Nvidia’s Tegra K1 Makes it into Xiaomi’s MiPad tablet

Tegra K1 one is coming to a real tablet, maybe….

MiPad

Today in Beijing Chinese OEM Xiaomi launched their first tablet the MiPad which is the first tablet powered by Nvidia’s Tegra K1 SoC. The MiPad is a 7.9” tablet with a 2K display resolution, 2 GB of RAM and up to 64 GB of storage. It also has an 8 MP rear camera and a 5 MP front camera. Battery life is said to be good for 11 hours of video play back and 86 hours of music playback. Basic specifications aside, this device is noteworthy for being the first Tegra K1 device. It’s hard to gauge what the impact of this device is going to be on Nvidia’s fortunes. But Xiaomi’s Mi3 Tegra 4-based phone which was launched last year did little to stem the decline of Nvidia’s Tegra business.

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Visually the MiPad looks like someone at Xiaomi copied the physical design of the iPad mini and then used Nokia’s color scheme to pad out the line-up. Even the visual design of Xiaomi’s version of Android looks to be aimed at mimicking the visual elements of Apple’s iOS 7.x. There’s no word on exactly which version of the K1 is in the MiPad, but it likely one of the A15-based SKUs.

That said the MiPad’s spec sheet would lead us to believe that Xiaomi has at the very least built a competitive device based on Tegra K1 by nailing the display, camera, form factor, and battery life specifications that consumer’s want. The MiPad will be in stores starting in June and is priced at $240 for the 16 GB version and $270 for the 64 GB version. This prices it above Google’s Nexus 7, a device which it should handily beat in terms of features and raw performance.

For now Tegra K1 is still vaporware in tablets but by the end of the quarter we will know if OEMs are really on board with Nvidia’s latest wonder chip or if the Tegra group is going to have another rough year in tablets.S|A

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Thomas Ryan is a freelance technology writer and photographer from Seattle, living in Austin. You can also find his work on SemiAccurate and PCWorld. He has a BA in Geography from the University of Washington with a minor in Urban Design and Planning and specializes in geospatial data science. If you have a hardware performance question or an interesting data set Thomas has you covered.