablets fell out of fashion for a reason, and I think most people will still be better off with a bigger device that can serve as a powerful and portable laptop replacement. If that’s more appealing to you, the best value option right now is the Honor Pad 10, where you’ll get the 12.1in tablet, a keyboard case and a stylus for just £300.
With that being said, however, I really like the Xiaomi Pad Mini. The compact and robust build makes it well-suited to being slung in your bag for a bit of streaming on the train to work, or even tucked neatly into your carry-on for a flight. Once you download a competent sketching app, the stylus is precise and responsive enough to facilitate digital art, too.
Which makes it all the more frustrating that it isn’t coming to the UK. We have nothing else like this on the market right now, with only the pricier iPad mini 7 catering to those who want a compact tablet. The Xiaomi Pad Mini has the looks and hardware to offer a serious Apple alternative for Android fans and it’s a real shame that only Asia and the Middle East are being given that option.
