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.
Xiaomi's biggest constraint has been its strategy of hosting weekly online flash sales, which might be great for generating some initial buzz, but only result in prolonged frustration for customers. Thankfully, the Mi Pad will be available for outright purchase without any such hassle. Let's see how the company adapts to this new territory.
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.
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( the iPhone 5c vibes we got were no doubt coincidental), 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 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 tab
