It took Xiaomi almost nine months to bring its first tablet, the Mi Pad to India. Now in tech aeons, that's a long time. You know how quickly gadgets become dated these days. The most striking aspect of Xiaomi's Mi Pad however is that when you carefully sift through its spec sheet, you realize it hasn't aged at all. That itself is enough to give you some idea about what we are going to deal with here.

To begin with, the Mi Pad carries forward Xiaomi's legacy of taking unabashed inspiration from Apple with quite ease. Heck it takes it to an all new level in the Mi Pad.

Deep inside it is still Android though, and with the kind of credentials it has in the hardware department, it's got enough to put the recently launched Nexus 9 to test, at least on paper. That when the Mi Pad was launched way earlier than the Nexus 9.

The Mi Pad has been priced at Rs.12,999 in India, which is all very typical of Xiaomi. If you've been reading closely, you'd probably realize we have set some high benchmarks for this one. Is the Xiaomi Mi Pad up for the challenge though? We find out...

Design and build

If you're still scratching your head over why the name M(iPad) seems all too familiar, well, you wake up and smell the coffee. There's a reason why Xiaomi is called 'China's Apple', and it's got a little more to do with just popularity and sales figures.

Xiaomi takes a lot of design cues from Apple's bold and metallic iPad Mini and infuses an all plastic frame to it as an only mark of distinction for the Mi Pad. In the process however it ends up making a tablet that actually looks like an iPhone 5C on steroids.

Putting aside the uncanny resemblance to Apple's offering for a split second, the Mi Pad looks and feels to be a well-build device for its price.

At 202x135.4 x8.5 mm and 360g, the Mi Pad is on the bulkier side so that single-handed operability is a challenge on the device. This is not very alarming though since being a 7.9-inch tablet you don't expect to operate it with just the one hand.

The back (which is removable), although, made of glossy plastic is not very prone to smudge/fingerprint. However, it was a little too slippery for our liking.

The display is guarded by a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protective covering and won't smudge easily, unless you have greasy fingers.

The right edge houses the traditional volume rocker and the power button, both made of brushed metal. They seem pretty firmly placed, are non-flimsy and offer good tactile feedback. The left edge houses a microSD card slot, much to our liking.

The lower end of the display is marked by three capacitive buttons that are backlit and offer good touchscreen response. There is also an LED notification light on board.

The Mi Pad comes with dual stereo speakers that are placed at the lower back end of the tablet.

Display

Design is not the only thing strikingly common between the Mi Pad and the iPad Mini. Xiaomi takes its knack for inspiration further by putting together a display that boasts of the exact numbers, both in terms of display size and resolution.

The Xiaomi Mi Pad features a 7.9-inch IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 1536 x 2048 pixels that roughly translates to 324 ppi.

No wonder this is by far the best display that we have seen in a tablet of this price category. Although the colours were a tad warmer, we were pretty pleased with what the Mi Pad has to offer in the display output department.

More importantly, the Mi Pad offers some really crisp viewing angles. We observed almost negligible amount of discoloration upon viewing from different angles.

Outdoor visibility is also good on the device. Also, visibility is only minutely affected when sunlight is directly reflecting at the device.  

Software

The Mi Pad runs Android 4.4.4 KitKat out-of-the-box with Xiaomi's latest MIUI 6 on top. We like the overall look and feel of the MIUI 6. It focuses largely on the 'looking good' aspect over its predecessor MIUI 5 which is not a bad thing, since underneath it's still KitKat, and it's a smooth operator to a large extent. Therefore what you get is a UI that looks good, and is as functional at the same time.

Just to brush things up for you, the UI on board essentially gives way to the traditional app drawer in favour of a springboard of apps and widgets spanning multiple home pages. This is the story of most Chinese UIs these days, only Xiaomi somehow manages to do it better.

The MIUI 6 borrows heavily from Apple's iOS 7, even iOS 8 to some extent in the design department and infuses it with the functionality of Android, giving you the best of both worlds in the process.


There's a slight catch with the Mi Pad though. Although it comes pre-loaded with MIUI 6, it seems the Mi Pad is running a rudimentary version of this UI and not the stuff we see on say the Mi 4. Ironically, the Mi Pad runs the very recent MIUI 6 version. Granted Xiaomi would have had to modify the UI to fit the tablet form factor and everything, but that doesn't mean stripping off some of the key selling points of the UI.

The MIUI 6 on board the Mi Pad gives you little or no customisation options, in that you don't get access to themes. It's missing out on the security app as also a number of system tools such as compass, recorder, QR scanner and report bug tool. Also, the clock app misses out on the funky animation bit of the original MIUI 6, and instead looks like the one we had in the MIUI 5.

You'd say we are hand picking minute details here, but the point is when you look at it from a broader perspective it appears that Xiaomi's tablet hasn't been as lucky in the software department as its smartphones.

Performance

The MiPad is powered by a 2.2 GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra K1 CPU alongside ULP GeForce Kepler (192 cores) GPU and 2GB RAM.

Just to cut short the chase here, let's just say the Mi Pad is a monster in terms of raw power output. It is not the dual-core K1 processor, which uses a different and is a more potent processor that Google has used in its Nexus 9 but for the price the quad-core K1 in the Mi Pad is very very good.

