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After taking the smartphone world by storm, Xiaomi
is trying to repeat its success where tablets are concerned. We've been almost
universally impressed by what the Chinese company has managed to produce given
the prices it charges, and the rest of the industry has had to scramble to
match this new competitive force. As customers and compulsive bargain hunters
ourselves, Xiaomi has brought nothing but good news this past year.
Recent launches
haven't had as much of an impact as the first few did, but that's set to change
again with the new Xiaomi Mi Pad. While there
are plenty of Android tablets in this price range already, the
company is promising high-end features and the kind of quality that competitors
do not deliver. Apple, in particular, stands out as the prime target -
not the horde Android manufacturers offering oversized phones.
Look and feel
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.
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.
There's an
almost distractingly reflective Mi logo in the upper left corner, above the
screen. You can see a camera cutout in the centre, but apart from those the
front face looks blank. Capacitive touch buttons below the screen light up when
you use them. You'll find a camera and microphone in the upper left corner of
the rear, and two speaker grilles towards the bottom. Another Mi logo and some
regulatory text are the only other things to be seen.
Despite
Xiaomi's promotional materials prominently showing the Mi Pad in a variety of
colours, it
will only be available in white when it goes on sale in India. Maybe the other
options will be available later. While the front face is black, the white rear
shell wraps around and an outline is visible when looking at the Mi Pad
head-on. The rear is glossy and extremely slick, unlike the Redmi 2's matte
texture, and we did feel the device slip from our hands more than once.
Specifications
and software
The most interesting line on the Mi Pad's spec sheet is the SoC description. This is one of the only shipping products in the world that uses Nvidia's Tegra K1 SoC. Nvidia launched the Tegra K1 with much fanfare in early 2014 but it just never took off in the way that the company had hoped. Despite promising benchmark numbers and arguably superior graphics performance, phone and tablet manufacturers just did not launch a lot of Tegra-based products last year.
The most interesting line on the Mi Pad's spec sheet is the SoC description. This is one of the only shipping products in the world that uses Nvidia's Tegra K1 SoC. Nvidia launched the Tegra K1 with much fanfare in early 2014 but it just never took off in the way that the company had hoped. Despite promising benchmark numbers and arguably superior graphics performance, phone and tablet manufacturers just did not launch a lot of Tegra-based products last year.
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. The Tegra K1's main appeal is the
fact that it leverages Nvidia's Kepler-generation graphics architecture. Not
only is the hardware potent, but support for game engines is also brought over
from the desktop side of things. The Tegra K1 has 192 graphics execution units
and so is theoretically on par with today's most bare-basic entry-level
graphics cards. Of course power, heat and other factors mean you can't really
compare desktop and tablet processors side by side.
The SoC is
supported by 2GB of RAM. This model has 16GB of storage, and you can add up to
128GB more using a microSD card. You get Wi-Fi b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 4.0, but
interestingly no GPS. There is no version of this tablet with cellular data
capability or voice calling.
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 1536x2048 - 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 you're
interested in taking photos with your 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.
MIUI 6 runs on
top of Android 4.4.4. It looks much the same as it does on Xiaomi's most recent
smartphones including the Redmi 2, and is scaled nicely for the tablet's screen
size. It behaves like iOS in that there is no app drawer, and you see only app
icons as soon as you unlock the device. Unlike on the phones we've seen, there
is a separation of spaces for app icons and widgets - you can scroll to the
left of the default homescreen to find a screen dedicated to widgets. If you
fill this one up, new widget screens are created further to the left, while
icons pile up on the right as you install apps.
For some reason
icon-sized widgets such as settings toggles and quick contacts can only be
placed on the icon screens, not the widget screens. While the end result looks
clean, it is functionally confusing. We also noticed that Xiaomi's usual themes
app is missing. There aren't very many built-in apps and even the ones there
are seem quite functionally limited.
Performance
Thanks to its hardware, the Mi Pad should have tremendous potential for gaming. Sure enough, we were able to crank out a very impressive average of 42fps in the GFXbench test, and 25,338 points in 3DMark's high-end Ice Storm Unlimited run - Ice Storm Extreme was maxed out. These are the highest scores we've seen on small tablets, and are especially impressive considering the high screen resolution. Needless to say, 3D games looked very good indeed.
Thanks to its hardware, the Mi Pad should have tremendous potential for gaming. Sure enough, we were able to crank out a very impressive average of 42fps in the GFXbench test, and 25,338 points in 3DMark's high-end Ice Storm Unlimited run - Ice Storm Extreme was maxed out. These are the highest scores we've seen on small tablets, and are especially impressive considering the high screen resolution. Needless to say, 3D games looked very good indeed.
However we do
have to say that the upper rear of the Mi Pad did get hot to the point that it
was uncomfortable to hold. With the device in landscape mode for gaming, the
difference between what our two hands felt was highly distracting.
As far as
CPU-based tasks went, AnTuTu also returned a very impressive score of 48,666
points but Quadrant did not run. The UI was generally snappy other than a few
odd, intermittent slowdowns and app crashes.
Xiaomi as
always offers a Balanced mode and a Performance mode, and though it prompts
users to switch when it detected benchmarks running, it doesn't try to optimise
results automatically. We ran all our tests in Balanced mode, which gives users
a better idea of what to expect in day-to-day situations. Even so, we ran our
core tests again in Performance mode just to see the difference it made. The
3DMark score went up to 27,380 but GFXbench showed no improvement.
We found the
screen of the Xiaomi Mi Pad to be sharp, clear and generally pleasant to use.
It struggled a bit under direct sunlight, mostly because of how reflective it
is. We had no trouble playing any of our test videos and performance was smooth
throughout. The speakers were a bit disappointing - even though the sound got
pretty loud, it was muffled and harsh with distortion at higher volumes. The
sound should be good enough for effects while playing games, but not movies or
music.
The camera is
pretty good by tablet standards. You won't want to rely on it to preserve any
important memories, but it's good enough to serve in a pinch. We were also
impressed that the battery lasted 13 hours, 11 minutes in our video loop test.
This is a pretty good result and it should be enough to keep you entertained at
least through a long flight.
Verdict
Once again, Xiaomi has delivered a product that isn't perfect, but offers absolutely terrific value for money. In doing so, the company has also once again displaced every competitor around it. One of the biggest problems with this tablet is that no 3G/LTE version is available, which for many people will be a dealbreaker. Even for a few thousand rupees more, a variant with cellular data would be very welcome in our market.
Once again, Xiaomi has delivered a product that isn't perfect, but offers absolutely terrific value for money. In doing so, the company has also once again displaced every competitor around it. One of the biggest problems with this tablet is that no 3G/LTE version is available, which for many people will be a dealbreaker. Even for a few thousand rupees more, a variant with cellular data would be very welcome in our market.
For what it is,
the Xiaomi Mi Pad is still a fantastic bargain. It works well as a portable
entertainment unit and it's unobtrusive enough that you could just toss it in a
bag and keep it with you wherever you go. It works well for reading, watching
movies, playing games, and browsing the Web.
It might not be
as polished as the iPad mini 2, but it does come in at slightly more than half
its price. If you really want an iPad then
you'll still buy an iPad, but for many people there is now a viable way to save
a lot of money.
