The iPad Pro is cloned by Xiaomi at half the price: $386

Xiaomi is the most recent corporation to rekindle its interest in Android tablets.

Isn’t it true that Android tablets are making a comeback? After years of neglect, Google has recently released a few tablet apps, given talks at Google I/O on how to design tablet apps, and the Android 12 developer preview reveals that the firm is working on a taskbar-like UI for large-screen devices. Xiaomi, the world’s most popular Android gadget maker, is now introducing an Android tablet for the first time in three years.

Apple’s top tablet, the iPad Pro, appears to have influenced the Xiaomi Mi Pad 5 Pro. Xiaomi is known for its wacky, technology-packed looks, yet it occasionally reverts to its old methods as an Apple clone maker. It’s one of those occasions.

With a Snapdragon 870 SoC (a 7 nm chip with four Cortex A77 cores and four Cortex A55 cores), the company’s new tablet boasts an 11-inch, 120 Hz, 25601600 LCD and is quite high-end. The base model comes with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage available as upgrades. There’s an 8600 mAh battery, NFC, a side fingerprint reader/power button, Wi-Fi 6, a USB-C port, and eight speakers on the left and right sides. The tablet’s frame and back are both made of aluminum, and it weighs 515 grams.

The front camera, which is on the left side of the smartphone in landscape mode and hence not particularly useful for landscape video calls, is the only flaw in the design. Because the keyboard attachment, side speakers, and side fingerprint reader all support landscape use as the preferred mode, the location is particularly odd. The peculiar camera placement could be due to support for the pen accessory, which magnetically attaches to the tablet’s top edge (in landscape) and charges wirelessly.

While cloning Apple is a terrible Xiaomi habit, the business is also sticking to its good habits, such as producing good hardware at reasonable pricing. The Mi Pad 5 Pro starts at CNY 2,499 ($386), which is less than half the price of the $799 entry-level 11-inch iPad Pro. The Mi Pad 5 Pro 5G, a cellular version with a reportedly stronger primary rear camera (50MP versus 13MP), costs around $540—roughly half the price of the $1,000 cellular iPad Pro. Xiaomi also sells iPad-style accessories, such as a keyboard for $62, which is significantly less expensive than Apple’s $300 Magic keyboard for the iPad. A stylus costs around $62, which is far less than the $129 Apple Pencil. Although the iPad Pro is certainly speedier and more polished than Xiaomi’s offering in a million ways, many buyers will consider it near enough for half the price.

Because the device is presently only available in China, all of these costs are in CNY. But that’s where all Xiaomi devices start, and they usually get a larger spread from there.