Poco Pad X1 Review

Introduction

If you were looking for an iPad competitor in the world of Android tablets, your most likely destination would probably be Samsung, or maybe OnePlus. But this year, there’s an option from a very unlikely source: Poco. 

The Poco Pad X1 is a surprisingly adept $399 Android tablet with enough power, quality and versatility to keep pretty much anybody happy, and I’ve been testing it for the past few weeks. Let’s jump in.

Design 

• iPad-inspired design, including accessories
• Floating keyboard case is fantastic
• Uniform bezels, clean look

To say Poco has taken some inspiration from Apple in the design department is something of an understatement. Especially when you snap it onto the optional floating keyboard case – which bears a striking resemblance to Apple’s Magic Keyboard – and when you magnetically attach the optional stylus (called the Focus Pen) to the side. 

From a distance, you’d be hard pushed to tell the two apart. But there are some telltale signs that some corners have been cut by Poco, and an attempt to at least make the tablet itself look a little different. The former is, undoubtedly, to cut costs and bring the tablet down to an affordable price point. 

For instance, that floating keyboard case – which snaps on using physical connectors and magnets on the back of the tablet – doesn’t have a USB-C passthrough for charging or data transfer like Apple’s. And while the stylus or pen does magnetically attach and charge wirelessly from the side of the tablet, it has physical buttons for enabling some features. 

Despite that, with it snapped on, the tablet becomes a very convenient work machine. I wrote a good chunk of my words for this review, and a couple of others, using that magnetic keyboard.

The keys are well spaced, give just about enough feedback and are backlit, so you can use it in dim environments too. And the best part about the floating keyboard design, just like with Apple’s alternative, is that you can sit with it on your lap, because it doesn’t use a kickstand on the back to hold it up. 

The tablet itself doesn’t have depth-sensing facial recognition or a fingerprint scanner for authentication, so you’re limited to using a passcode or facial recognition that only uses the selfie camera on the front, and is therefore not as secure as Apple’s Face ID. 

Still, there’s a lot to like about the build and finish of Poco’s latest tablet. The flat edges and rounded corners are precise, neat and attractive, matching well with the uniform bezels around the 11.2-inch display. There are neatly machined holes for all the speakers built around the sides, enabling the immersive audio features I’ll get into in a little bit. 

Turn it around, and the back is your first clear sign that this is indeed a Poco tablet. The square camera island is surrounded by a yellow metal frame, contrasting with the dark grey aluminium body. And there’s the large ‘Poco’ label slapped in the middle of the space. 

Otherwise there’s not a huge amount more to say about the design. It’s a glass and metal rectangular slab. It’s thin, easy to hold, and has a clean look. 

Screen

• 11.2-inch screen is the ideal size for a tablet
• 3:2 aspect ratio is great for split-screen multitasking
• Impressive speaker array for the price

Poco’s first tablet had a pretty weak display, but it’s hard to criticise the 11.2-inch panel fitted in the Poco Pad X1.

It’s just the right size to be convenient, it’s bright and, at 345 pixels per inch, it’s sharp enough to keep details crisp at arm’s length. Plus, because it’s a 3:2 ratio, it’s not excessively narrow or wide and is well-suited to productivity tasks, not just video watching. 

The brightness levels can reach a peak of 800 nits in HDR movies, which, combined with deep contrast levels, is enough that it has both Dolby Vision and HDR10 certification, but it might also be the area it could do with a little improvement. 

With the glass being quite reflective, I often struggled with darker scenes in videos to see what was happening clearly. Especially if there was any bright light bouncing off the panel on the outside. 

Still, the colours are good. They’re vibrant without pushing too far into the realms of over saturation. If I have any criticism, it’s that it is a little warm, or pushes the reds and oranges a bit too hard sometimes – and that can skew some skin tones.

But, generally, it’s a great panel for media consumption, gaming or just basic photo editing. And it’s only helped further by the fact that it has a 144Hz refresh rate for silky smooth and sharp detail when the animation speeds up. 

Perhaps as impressive is the speaker array that lines the outside edges. It’s got a quad speaker system, firing sounds out both sides of the tablet in horizontal view. And they’re loud too. Even at 15% volume in a quiet room, it was more than loud enough to get clear dialogue in any shows and movies. 

