Xiaomi Mi Pad review: The iPad killer

Barely a year ago, Xiaomi entered the Indian market with its budget smartphone Mi3, and rearranged the entire dynamics of the smartphone industry in the country. Recently, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer introduced India to its first tablet, the Mi Pad.

The Xiaomi Mi Pad is a 7.9-inch tablet, which sports a unibody design. Owing to the form factor and plastic body, at the first look, the Mi Pad reminds you of an iPhone 5C or a Windows Phone stretched out to a tablet.

Made out of a sophisticated plastic, the Mi Pad is sturdy and well-flushed along the edges. However, the back panel of the tablet is eminently glossy, which does not allow a good grips and therefore we would recommend a sleeve or a cover to keep the tablet safe.

The Mi Pad flaunts a 7.9-inch IPS LCD 2K display (1536 x 2048 pixels, which is double the HD resolution) with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. The tablet’s front panel sports a 5MP secondary camera and a notification LED on the top, and the control touch-buttons at the bottom of the panel. While a headphone jack is placed on the top edge of the tablet, a USB charging port sits at its bottom edge. On the right edge, it features a volume rocker and a power button, and the left edge sports an ejectable tray for the microSD card.

On the back panel, the Mi Pad features an 8MP primary camera. And along the bottom edge, sit two stereo speaker grilles on the either sides.

Under the hood, the Mi Pad is powered by an Nvidia Tegra K1, featuring a Cortex A-15 quad-core processor clocked at 2.2 GHz, and accompanied by ULP GeForce Keple GPU and 2GB of RAM. The tablet embraces an internal storage of 16GB, which is expandable up to 128GB using a microSD card. The connectivity options include Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual band, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi hotspot, Bluetooth v4.0 and a micro USB 2.0. The Xiaomi Mi Pad is fuelled with Li-Po 6700 mAh battery, and is expected to deliver almost a day’s battery life. However, in case of heavy usage such as gaming, the battery is bound to exhaust sooner.

Running on the Android 4.4.4 KitKat operating system, the Mi Pad’s user interface is over-layered with Xiaomi’s custom MIUI V6. The tablet’s UI is smooth and fluid, with effortless transitions. However, as compared to the Mi smartphones, Xiaomi has skipped some of the MIUI features on the tablet. It doesn't get themes, security app, recorder, QR scanner, compass and the bug-reporting tool.

 

 

The display of the smartphone is crisp and bright, and has good color saturation, and great viewing angles. The 2K resolution of the display enhances the user experience quite a bit. The display’s legibility in bright sunlight is good too, which means it is clear enough to read even in bright sunlight.

Moving to the camera, the Mi Pad sports an 8MP primary camera. The images taken from the Mi Pad are just about fine, with nice and bright colors, but it lacks adequate sharpness and clarity. The image quality further degrades when clicked in low light or at night, owing to a missing flash. Below are some of the shots taken by the Mi Pad. You can click to view/download the images and view them at full resolution in order to judge the performance of the camera.

Additionally, the tablet sports a 5MP camera in the front, which is fairly decent. However, since the tablet is not really meant for photography, the primary camera could have been done away with altogether. In its stead, the 8MP camera could have been placed in the front, which would be a lot more useful for purposes like video calling.

With the given configuration, the Mi Pad is ideal for gaming and heavy usage. However, it is to be noted that some of the gaming apps in the play store are not compatible with the Mi Pad’s 2K display and the aspect ratio.

With a modest price tag of Rs 12,999, the Mi Pad is a great investment. The tablet is primarily recommended for people who want a gaming gadget in a budget. Xiaomi Mi Pad is an ideal Android replacement for Apple iPad Mini.