The Mi Pad K1 processor uses four ARM A15 cores. These have only 32-bit capabilities but currently that should not be a limitation for the Mi Pad, especially considering how it still runs on Android KitKat, which doesn't support 64-bit computing.

As expected, the Mi Pad blew the competition away (in this price bracket, even the higher ones) especially with GPU intensive tasks. While synthetic benchmarks left nothing to the imagination, we decided to take the Mi Pad for a real swing.

Quite obviously then we installed the Nvidia TegraZone app to gain access to a wide number of Tegra K1 exclusive games. The Tegra K1 chip promises last generation console like graphics on tablets, according to Nvidia; and let's just say it wasn't entirely bluffing when it said that.

The Mi Pad barely broke a sweat while dealing with highly-graphics intensive games like Asphalt 8: Airborne, Modern Combat 5 Blackout, Shadowgun DeadZone among others. We witnessed no lag with either the character or background with respect to these games, so much so that the Mi Pad could be your best bet for a gaming tablet in this price bracket.

That said some games, particularly Asphalt 8 had scaling issues, meaning the game looked a bit stretched and uneven than normal.

Moving over from gaming, the Mi Pad is what you call a Mecca of multitasking. The tablet refused to stutter even when as many as 19 apps were running in the background, some of these GPU intensive games. The tablet won't keep you waiting as apps open and close in a jiffy, so that overall it seems you're working with a high-end premium device.

The Mi Pad comes with 16GB of internal storage of which about 12.53GB is available for use. The device supports expandable storage of up to 128GB via micro-SD card, something that both the iPad Mini and the Nexus 9 lack.

The Mi Pad comes with dual speakers located on the back lower end. While they are not particularly loud (as say HTC's BoomSound speakers), they are clear and audible. Although they don't have the best placement, it's surprising that the sound quality is barely affected even when the device is lying back facing down.  

The Mi Pad lacks a GPS, NFC, or a 3G/LTE variant. You can't make voice calls with this one.

Camera

This is another area that has been compromised when you compare with Xiaomi's smartphone offerings. It's surprising for a company that is known to invest well in its cameras to have plainly overlooked this aspect in the Mi Pad.

We have come to expect less from companies (even industry honchos) when it comes to tablet cameras. But that's no excuse for companies to take things for granted.

The Mi Pad sports an 8-megapixel rear camera with auto-focus but no LED flash and dedicated HDR mode. There is also a 5-megapixel front-facing camera on board.

While images clicked in ambient outdoor lighting conditions are able to pack in true to life colours on most counts, there's some image noise that accompanies them so that overall the amount of detail is compromised. Indoor photos are only satisfactory and have evident noise.

Lack of LED flash means the primary snapper has not much use in dimly lit conditions. We found the auto-focus passable, while shutter speed is also not the best in the business. All in all, the primary camera is a pretty regular affair, unlike Xiaomi's usual scheme of things.

The secondary camera can only shoot passable selfies, which have noise.

The primary camera can record full 1080p videos, but they lack detail and have noise.

Notably, the camera app seems to have been reworked on a little to include just the bare bone toggles that are limited to a number of filters, with no options whatsoever to play around with image size or resolution.

Battery

The Mi Pad decks in a non-removable battery with a capacity of 6700mAh which is rated to deliver up to 11 hours of multimedia and 86 hours of music playback, according to the company.

Considering that you'll be doing a good amount of gaming on this one, we decided to begin our tests with just that. An hour of highly-graphics intensive gaming on the go dropped the battery level to an alarming 30% which doesn't seem very encouraging, to say the least.

Two hours of video playback (full1080p) with maxed out volume (on speakers) dropped the battery to a 40%, again not very encouraging. The same drop in level was observed when playing YouTube videos (full HD) for the same period and maximum speaker volume.

Based on our tests, we were able to get close to four and a half to five hours out of the Mi Pad on heavy usage, which when you consider its mammoth battery seems far too less. The iPad Mini with Retina Display has a much better battery life in comparison even though it has a smaller 6470mAh battery.

That said moderate to light usage should see you comfortably sail through 12-13 hours which is not bad.

A dedicated power saving mode is lacking on the device.

Should you buy it?

Xiaomi's first tablet has its fair share of flaws. Unlike its smartphone offerings, this one seems more like a 'work in progress' affair. That doesn't mean it's not well put up though.

Although it borrows heavily from Apple's iPad Mini with more than just the looks, it crams in top notch hardware that gives the Nexus 9 some serious run for the money. The fact that we are keeping the Mi Pad in the same league as the iPad Mini and the Nexus 9 speaks a lot about the device as a product, especially since it costs peanuts to own the Mi Pad.

Considering Xiaomi's track record though, the Mi Pad somehow doesn't fit right in its ecosystem. Yes, it does have Nvidia Tegra K1 and other such novelties but somehow it just doesn't end up completely satisfying the value for money quotient that we have grown to associate with Xiaomi's devices.

Nevertheless, if you're looking for a top of the line gaming tablet in the budget category, the Mi Pad is just what the doctor ordered for you. You'll be blown away by its crazy graphics and smooth, lag-free experience barring some scaling issues here and there.

The best part is you won't have to go through the grueling ordeal of a flash sale to grab on to this one.