TechRadar Verdict
Realme Pad X has all the ingredients to make it a great choice for a multimedia consumption device. It has a great display, an even greater set of speakers and great battery life. Everything is held together by the performance of Snapdragon 695 SoC and Realme UI for Pad.
Pros
- +
Display
- +
Speakers
- +
Battery life
Cons
- -
No 3.5mm headphone jack
- -
No high refresh rate display
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Realme Pad X is the company's premium tablet offering in the Indian market. It is priced in the Rs. 20,000 to Rs. 25,000 price bracket. For the price, it brings a lot of stuff to the table, including a great screen and an even greater speaker setup. Let us talk in detail about how good the new Realme Pad X is in this review.
Price and availability
Realme Pad X is priced at Rs. 19,999 for the Wi-Fi only variant while the higher 5G variant costs upwards of Rs. 25,999. That puts it at odds against Xiaomi Pad 5 for the 6/128GB variant. And only the 4/64GB Wi-Fi only variant feels a little aggressive on the pricing, but Realme Pad X brings 5G support to the table while the Xiaomi Pad 5 only comes with Wi-Fi only variants.
Realme Pad X is available on Realme.com and Flipkart online, and it is available across all the retail channels offline.
Design
Realme Pad X has a clean design, with just the display on the front with equal bezels. But that's the case with almost any other Android tablet. There's also the front camera on these bezels.
On the back, it looks premium with its matte-finished plastic back. It looks minimalistic, with the camera array looking better than expected in real life. But the minimalistic camera from Realme Pad might have looked better, in my opinion. I like the matte finish on the back panel; its matte finish registers no fingerprints and smudges. The tablet feels light, too; at 499 grams, it is lighter than Xiaomi Pad 5 by 12 grams.
The placement of buttons in the tablet is ergonomic; it is accessible in both landscape and portrait mode.
Display and speakers
Talking about the display, we have a 10.9-inch 2K display. It has a brightness of 450nits and a refresh rate of 60Hz only. There should have been support for a high refresh rate display, especially when the competitor of this tablet, Xiaomi Pad 5, comes with a 120Hz display. But I can live with the 60Hz display, but I sometimes miss the high refresh rate as I haven't used a 60Hz display on my phone in a long time.
Watching movies and TV shows on the tablet is a breeze and the display displays on a tablet in the price range. It does not come with the wide contrast ratios of an AMOLED, but it has accurate colours and wide viewing angles.
The display is complemented with an excellent quad-speaker setup, with two placed on either side of the display. It is Dolby Atmos supported and has four times thrice as loudness as an average smartphone. And watching movies and TV shows is elevated heavily by these speakers.
Performance
Snapdragon 695 SoC powers realme Pad X. It is a powerful chipset we saw in various smartphones such as Realme 9 Pro, OnePlus Nord 2 CE, and Moto G71. Compared to its peers, it offers better performance than Oppo Pad Air. At the same time, Xiaomi Pad 5 remains the one to go for in terms of performance, as it's Snapdragon 860 is objectively better than Snapdragon 695.
The tablet did not break a sweat in my everyday use involving watching YouTube videos, light gaming, and reading comics. During my testing, I did not encounter any lag or significant bugs on the device.
The device did offer decent performance on heavy gaming involving Apex Legends and Call of Duty Mobile. But it did get a little hot after a while of heavy gaming.
There is 5G support with the tablet, with support for 13 5G bands.
Camera
The tablet has a 13MP camera on the back and an 8MP selfie camera on the front. There isn't anything particular about the cameras; it is just average.
Most people aren't even going to use the cameras on tablets to capture pictures, but most people will use the front camera. The front camera has a limelight feature that keeps you in the middle of the frame on video calls and meetings. That is an excellent addition. The front camera is average, but it is at least better than laptop webcams.
Battery
Realme Pad X comes with a pretty hefty 8340mAh battery. It lasted for two days on average in our testing in normal usage, including Youtube, Netflix, Astonishing Comic Reader, Hotstar, and Kindle.
There is support for 33W fast charging, and the charger is given in the box. It takes almost 2 hours to go from 0-100% on average.
Software
Realme Pad and Realme Pad Mini came with almost stock Android UI rather than the Realme UI custom skin. But this time, we get the complete tablet experience with Realme UI for Pad. The familiar Realme UI from Realme phones is customized for a better tablet experience.
Verdict
Realme Pad X is an excellent offering from Realme in the sub-Rs. 25,000 segment of Android tablets. It comes with a great display coupled with even more fantastic speakers. And it has the performance for everything you want to do with a tablet. Although most people don't need the 5G support in a tablet, it is lovely.
Realme Pad X is easily the best tablet that Realme has ever produced, and it is a polished product with great build quality and stable software. It can be the perfect device if you are looking for media consumption and even gaming.
Realme should have given a 6/128GB option for the Wi-Fi-only variant, as the Wi-Fi-only variant comes in only a 4/64GB combo. 64GB isn't enough and even the base variant of the 5G variant of Realme Pad X comes with 4/6GB. For the price of Rs. 25,999, at least 128GB of internal storage should have been given by the company. It feels like a crime providing a measly 64GB for the price of Rs. 26,000.
The 6/128GB version costs Rs. 27,999 and at that price, this device is even costlier than the 6/128GB variant of the Xiaomi Pad 5. Even though Xiaomi's tablet doesn't come with cellular connectivity, for the similar pricing, Xiaomi Pad 5 would be a better buy. But the Wi-Fi-only variant offers so much for the price, making this the best Android tablet to get for Rs. 20,000.
