Xiaomi Pad 4

Picked up a Xiaomi Pad 4 recently. Feels like it’s the most worthwhile Android tablet you can buy right now.

The packaging is pretty bare-bones, looks like a big phone no matter how you slice it. Inside there’s just the tablet and a charger.

Oh right, buying from the official site also gets you a Mi Fan card. I don’t think it’s good for much, honestly — the O Fan card is better.

I got black. Originally wanted black and couldn’t get it, ended up swapping stock with 白徵明 to finally land a black one.

There’s not much to say about this tablet. Anyone who’s used a Xiaomi phone — including Miboys like 吴老二 — will find it familiar. But I don’t like MIUI, so my advice is to switch to the English UI and a third-party launcher once you have it.

My personal requirements for a launcher are two:

1. Looks close to stock
2. Has the left-swipe Google Now feed

Lots of people recommend Nova Launcher, but I found this instead: lawnchair

It’s basically a fork of Pixel Launcher. Worth installing, has enough features.

Next, swap the icon theme to this Polycon icon pack and you’re pretty much at stock style.

You can also keep MIUI’s iOS-ripoff full-screen gestures:

After that the tablet is more or less usable. Oh right, you’ll probably want Google services — use this version, no Root needed:

As for accessories, I’d suggest the official leather case. For a screen protector, get the SmartDevil Xiaomi Pad 4 protector — it has an oleophobic coating. Do not buy the official glass protector, it has no oleophobic coating.

One more thing worth mentioning: if you decide to game on the Xiaomi Pad 4, you’ll run into a bug where the touch input jumps around randomly.

The cause: when the device gets hot, the touch IC becomes unresponsive.

The fix is to improve the cooling. The official leather case does nothing good for heat dissipation — if you game a lot, buy a case with vents on the back to avoid it.

There’s not much else to say about this tablet. Right size, long battery life, better for going out than the 10-inch models or the 8-inch ones with thick bezels — and the bezels here are thin.

Oh right, I bought the Wi-Fi version. No LTE when I got it. But there’s an idiot on the official Xiaomi forum claiming his Wi-Fi model turns into LTE when he puts a SIM card in.

Someone confirmed it’s fake. I actually read that guy’s chat logs — he received the LTE model that morning and by the afternoon was pretending he had the Wi-Fi version. Looks like an immature Miboy prank, same breed as 吴老二.

If you’re buying now, I’d still suggest the LTE version — better value, and supposedly you can just walk into an offline store and buy one.

I don’t need LTE anyway. This tablet is just a stopgap — I’ll see if there’s a flagship in the second half of the year.