Xiaomi launches a $240 Android tablet to take on the iPad Mini & a cheap 4K TV

After exploding onto the Chinese Android smartphone scene a few years ago, Xiaomi is now entering the tablet arena.

Best known for its inexpensive-yet-powerful Android smartphones, Xiaomi today announced the Mi Pad, a 7.9-inch Android tablet starting at just $240. Judging from its name and size, it’s being positioned as a direct competitor to Apple’s iPad Mini.

Indeed, the Mi Pad looks suspiciously like an iPad Mini (so much so that the company is probably treading on copycat territory, like Samsung) crossed with the colorful cases from the iPhone 5C. The tablet is powered by an Nvidia Tegra K1 system-on-a-chip with a 2.2 gigahertz quad-core processor, as well as a powerful graphics processor.

Basically, with all that power, the Mi Pad should be well-suited to gaming.

The Mi Pad comes with 16 gigabytes of storage for its base $240 model, while a 64GB version will run for around $270. In comparison, Apple’s iPad Mini with Retina Display starts at $400 for 16GB of storage and jumps to $600 for 64GB of storage.

Additionally, Xiaomi also announced a new smart TV model today, the Mi TV 2, which packs in a 49-inch 4K screen for just $640. That’s significantly cheaper than Vizio’s much-anticipated $1,000 50-inch 4K TV, and it’s on par with Chinese electronics maker TCL’s 4K TV. Don’t be surprised if we see a slew of cheap 4K sets by the end of the year.

Xiaomi isn’t saying when the Mi Pad will be available outside of China, but the company will start a beta test program in China next month.