From the living room to the boardroom: The reason why Android tablets are making a comeback

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.For more than a decade, Android tablets have lived in a strange limbo. They were declared dead when phones grew larger, dismissed as pandemic‑era stopgaps, and overshadowed by Apple’s iPad.

Yet the category refuses to fade away. In India, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Lenovo, and Samsung continue to launch new models every year, and many of them are selling far better than their reputation suggests.This contradiction is at the heart of the tablet story today.The post-pandemic momentum did not just "bring back" tablets; it transformed them into a standalone category that sits comfortably between the smartphone and the laptop.Xiaomi’s latest launch, the Pad 8, arrives in this context of market category that isn’t booming, but nor is it shrinking.

Tablets aren’t fashionable, but they continue to serve a functional purpose, and consumers are more willing than ever to treat a tablet as a long‑term computing device rather than an auxiliary accessory.I recently sat down with Sandeep Sarma, Associate Director, PR & Marketing, and Gautam Batra, Associate Director, Product Marketing, at Xiaomi to understand why the company treats tablets as a growth engine (Xiaomi re‑entered the segment in India with the Pad 5 in 2022). Currently the company sits at the number three spot in India in this segment, even ahead of Apple.In the smartphone world, the volume usually sits at the bottom of the value chain; a company typically sells millions of entry-level devices, and the numbers taper off as one moves toward the flagship.

With tablets, the opposite is true. Xiaomi is seeing its highest demand in the “premium” segment, which they define as anything north of ₹20,000.“People are no longer looking for a ‘cheap’ tablet,”