Xiaomi Mi5 review..

Xiaomi Mi5

There’s a familiar formula for flagship devices. You get the top-of-the-line high-end components — the best processor, lots of memory and a bagful of  value. In exchange, you hand over a sizeable chunk of your savings. The Xiaomi Mi 5  then is a misfit flagship that causes a certain degree of disbelief. It’s a handset with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 820 chip, 3GB of memory, a 16 megapixel Sony sensor, all for a buck under twenty-five grand. Is this the phone all of us were waiting for? Lets find out.

With all that headlining tech underneath the hood, it’s easy to overlook how gorgeous a device the Mi 5 is. With the aluminum frame and curved white glass back, this phone feels way pricier than it is. That said, the slippery back, the 129gm weight and the slim profile had me treating it with kid gloves in the beginning — the Mi 5 is very prone to sliding off the gentlest of slopes onto the floor. 

Fronting the charge is a 5.15-inch full-HD display which, though it lacks the quad-HD resolution of the Samsung S7 range, holds its own against the cream of the crop. It’s pin sharp and super bright, has excellent contrast levels and colours truly pop on this screen, and it features a helpful Reading Mode which reduces eye strain over extended reading sessions.

The features of Xiaomi Mi5

And with Qualcomm’s latest chip and 3GB of memory, the Mi 5 stands ahead of pretty much everything out there right now, handling games- and graphics-intensive tasks with equal aplomb. Over prolonged camera shooting or gaming sessions, though, the Mi 5 does run a wee bit hot for comfort. The fingerprint scanner is consistent, and despite the high performance figures, the 3,000mAh battery never failed to get me through the day.

As much as Xiaomi got it right with the Mi 5, there are some noticeable drawbacks. The camera, for instance, offers four-axis image stabilisation and some pretty impressive specs on paper, but the image quality is a bit of a mixed bag. In good light, the Mi 5 turns out impressive images, with excellent colours and details, but in low light, the images end up soft and noisy, an area where the ‘twice-the-price’ S7 excels. Video results are pretty good though. Also, Xiaomi kits the Mi 5 with MIUI 7 based on the latest version of Android Marshmallow, but you’d hardly notice it with the bog-standard MIUI interface on top.

Probably my biggest quibble with the device, which speaks to how sorted it is in general, is that Xiaomi’s chosen to launch a single colour, single storage (non-expandable) variant of the Mi 5 in India — a Model T-esque choice, if you will. At the price though, the Mi 5 is one hell of a flagship, one that is absolutely worth your money.

So, what do think of the new Xiaomi Mi5? Do let me know in the comments below.

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