Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Scintillating and smooth display
- Good battery life
- 120W fast charging
- Focus Pen stylus is great fun
Cons
- Limited software support
- Stylus not included
- Officially only works with Xiaomi stylus
- No 5G option
Our Verdict
The Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro is a powerful, capable Android tablet with a super-smooth display, great entertainment features, and compares well on price with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra and Apple iPad Pro (2022). That said, if you don’t need a tablet for artistic and work reasons, a mid-range Android tablet like the Xiaomi Pad 6 might be a better value choice.
Price When Reviewed
Unavailable in the US
Xiaomi’s latest high-end Android tablet is the Pad 6S Pro 12.4, and it’s something of a head turner – sleek all-metal body and a 12.4-inch 3K display on the outside, powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor with up to 12GB memory and 512GB of storage on the inside.
As well as offering buyers an alternative to the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra – another powerful Android tablet – and the Apple iPad Pro (2022), Xiaomi has made a tablet that appears to be able to do anything.
Powerful speakers and a detailed display promise a great multimedia experience. There’s also a Xiaomi Focus Pen stylus, which as well as letting you doodle and take notes on the Pad 6S Pro, comes with an interesting cropping feature, and a rubberised cover with a kickstand.
There’s also the Touchpad Keyboard dock in the pipeline, which should let you crack on with some work when you’re done with streaming and sketching – this peripheral was not provided with the review sample, sadly, and at the time of writing, neither was a release date.
With prices starting at £599, the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro is also competitively priced, and could do for high-end Android tablets what the Xiaomi Pad 6 did for mid-range tablets.
Take a look at our current picks for the best tablets money can buy.
Design & Build
- Wafer-thin all-metal jacket
- Camera module juts out from the body
- You’ll probably want a case
It’s hard to believe that the thin edges of the device house no fewer than six external speakers
The Pad 6S Pro’s body is made from a metal alloy that’s available in just one colour, a dark silver which Xiaomi calls ‘graphite grey’. Currently, the official Xiaomi Pro Cover folding case is also only available in grey. Hopefully more colour options will be made available sooner.
The metal jacket and 7mm bezel give the Pad 6S Pro a smart, tidy look. It’s hard to believe that the thin edges of the device house no fewer than six external speakers – two speaker grilles sit on either edge.
On the left-hand edge of the Pad 6S Pro (when holding it in portrait mode) you’ll find the power button. The volume rocker sits around the corner, on the top edge of the device, which makes for easy screenshot taking.
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Thomas Newton / Foundry
The top edge also features a magnetic strip, for the Focus Pen stylus to be connected to for charging and storage. Over on the right hand side between the two speaker grilles is a Type-C USB port. There are no ports, connections, or grilles on the bottom edge.
The front-facing camera sensor is tiny, barely noticeable in the bezel. Over on the rear is a camera module which looks like it’s been transplanted from the Xiaomi 14 smartphone. It rises about 2mm up from the rest of the tablet’s body, which means that the Pad 6S Pro won’t rest flush with a desktop. If I were a cynic, I’d say that the intent here is to force you to buy a protective cover with your tablet.
The Pro Cover, with its rubbery coating, makes the Pad 6S Pro easier to grip and hold, plus, the clasp helps the stylus in place when it’s charging. While the tablet is fairly weighty, you can (just about) hold it in one hand and swipe and sketch in the other.
Note that it doesn’t come with an IP rating for dust and water protection like the IP68 Tab S9 range.
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Screen & Speakers
- 12.4-inch LCD panel
- Maximum refresh rate of 144Hz
- Six external speakers
The Pad 6S Pro’s 12.4in display is an LCD type, meaning that it won’t offer the gorgeous levels of contrast that you get from an OLED display – like the one on the the Samsung Tab S9 Ultra – but with quoted peak brightness of 900 nits, contrast here is still good.
The high resolution and 144Hz refresh rate means that games and video content looks nicely detailed as well. The 3:2 aspect ratio means that video content is letterboxed, but the extra height you get compared with 16:10 displays makes for roomier web browsing and office tasks.
The photos I’ve taken might suggest otherwise, but the display was bright enough to punch through the midday sun, even if the reflective coating does pick up glare pretty badly. With the High Brightness Mode engaged, I recorded peak brightness of 921 nits, slightly higher than the listed maximum. The display is more than bright enough for indoor use.
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Audio from videos and music played through the stereo speakers sounds fantastic, all things considered. Dialogue always sounded clear as a bell above background noise, even in action sequences, such as the battle scene of Episode 9 of Shogun.
Tracks with stereo and 5.1 mixes sounded a lot more spacious than they would on most tablets, and while the physical limitations of a device of this size mean that bass response is always going to be limited, I was impressed with how weighty songs sounded.
It’s no substitute for a standalone speaker or soundbar, naturally, but as tablet speakers go, they are very good indeed.
