In these months we have often talked about the Xiaomi 18 lineup, while clues about the future tablets from Lei Jun’s company have been minimal. Now a leak shakes things up and foreshadows a major development: Xiaomi Pad 9 could be nothing more than a rebrand of the current Pad 8, probably a cost-cutting move aimed at focusing more on improvements for the bigger sibling.
Xiaomi Pad 9 revealed early: will it be just a simple rebrand?
We live in an era dictated by haste, not speed. For tech manufacturers, keeping up with the competition means constantly chasing the latest novelty. There is now an unwritten rule: every year you must churn out a new flagship, a tablet, and a mid-range device. The result? A frantic race against time that saturates the market.
Xiaomi fans know this all too well: just look at the colossal problem with smartphone names, with a parade of launches, rebrands and market-based changes.
It seems the haste could play a bad trick on the next Xiaomi Pad 9, perhaps arriving as a simple variant of the current Xiaomi Pad 8. The information uncovered by the well-known insider Kacper Skrzypek (an authority when it comes to leaks about Lei Jun’s company) points toward a rebrand, perhaps with a few tweaks.
HyperOS code has revealed that the future tablet, identified by the code M656BA, could have a 9,720 mAh battery – compared to the 9,200 mAh of Pad 8 – still with 45W charging. The string analysis revealed three codenames: donghai and yupei_d for Pad 9 and shuntian for Pad 9 Pro; the name yupei is the same as Pad 8, so the two devices share a development base or a common firmware.
Summing up, the next tablet should have a lot in common with its predecessor: apart from the battery, Xiaomi could change the design, memory configurations, display calibration, but the rest would remain unchanged. So we can again expect the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 under the hood.
And Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro?
It’s not to be ruled out that this could be a move to counter the price increases caused by the memory crisis, perhaps to concentrate resources on the Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro.
The latter should debut with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5, so this time there wouldn’t be a flagship chipset. Remember that Pad 8 Pro was launched last September with the 8 Elite version, so we would have expected the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 – Qualcomm’s most powerful SoC for this year.
We’ll see how things evolve: in the meantime the debut of the tablet series is expected for the month of September, alongside the Xiaomi 18 family.
