After a few teasers and leaks, the Xiaomi Mi Pad 3 went official today, with some interesting features, like a MediaTek CPU inside. This model is priced starting at $220 and makes some familiar, but also interesting decisions.
The successor to the 2015 Mi Pad 22, the Mi Pad 3 appeared on the Xiaomi official site sans announcement. Outside it looks and feels very much like the 2015 model, sporting an unibody metal design. It measures 7 mm in thickness, weighs 328 grams and remains a compact affair, with a 2048 x 1536 pixel display, that has an LCD panel.
The biggest change is inside, where there’s no longer an Intel CPU, swapped for a MediaTek MT8176. We’ve heard MediaTek was cozying up to Xiaomi and now we know why. This is a hexa core CPU, with two 2.1 GHz Cortex A72 cores and 4 Cortex A53 ones a well. There’s also 4 GB of RAM here and contrary to the rumors, this machine runs Android not Windows 10.
There’s the MIUI 8 skin on top and we also get a bigger 6600 mAh battery compared to the predecessors’. On paper we are promised up to 867 hours of standby and 12 hours of media consumption. There’s also a camera upgrade, to a 13 MP shooter at the back and internal storage is 64 GB. No microSD card slot here, although the first Mi Pad had one. Availability is unknown yet.
