What memories of that time, now so far away, when you found small tablets everywhere? Now, buying one is a complex task. Or at least risky. Even the iPad mini was, for a time, in danger of extinction.
The Realme Pad Mini arrives on the market to offer something that seemed to threaten to disappear due to the proliferation of smartphones with large diagonals: a small, affordable tablet with no pretense other than consuming content. Let’s see if it’s worth it or not.
The Realme Pad Mini is a reduced format tablet with an 8.7-inch screen. The resolution is only HD +, that is, 1340×800 pixels.
As soon as you turn on the tablet and start messing around with it, you can already see that sacrifices have been made to get a small tablet. The screen has been one of the most affected. And that’s not good news on a tablet.
It is enough to look from the screen of this Realme tablet to almost any smartphone, no matter how entry-level it may be, and you understand it right away. Especially if you spend a lot of time reading or consuming content that is not video or audio. There, the low resolution of the LCD panel is a drawback.
A tablet, small or large, is, after all, a screen. That the quality of the panel is insufficient costs a lot to assume
The screen of the Realme Pad Mini scratches in practically everything: resolution, brightness, contrast… only the use of the screen is remarkable. The frames are appreciable but don’t make us lose too much of an immersive feeling. We are talking about a cheap tablet, but not so much. And it is something that a consumer should know before launching to buy a device with this clear usage profile.
However, the sound of the Realme Pad Mini is up to what we expect in a multimedia experience on a tablet.
Its two stereo speakers offer an excellent surround feeling while sounding powerful and quite precise for its size.
As for the cameras of this tablet, they are, as we expected, merely standard. The rear offers an 8 MP (f2.0) solution that is used to get out of the way in case we need it, which would surprise us today, while the one for selfies (5 MP and f2.2) gives us just enough that we are going to need for an occasional video call. Our interlocutor, at least, will know that it is us.
Fair power under Android without additions
The Realme Pad Mini is presented in society in two versions: one with 2 GB of RAM accompanying 32 GB of internal memory, and another more interesting one with 3 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage. In both cases, the processor is a Unisoc T616 at 2 GHz (GPU Mali G57 MP1), and the internal memory can be expanded with microSD cards of up to 1 TB.
With that basic technical sheet, it has been easy to verify in the performance that we are facing a tablet that offers us adequate power. Look, if not, at the benchmarks:
GeekBench: 370 / 1360
PC Mark Work 3.0: 8442
3DMark SlingShot: 1672Something better is the connectivity section, where charging is done via USB-C, and we also have Wifi 5, Bluetooth 5.0, headphone jack, and versions with 4G connectivity.
A Premium design that is appreciated
I must admit that the idea of the cheap and small tablet inevitably leads me to the Amazon Fire. Yes, they are incredibly affordable, but at the level of finish, they do not offer anything extraordinary.
With Realme, one knows that, even at a low price, the quality of construction and attention to detail is assured.
That is why it is so surprising that the Realme Pad Mini, as with many of its smartphones, stands out from the outset due to the high level of finish for its price.
The manufacture of the tablet is in solid aluminum. We gain a tremendous feeling of robustness in hand, but in return, the weight remains at 373 grams.
In a tablet of this diagonal (8.7 inches), offering a lot of comfort for use with one hand is essential. This Realme Pad Mini achieves it on that excellent touch and for a thickness of only 7.6 mm.
The physical volume and power controls have a good finish and travel. They are located on the right side.
A battery at the level of the finish of the tablet
Suppose we started this analysis of the Realme Pad Mini by praising the brand’s work in terms of design and finish in this tablet model. In that case, we will end it by Finding another positive point after our real test with the small tablet from the Asian manufacturer.
In autonomy, the Realme Pad Mini gives us just what we need with a tablet: forget that you have to charge it for a few days.
We talk about the battery. It’s capacity of 6400 mAh together with the low resolution and brightness of the panel or the undemanding of the layer? Of Realme on Android, they achieve something also essential in the experience with a tablet: that we forget about its battery.
In our tests these weeks, with more occasional use, we only had to worry about charging it every three days, with about 2-3 hours of varied use each day.
Charging is done at 18 W with the standard charger, and we have it at 100% in less than two hours; another good news.
