The Xiaomi Mi Pad 4 is likely coming with a Snapdragon 660

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Yesterday, Xiaomi announced the Mi 6X in China. The device is widely believed to launch internationally as the highly anticipated Xiaomi Mi A2, though that hasn’t been confirmed. Another Xiaomi device that many people are looking forward to is the successor of the Xiaomi Mi Pad 3. A Xiaomi executive stated that the company was working on a new Mi Pad tablet back in October, but we haven’t heard any official information since then. Now, we have obtained firmware files of a Xiaomi tablet with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660, which we believe to be the Xiaomi Mi Pad 4.

The following information is based on firmware files obtained by @FunkyHuawei, the man behind the FunkyHuawei.club service, which allows users to update, unbrick, or rebrand Huawei and Honor phones for a fee. He has shared the files exclusively with XDA-Developers.

Is the Xiaomi Mi Pad 4 real?

First of all, why are we confident that the firmware files we have are for the Xiaomi Mi Pad 4 and not for another device, like say the Xiaomi Mi Max 3? There are a few things we took into consideration such as:

The MIUI configuration for the device states that it is a “pad” (boolean "is_pad" set to true) something that only earlier Xiaomi Mi Pad devices have specified. In the build.prop, the property called ro.build.characteristics is set to “tablet.” This property is read by apps to decide whether to show a tablet interface. For example, the Xiaomi Mi Pad 3 has this property set to “tablet” whereas devices like the Xiaomi Mi Max 2 have it set to “default.” The default screen density ( ro.sf.lcd_density ) is set to 320, which is an extremely low value and something you would expect from a tablet device to show lots of content on the screen. The battery capacity is 6,000mAh, which would be really large for a smartphone. The Xiaomi Mi Max 3 would be a possible contender for such a large battery, but I’ve already dug into the firmware files for the device I believe to be the Mi Max 3 and it doesn’t match this device. Xiaomi has only ever produced Android tablets in the Mi Pad series, so given that this is a Xiaomi-made tablet, it’s highly likely another Mi Pad.

Now that we’ve laid out our reasoning for why we believe this device is the successor to the Mi Pad 3, let’s discuss some of the specifications we have uncovered.

Possible Xiaomi Mi Pad 4 Specifications

For the display, Xiaomi may be making a bold move here. The boolean value in the MIUI configuration file called “ is_18x9_ratio_screen ” is set to “true.” I am skeptical as to whether the device will truly be an 18:9 tablet because of how absurd that would look. Still, I’m choosing not to omit this finding because it’s what the firmware tells me—even if it may seem silly. Something that’s more plausible is the inclusion of an LCD panel over an OLED, which I’m basing off of the omission of any OLED properties in build.prop (which is typical for Xiaomi devices with OLED displays.)

According to the vendor build.prop, the device will have the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 system-on-chip. Since the maximum CPU frequency in MIUI’s configuration file is set to 2.0GHz for the big cluster, this is indeed likely the Snapdragon 660 rather than the Snapdragon 636 as seen on the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro and Asus ZenFone Max Pro (M1). We don’t have any information on the RAM or storage capacities, unfortunately. Whether or not the device will have a microSD card slot is ambiguous; the lack of a “nosdcard” property in ro.build.characteristics tells me that it will have a microSD card slot, but given Xiaomi’s non-standard MIUI configurations, it might not have one. (Notably, the Mi Pad 3 lacks a microSD card slot and the “nosdcard” property, which is why I’m remaining cautious here.)

According to the device’s camera configuration files, it’ll have a single 13MP OmniVision OV13855 sensor with a f/2.0 aperture on the rear, and a single 5MP Samsung S5K5E8 sensor with a f/2.0 aperture on the front. The device won’t support 4K video recording but it will apparently have portrait mode support.

Lastly, the MIUI configuration file states that it won’t have NFC support.

We’ve put together a small chart that summarizes my findings. If we learn more about the Xiaomi Mi Pad 4, we’ll let you all know.