After taking the smartphone world by storm, Xiaomi is trying to repeat its success where tablets are concerned. With the new Xiaomi Mi Pad, this Chinese company has not only brought competition to other tablets but also made them affordable. In terms of its overall size and dimensions, the Mi Pad has a lot in common with Apple’s iPad mini. There is no mistaking one for the other though, as the Mi Pad is all glossy plastic. Xiaomi says it has used magnesium alloy in the construction of the Mi Pad, but you wouldn’t know by looking at it. The shell isn’t removable and so the battery is sealed in.
There’s a microSD card tray on the left side and the power and volume buttons are on the right. The 3.5mm headset socket is on top and the Micro-USB port is on the bottom.
The Mi Pad features Nvidia’s 32-bit Tegra K1, which has four cores running at 2.2GHz and a fifth low-power “companion core” that kicks in to let the main cores go to sleep when power needs to be conserved.
If you had any doubt which tablets Xiaomi wants to compete with, look no further than the screen specs. The 4:3 LCD screen measures 7.9 inches diagonally and has a resolution of 1536×2048 – exactly the same as the second- and third-generation iPad minis. Not many small Android tablets use this kind of screen; 16:10 and 16:9 are much more common.
If one is interested in taking photos with a tablet, the Mi Pad has an 8-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel front camera. You can record 1080p video but there’s no flash. The battery capacity is an impressive 6,700mAh.