Focus Pen stylus
- 240Hz touch sampling rate
- 8192 levels of pressure sensitivity
- Great for sketching and writing
- Highlighter tool and palm detection needs work
A key selling point of the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro is the Focus Pen, an active stylus which pairs with the Pad 6S Pro via Bluetooth.
It uses proprietary Xiaomi technology, and according to spokespeople isn’t based on AES technology. In other words, if you try to use another stylus with this, chances are if it does work at all, its functionality will be limited.
As well as functioning as a stylus as you’d expect, the Focus Pen has some interesting tricks up its sleeve
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Thomas Newton / Foundry
As well as functioning as a stylus as you’d expect, the Focus Pen has some interesting tricks up its sleeve. There are three controls on the side of the Focus Pen, which let you action different things.
The Writing button (the one closest to the tip) quick-launches the Mi Canvas note-taking and sketching app. The Screenshot button (the middle button) launches a cropping tool, which which you can grab and save specific portions of what’s on your display, or take an entire screenshot, instead of having to reach for the power key and volume rocker.
Finally, there’s the standalone Spotlight button, which can do a number of things. Pressing and holding this button sees a red dot cursor appear on the screen which you can the move around with the stylus, effectively using the Focus Pen like a virtual laser pointer. It’s easy to use, fun, and effective sat close up and stood far away.
While I was able to use this comfortably when stood two meters away, at such a distance, it’s also tricky to see what’s on the display, so perhaps not best employed in large meetings.
Pressing the Spotlight button once brings up a highlighter tool which does a similar thing, although in practice, this is harder to use, thanks to the cursor suddenly veering off in one direction, or the highlighter not always highlighting, even though you’ve got the button pressed down. Trying to make helpful annotations to images felt like performing keyhole surgery with a Nintendo Wii controller.
Another thing you can do with the Spotlight button is use it as a remote camera shutter.
You might be thinking, ‘Yes, this is all very nice, but how does it fare as a stylus?’ Pretty good, as it happens.
The Focus Pen boasts 8192 levels of pressure sensitivity (double that of the Apple Pencil 2nd gen), a 240Hz touch sampling rate (the number of times the Pad 6S Pro’s display can sense the stylus per second), and 3ms of latency (the delay between you writing something and it appearing on the display).
In simple terms, it’s a very sensitive stylus that’ll let you quickly scrawl away with very little activation force.
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Thomas Newton / Foundry
The Mi Canvas app demonstrates this well – I had a lot of fun producing sketches of pine cones and marvelled at the very subtle changes you can make to drawings. For example, the pencil tool will yield stronger, darker marks the harder you press, as you might expect. With the pencil opacity set to 60%, this effect became uncannily lifelike, as with tiny flicks of the stylus, I could easily add slight details, or heavy shading simply by pressing a mite harder.
This is great not just because of the pleasing effect of the technology, but because it saved me from having to stop drawing, dive into the settings, increase opacity, and jump back. I could have easily missed the deadline for this review as a result of how much fun sketching is.
The ink pen tool was a little slower to respond, with some noticeable delay between pen strokes and the ‘ink’ appearing on the screen. Other than that specific tool in Mi Canvas, there was no discernible delay.
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Mi Canvas also as an intriguing AI Pen tool, but this option is currently only available to beta testers, so I can’t say if it’s an improvement on what we saw at this year’s Mobile World Congress. It can turn a simple, rubbish even, sketch into usable artwork.
The tablet’s palm rejection measures usually worked – the Pad 6S Pro could usually tell whenever I was resting my hand on the display, and wouldn’t pick that up when I was sketching, but, I found that whenever jotting down things in the Notes app in landscape mode, my palm would, more often than not, accidentally launch the keyboard, which was irritating.
Thankfully, I never encountered this when holding the tablet portrait-wise, which is probably how most people will be holding it while taking notes, so arguably, not as big an issue as it might appear but it’s still annoying.
This aside, the handwriting recognition aspect of the Notes app is very good. I really had to try hard, by writing badly on purpose, to fool the software into converting my handwriting into the wrong word, but the majority of the time, the Pad 6S Pro had me beat.
Specs & Performance
- Excellent overall performance
- Not quite as powerful as the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra
- But Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro’s battery lasts longer
The Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro’s performance is very good indeed. As well as the aforementioned Mi Canvas app running very smoothly, high-end game Asphalt 9 ran like greased lightning with added grease.
General everyday operations like web browsing and even just swishing through menus feels fantastic as well, a sensation helped by that 144MHz display.
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Thomas Newton / Foundry
Thomas Newton / Foundry
There are two versions of the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro available, one with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, one with 12/512GB, neither of which can be expanded with microSD cards. The model offered for testing is the entry level one.
Both are powered by the octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, which boosts up to 3.19GHz – slower than the overclocked Samsung variant, which boosts up to 3.36GHz.
It’s perhaps not a shock then to see that the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra leaps ahead of the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro in almost every benchmark, especially the Geekbench CPU stress test. It’s a little behind the Apple iPad Pro 12.9 as well – a tablet from 2021.
But, to paraphrase Blade Runner, the tablet that…