After a series of leaks, and endless delays, the Xiaomi Mi5 has finally been unveiled. Pricing has always been the forte of Xiaomi phones and it is no different for the Mi5 whose prices start from ¥1999 ($306 / Rs 21,000) for the base variant and extends up to ¥2699 for the top variant.
The Mi5 comes equipped with a 5.15-inch FHD display accompanied by the 2.5D curved glass and Gorilla Glass 4 Protection. The design of Mi5 looks like it was evolved from the Mi Note Pro, albeit much smaller. The flagship will draw its power from the top of the line Snapdragon 820 SoC paired with a range topping 4GB LPDDR4 RAM (on 128GB only) and an Adreno 530 GPU. The storage options offered are in the form of 32GB, 64GB and 128GB, but alas Xiaomi still doesn’t think it’s important enough to have a microSD card slot.
On the imaging front, the Mi5 sports a Sony IMX298 16-Megapixel primary camera with Phase Detection AutoFocus (PDAF), DTI pixel isolation technology, Spectra image processor, 4-axis optical image stabilization (OIS), 4K video recording, and the secondary camera assumes the form of a 4-Megapixel unit with pixel size of 2 microns. The Mi5 also boasts of other features including fingerprint sensor, dual-SIM card slot Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC. The Mi5 will come with 4G+ support (supports speeds up to 300Mbps) and VoLTE support as well.
The base version of Mi5 is priced at ¥1999 and it comes with Snapdragon 820 clocked at 1.8GHz along with 3GB RAM, the middle version is priced at ¥2299 and it comes with SD 820 clocked at 2.15GHz along with 3GB RAM and the top variant (which they call Mi5 Pro) has the same SoC but with 4GB RAM and 128GB storage. Interestingly, the Mi5 Pro comes with 3D Ceramic back cover as opposed to 3D glass back on the other two models. The ceramic variant weighs 139g as against 129g on the other two variants.
The Mi5 also comes with a home button on the front which also doubles up as the fingerprint scanner, much like the Samsung Galaxy phones, and a departure from Xiaomi’s “fingerprint scanner on the rear” design on Redmi phones in the past.
The Mi5 comes with the standard 3000mAh battery with Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 that will offer talk time of up to 2.5 hours with just 5 minutes of charge. It comes in Black, White, Gold and Rose colors and goes on sale in China from March 1. Global launch of Mi 5 will be starting shortly. So stay tuned for more details.
Update: Xiaomi says that the Mi5 will be coming to India “soon”, although no timelines were provided.
Mahit Huilgol is a Mechanical Engineering graduate and is a Technology and Automobile aficionado. He ditched the Corporate boardroom wars in favor of technology...