Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro 12.4 Review : Strong Price Play, How About Offerings?

Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro 12.4
Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro 12.4
The Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro is the company’s first 12.4″ tablet made available in Malaysia with the same objective as every other product they have : top-shelf specs and accessories with a price that undercuts the competition. While a strategy like that has worked out for them for the longest time, how does it stack up against a slowly maturing market segment?
Design
8
Display
7
Performance
9
Battery Life
8
Value
8
Multitasking Competency
7
Love
Strong performance as a tablet
Affordable 12-inch tablet option
Fastest charging for a tablet @ 35 minutes
USB 3.2 gen 1
Loven’t
Pricey for no OLED
No Cellular Variant
No microSD
7.8

Out of 10

Key Specs

CPU Snapdragon® 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform
Memory8GB LPDDR5X RAM / 256GB UFS 4.0
12GB LPDDR5X RAM / 512GB UFS 4.0
Display12.4’’ 3K 144Hz IPS LCD
3:2 aspect ratio
900 nits peak brightness
Camera50 MP, f/1.8, (wide) PDAF, OIS

2 MP, f/2.4, (depth sensor)

32 MP, f/2.2 (selfie)
ConnectivityBluetooth 5.3, USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 1, Up to WiFi 7
OSXiaomi HyperOS, Android 14
Battery10000 mAh, 120W Fast Charging
Available ColorsGrey
Retail Price8GB / 256GB – RM 2799
12GB / 512GB – RM 3099

What’s It Like To Use?

Coming in only Graphite Gray, the Xiaomi 6s Pro doesn’t need to WOW people in design. It’s a simply unibody tablet with thin bezels and slightly rounded edges. It’s also relatively thin, with just a 6mm thickness. Both the back and frame are aluminum with a matte finish. What really is to be admired is the size. It’s 12.4-inches in size, which has an uncommon 3:2 aspect ratio which I am totally all for. It’s great for fitting more content into one instance rather than needing to constantly scroll to view everything.

As for specs, the Pad 6s Pro has nearly everything covered, coming in strong with last year’s flagship chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Memory-wise are just 2 flavors, the base model being 256GB+8GB and tops off at 512GB+12GB. The display is an IPS panel with a 3K resolution, running up to 144Hz.

GameActivity (After 60 minutes)Highest Temperature
Wuthering WavesDaily Quests, Roaming @ 50-60FPS45°C
Zenless Zone Zero1 Entire Hollow Zero @ 56 – 60FPS46°C
Stardew ValleyDaily Farming and Tasks40°C

Expectedly, these specs translate to reliable, ultra-snappy performance, something which bodes well with HyperOS. It delivers stellar performance across a variety of titles, such as Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves. You can enjoy your daily questing on-the-go with max graphics, hitting and staying on the 60FPS mark for at least an hour before throttling down to the high 50s FPS. In this case, I think it’s pretty good considering just how much of surface area the tablet has for cooling, so you can confidently designate this to be a tablet fit for gaming any time, because even though it’s up to the mid 40s in degrees celsius, it’s not prominently felt because of the size of the tablet.

For viewing videos in general, I’d only recommend it to people who aren’t too particular with vibrancy, blacks and saturation, which would be a lot of people anyway. However, it’s still a very serviceable, if not good IPS panel, with impressive brightness and contrast to cover the sunniest days and darkest nights. Though there’s no PWM implemented, I personally had no trouble using the Pad 6s Pro in pitch darkness set at a lower brightness. No doubt we’re missing the vibrancy that come from mainstream OLEDs, I’d gladly pick battery life for this scenario. No sense in enjoying visuals if it doesn’t have the legs to last.

Speaking of legs to last, that is something the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro can absolutely do. It packs a standard-sized 10,000 mAh battery that can be fully charged in under 40 minutes using the included 120W charger. If you’re like me, trying to bombard it with constant tasks on Canva, Email, YouTube, an hour or 2 of gaming at a cafe, while listening to music, then I can tell you that from 100% in the morning, I go home with about 20% left in the tank late at night, and that includes use of the Xiaomi Focus Pen, Touchpad Keyboard, Logitech MX Master 3s mouse and a pair of earphones connected via Bluetooth, which is impressive considering the workload and multiple wireless connections to these peripherals.

