After a spate of fakes and rumours stating it would ship with a Core M3-7Y30, the Mi Pad 3 was officially announced today by Xiaomi. The 7.9″ tablet is just an internal component change around really as the screen and housing remains the same. The Atom Z8500 has been replaced by a MediaTek MT8176 Six Core CPU with a max turbo of 2.1Ghz. The GPU is an Imagination PowerVR GX6250, the same GPU used in the JDTab J01 that I reviewed recently.
It has Type-C, RAM has doubled to 4GB, and the storage is 64GB of eMMC 5 spec. The battery is now a larger 6600mAh and rear camera is now a 13MP f2.2 one. It will run MIUI 8 of course and has wireless AC. No MicroSD card support.
The Xiaomi Mi Pad 3 will sell for around $220 USD in China tomorrow. GearBest has it listed for $316 on preorder here.
While it might be a decent little retina tablet for the price with that 2048 x 1536 screen, decent speakers and premium build I can’t help but feel a little disappointed. I would have hope that if they had gone just Android they would have gone all out and used a Snapdragon 820 or 821 SoC. Even a MediaTek Helio X25 but sadly a very run of the mill hexacore CPU from MediaTek. Going ARM again also means no X86 support for Windows 10.
I’ll still review this and hope it’s not going to be a disappointment like the JDTAb J01 was. At least it should run Android games better than the Mi Pad 2.
While I’m disappointed, I’ll still get one to review as it should still be a nice 7.9 Android tablet.
Source: Xiaomi
