The Xiaomi Mi Pad has been around in the country for a little over a month and is readily available through Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal. Till now only the white colour model was available and blue colour unit is also available these days on Flipkart. Today we will discuss as to how much sense does the Mi Pad make as a sub Rs 15,000 tablet. We won't evaluate it against the likes of iPad Mini or Nexus 9 but will instead evaluate it against other budget tablets. Before we start the discussion, let us quickly take a look at what it offers:
- 7.9-inch display with a resolution of 2048×1536 pixels (326ppi), Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection on top of it
- 2.2GHz Nvidia Tegra K1 processor with 192-core Kepler GPU
- 2GB RAM
- Android 4.4 KitKat based MIUI 6
- 16GB internal storage which is expandable by 128GB with the aid of a microSD card
- 8-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel front camera
- 6,700 mAh battery
- Rs 12,999
To start off, the display is actually quite good. It offers a full HD resolution and the colour reproduction is on the better side of things too. Sometimes, the colours may just appear a bit saturated but that's only if you look into the finer details. The processor performs every task you throw at it with ease (personal experience) and games like Modern Combat 5 run like a breeze.
You might want to close your applications when you exit an app because out of the 2GB RAM on offer, only 1GB is available upon switching it on and it soon drops to 800-850MB as soon as you start browsing the internet or open a couple of apps. You constantly need to keep on clearing the cache to have about 800MB of RAM available. Open 3-4 apps, and the RAM available drops to 300-350MB. It is not exactly the multi-tasker you'd wish for, but then other devices in this range come with 1GB of RAM out of which about 600MB is available.
The rear camera performance is quite average but is better than the other 5-megapixel camera units present on other devices (read as Fonepad 8). It runs Android 4.4 KitKat based MIUI 6 which crashes once in 5-6 times so it still needs a bit of a polishing. The battery backup is quite good and you can easily get 8-9 hours of video viewing from it. The rear of the tablet is nothing short of a fingerprint magnet.
To sum it up, your other options in this range are the Canvas LapTab (runs Windows 8.1), FonePad 8, Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 and Dell Venue 8 Pro. If you want voice calling, the Fonepad 8 wins the battle here and even it offers a snappy performance. But if voice calling can be skipped, I firmly believe that the Mi Pad puts forth a strong case. Feel free to drop in your comments to take this discussion forth.