The Accessories

The Xiaomi 6s Pro comes with 3 optional accessories since launch :

  • Xiaomi Pad 6s Pro Touch Keyboard
  • Xiaomi Focus Pen
  • Xiaomi Pad 6s Pro Cover

Touch Keyboard

  • The touch keyboard props itself up using half the cover from the back. It’s solid and magnetically attached to the other half of the cover. It attaches with the tablet magnetically using POGO pins at the back of the case.
  • The typing feel is typical, akin to any tablet keyboard most people have already used. It is low-profile with a low travel distance so it’s quick but not too flat unlike a scissor-switch. The keyboard is also backlit, and you can adjust its brightness in the settings or enable automatic adjustment.
  • Touchpad is thin with almost no flex, with the clicks feeling solid and confident. It controls a cursor that will automatically appear and also supports finger gestures for screen-free navigation.

Focus Pen

  • The focus pen weights about 15g, and connects automatically via Bluetooth once you magnetically attach it to the top side of the tablet (assuming landscape position). It also charges its built-in battery the same way, it does not have a its own charging port.
  • It features 8192 levels of pressure and a fast 240Hz sampling rate with an average of 3ms latency

3 Buttons on-pen

  • Most bottom button : Opens Mi Canvas App
  • Middle Button : Takes screenshots (can choose to capture entire / section of current display
  • Top most button : Mutli-purpose button (Virtual laser pointer, camera shutter, annotation tool)

From a note-taking perspective, it’s fast and as straightforward as it gets (using only Mi Canvas). It doesn’t necessarily stand out from other styluses I’ve used thus far, but it gets the job done and the buttons are indeed useful.

For those looking to doodle or do actual illustrations, the Xiaomi Focus Pen’s specs does translate to excellent real life delivery towards the matters of precision and smoothness, however it does take awhile for you to acclimate to the shape and shortcuts, especially those coming from an SPen or Apple Pencil environment. It’s not too difficult, it’s just the matter of getting used to a new drawing pen.

Xiaomi Pad 6s Pro Cover

  • Standard kickstand cover that offers basic protection, with magnetic open/close.
  • Can stand on both landscape and portrait positions due to folding

Approach to Multitasking

Of course I had to look into this. There’s only really 2 ways for you utilize multi-tasking on the Xiaomi Pad 6s Pro.

Default Android Tablet Mode

Split-Screen

I personally like the split screen capabilities of HyperOS on a tablet like this. You literally just open any app as you normally would and just tap the 3 dots on the top, and from there just choose whether you want the app to be placed half-screen on the left of right. You can also minify the app to be a floating, movable window while you’re browsing the rest of the homescreen or have an open app on the left or right that occupies the half the screen. The maximum number of concurrent windows you can open are 3, 1 on each side occupying half-screen, while the 3rd is a minified window that can can drag to either side or right in the center.

I find the implementation to work well and straightforward to use.

Workstation Mode

Enabled via the control centre (or Android Settings), Workstation mode will convert the standard Android tablet experience into a desktop format, clearing all typical Android tablet icon shortcuts off the screen and giving you a PC like interface that retains the dock. From that dock, any open apps that you tap from there will open on the desktop as windows that you can resize. Typical scenarios would be working on Gmail and Office simultaneously while on a Zoom call, and while the implementation is easy, the end result still feels incomplete. It also feels rather limited, considering the fact that you cannot add icons to your desktop, only widgets, which ends up looking like a single-paged Android homescreen. The real difference is the dock changing to facilitate open apps and getting to resize them. I hope to see an update to improve workstation mode into being able to move apps and even change the dock to a flatted taskbar to really emulate the PC experience.

However nit-picking I am being, it still works and doesn’t require any time to get used to or learn, it really just needs that polish in the front-end.


The Verdict

The Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro proved to be capable of being a great high-end tablet that’s suitable for all kinds of users looking for an all-in-one for both work and play. Price-wise it tops off for RM 3099 which gets you the 12GB/512GB variant which I feel is more worth it compared to the base variant at RM 2799. That Extra RM 300 gets you 50% more RAM and twice the storage, it’s a clear winner, unless you’re a strict budget and you max out at RM 3000, in which I recommend either the Focus Pen for RM 399 or Touch Keyboard for RM 699 if you have some headroom.

I enjoyed reading and working on this tablet as the 3:2 aspect ratio made it comfy and provided more viewing of content compared to the tradition 16:9 aspect ratio.

Xiaomi’s on a mission to catch every segment by surprise, and the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro is definitely one of their few success cases in the large-sized Android tablet market.

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