Xiaomi announced the Mi 5 at a media briefing at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as in Beijing.
The Mi5 has 7.25mm thickness and weighs around 129g, it is impressive how it has managed to have the camera flush with the plane of the body and included a 3000mAh battery. There is a 3D ceramic variant as well.
The slim Home Button on the front also functions as a fingerprint scanner. The soft buttons also have a backlight.
It also has a USB Type C port at the base surrounded by two speaker grilles.
Display
The Xiaomi Mi5 sports a 5.15-inch full HD display which we thought was really reflective. It uses an IPS LCD panel which gives good viewing angles and the text appears sharp. Just as we had seen on the Mi4i, the Mi5 also supports Sunlight Display which dynamically readjust the brightness on pixels, so that you do not have to strain your eyes when out in bright sunlight.
Chipset, RAM, Storage and Connectivity
The Mi5 Pro has a 3D ceramic cover and 128GB storage with 4GB RAM. The Mi5 comes with a 3D glass cover and 3GB RAM with 32GB and 64GB storage.
Xiaomi has employed LPDDR4 RAM and UFS 2.0 standard flash memory storage. Both phones house Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 chipset which has a customised quad core Kryo processors clocked at 2.2GHz along with Adreno 530 GPU. This makes the Xiaomi Mi5 really fast to operate. And naturally there were no issues while navigating or trying on different apps on the phone. There is no provision for expandable storage.
In terms of connectivity, all the Mi5 variants will be supporting 4G+ or LTE Advanced with support for VoLTE as well. It takes in two nano SIM cards. There’s Wi-fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS with AGPS, NFC which supports read/write as well as card emulation for quicker pass through using just your handset and more.
OS and Software
The Xiaomi Mi5 series comes with Android 6.0 Marshmallow along with the MIUI 7 OS atop it. Xiaomi has developed an Android app called Mi Video Call which lets you do lot of cool stuff while on a Video Call. The phones on display did not have it. Apart from this there are the regular Mi themes, segregation of messages according to personal and service messages, and so on. To read an in-depth feature listing on MIUI 7 read this.
Camera
The front camera, Xiaomi Mi5 sports a 4MP camera with a 2 micrometer pixel size. On the video front, it can shoot 4K videos as well. Xiaomi is using Qualcomm’s Spectra image processor for behind the scenes work after you click your photograph.
The most important feature in the Mi5 camera though has to be the 4axis optical image stabilisation which compensates for camera shakes along the longitudinal, latitudinal planes, rolling shake and stutter caused due to shooting while walking. Xiaomi has managed to include 4axis OIS and ensures that the camera module does not protrude out and is flush with the back.
Battery
Xiaomi has used a 3000mAh battery for the Mi5 series and it is a non removable one. Considering it houses a Snapdragon 820, the phone sports QuickCharge 3.0 technology which Xiaomi claims takes only an hour to charge the Mi5.
