Xiaomi Mi5

The Chinese smartphone giant comes with another budget set to turn the mid-range flagship market. Priced at Rs. 15,999, Mi5 is a mid-range masterpiece that is aimed to provide flagship features in the hands of an audience with a medium budget.

Mi5 scores on all aspects – it has excellent performance, capable battery and killer design. Mi5 is a Xiaomi speciality, and it’s ready to take on even top-end phones with this flagship handset.

Mi5 looks like a luxury item. It has inward-sloping sides and a curved back making it feel good in the hand. It comes with a glass back, which Xiaomi calls 3D Glass. It adds to the premium look and also offers little friction. However, it can attract fingerprint smudges. The metal frame feels like a Samsung. The capacitive keys can be customised, and they are subtly backlit so that it becomes invisible when not touched. It comes with a headphone jack and a USB type-C port. The speaker grille is at the bottom right making it difficult to cover it up. The fingerprint scanner, unlike most flagships which have it cushioned at the back-centre, has been put on the front beneath the home button and may take some time to get habituated with. However, it’s ultra-fast and almost seems to be working like magic. It comes with 32GB storage, but sadly, it is not expandable.

Mi5 has a 5.15-inch screen with a resolution 1080×1920 pixels. It is a bit low considering Galaxy S7 has gone up to 1440×2560 resolutions. It has a bright display, brings up vibrant colours which have enough details in them. It does not come with OLED screen but an IPS-type screen which is still capable of producing vivid colours like Galaxy S7.  It does come with top and bottom thick bezels which limits the screen space you need to work with, but the side bezels are ultra-thin and won’t pose a problem.

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Mi5 is powered by Snapdragon 820 processor partnered with a 3GB of RAM. It’s one of the most powerful processors and has been used to power top-end products like Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge. For Mi5, this quad-core setup has two cores clocked up to 1.8GHz and the remaining two cores clocked at 1.3GHz. It’s a piece of fantastic power equipment. It can open apps fast and booting the phone, and opening camera apps are smooth and snappy. Mi5 does not struggle with graphics-heavy games either, making your gaming experience smooth and lag-free. However, there is a bit of warmup of the phone, especially after heavy use. Benchmark scores put the single-core score at 1470 and a multi-core score at 3093. LG G5 powered by the same processor but 4GB of RAM beats Mi5 by getting a single-core result of 2296 and a multi-core score of 5277. Adreno 530 GPU helps with the graphics processing, and games like Real Racing 3 plays smoothly and even looks great on the HD screen.

Mi5 has a 16MP rear camera with dual-tone LED flash. It can produce some impressive photos. In regular light, the pictures are bright, detailed and quite sharp though it can lose some details when you zoom in. Low-light images struggle a bit but remain decent regarding the colour and visibility. The details, however, are low.

However, similar flagships have a lot of noise and graininess in their image, thereby, giving Mi5 a competitive edge. HDR may cause a problem. It’s best suited for static subjects, because motion may result in ghosting. Close-ups shots turn out to be impressive as well.

The 4MP front camera is satisfying and captures enough details to make you look good. Plus, it works well in low-light capturing more light using its larger pixels. The wide angle also helps you to get your buddies in the frame too, or a wider view of the surrounding you are in. The beauty mode is quite intelligent and can identify your age and sex with near-accuracy.

Video shooting is super easy and captures enough details. Even 4K videos give you the detailed results. However, slow motion is not available in 4K or HD videos, and you have to drop down to 720p to experience it – an unfortunate flaw.

Mi5 comes with a juicy 3000mAh battery. It can easily get you through 24 hours on a full charge. A 90-minute HD video with maxed-out brightness and Wi-Fi on for ongoing background updating found Mi5 lose just 9% which is impressive and beats Samsung Galaxy S7 easily, which dropped to 87% in the same test. Plus, Mi5 comes with Quick Charge support which can get your phone juiced up within 90 minutes.

Mi5 looks premium and acts in the same way – it has an excellent processor, quality camera and decent battery life. It is a groundbreaking phone and tackles apps, games and all the user-related issues that came with Redmi 5 wonderfully. One of the only weaknesses of the phone is its lack of expandable memory. As a mid-range phone, it provides features which are worth more than the money. It is an instant recommendation for people who want high-end features within their mid-range budget.