They’re relatively well balanced too, but lacking a little in the bass department. Playing music through them, you’ll clearly hear vocals and most instruments quite clearly, but the lower frequency sounds like bass guitars don’t come through all that prominently. I wouldn’t describe them as tinny speakers, but they’re not the fullest I’ve heard on a tablet either. 

Performance

• Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 power
• Up to 512GB of storage
• Fine for most tasks, but occasionally lags

Performance-wise, the Poco Pad X1 sits squarely in the mid-range market. It’s not as powerful as the likes of the OnePlus Pad 3 or Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra, but it’s also nowhere near the bottom end. The result is a device that lets you get all the things done that you need to, without struggling with excessive lag. 

It’s powered by the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3, which is at the upper end of those mid-range phone and tablet processors. It means swiping through the user interface is almost always a snappy, responsive experience, and loading games and apps takes very little time. It’s not sluggish at all. And the benchmark tests we run back that feeling. 

Playing games is a pretty smooth experience most of the time, with responses on screen animating quickly after gestures are performed. I wouldn’t say it’s completely lag-free though. There are odd times when tapping to launch an app, or swiping up the app drawer, where I noticed some stuttering pretty consistently. Usually when going from a static, still page to a moving animation. 

The animation when using the Focus Pen to write or draw on screen isn’t completely smooth or fluid either, and so it doesn’t give a completely natural response like you might get from the Apple Pencil and an iPad. 

If most of your time on tablets is spent watching Netflix, or doing a bit of casual work and browsing, it’ll more than keep up with those sorts of tasks. It can even handle gaming pretty well. The only thing it lacks is the sort of power and capabilities required to keep the most demanding titles and apps running at peak performance in their highest settings for a long time. 

As for the built-in cameras, whether you use the rear or the front-facing sensors, the best way to describe them is that they work. Which is pretty typical on a tablet. They tend not to offer the quality you’d get from a smartphone, but in those odd moments where you quickly want to snap something just to share, or make video calls, they’ll allow you to do that. They are a little fuzzy and not the sharpest you’ll ever see, however. 

Software

• HyperOS 2 based on Android 15
• Workstation mode turns it into a laptop
• Standard smattering of AI tools

One of the most convenient things about HyperOS on the latest Poco tablet is the ability to switch between the familiar Android tablet interface and ‘Workstation mode’. This turns it into a computer interface of sorts, adding a dock to the bottom of the screen, removing all the app icons and folders from the desktop and opening apps in floating windows. 

Once open, you can resize and reposition them as you see fit, or have them open in full-screen mode. It’s a clever way to make use of the larger screen, and one that helps the Android tablet feel a lot less limited than it would be with a simple, traditional Android UI. 

As is typical, Xiaomi’s HyperOS has a suite of AI functions, most of which are similar to what you’ll find on most other modern-day Android phones and tablets. There are tools for writing that help with grammar and spelling, turning short notes into more detailed text, polishing style, generating summaries, and checking for professionalism. 

The tool for expanding short notes into more descriptive text is pretty extreme in its approach. I’d say almost taking it too far in terms of the original text that’s there, and what comes out afterwards. Two simple lines of text made up of 4 or 5 words can become a long paragraph with expressions and descriptions that weren’t in the original text. 

There is a tool coming to Xiaomi’s Canvas drawing app for turning doodles into AI-generated pictures, but that didn’t appear to be in the software running on our review unit. You also get translation tools, and Google Gemini is baked in as standard. 

Battery life

• 8850mAh battery
• More than enough for a day of use
• 45W charging delivers full charge in just over an hour

Battery drain is very much dependent on what you do with the Pad X1.

An hour of Netflix sips about 8% of the battery, which is pretty standard in a tablet. And if you’re the type of user who only picks it up once a day, or once every other day for an hour or two, you’ll get multiple days of use from a full charge. And it also means it’s more than enough to binge-watch 10 hour-long episodes of your favourite show on a long-haul flight before the battery depletes. 

Use it for things like casual games, drawing or anything that requires a bit more processing power, however, and you could probably drain the whole thing in a day. Especially if you’re a bit of a tablet power user. 

Still, charging speeds are pretty quick for a tablet. With a compatible Xiaomi charger, it’ll do half the battery in just under half an hour, and nearly 90% in an hour. So you’ll not have to wait long if you ever do need to top it up, thanks to its 45W charging speeds.

Should you buy it?

FAQs