Xiaomi Mi 5 review

Design

With the Mi 5, Xiaomi has included previously introduced design elements like the 3D glass from the Mi Note in addition to newly introduced aspects like the physical home button.

Premium aspects such as the curved glass found on the rear, contouring metal frame, and illusionary bezel-less display are strong indicators of the Xiaomi Mi 5’s flagship ranking. The phone’s form makes it comfortable to hold, even with a single hand. Whether you prefer glass over other materials or not, there is something to said for curved glass edges. While some may be led to believe that Samsung initially started this trend with the Galaxy Note 5, Xiaomi was actually first to implement “3D glass” with the Mi Note.

Display

Although many recently released flagship smartphones, like the Samsung Galaxy S7 and HTC 10, are shipping with quad HD displays, Xiaomi has chosen to stick with the tried-and-true full HD resolution. I personally respect this decision as 1080P panels are often cheaper, use less battery power, and virtually all users will be unable to notice a difference, especially at the Mi 5’s size.

The 5.15″ 1080P panel on the Mi 5 is also one of the best we’ve seen, thanks to vibrant and saturated colors, deep blacks, great contrast, and excellent viewing angles. We also found sunlight readability to be very good during our testing, as was the adaptive brightness feature. MIUI handles brightness adjustments notably well, and I rarely had to reach for the adaptive brightness slider during my testing, something which can’t be said for all smartphones available today.

Performance

If there is just one aspect of the Xiaomi Mi 5 that tips the flagship smartphone scale, it has to be its beastly Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor. It’s one of the fastest mobile processors available on the market today, and we were happy to see its inclusion in the Mi 5.

Camera

I was quite happy with the Mi 5’s 16 MP f/2.0 Sony rear camera when shooting in good lighting. Images that I took had a great amount of dynamic range and were very sharp and detailed. Color reproduction was also great and images did not seem under nor over saturated.

The dual-LED flash to the right of the camera module was helpful in evening out skin tones, and the 4-axis optical image stabilization worked well and helped reduce motion blur.

Xiaomi has bumped up the pixel size of its 4 MP f/2.0 front-facing camera, and I was generally happy with the selfies that the Mi 5 produced. Skin softening is turned on by default, and you may want to turn it off for more candid and realistic results.

MIUI’s built-in camera app is of notable quality, with an easy-to-use auto mode and an advanced manual mode. The manual mode does allow control over white balance, focus, exposure time, and ISO, which should be plenty for intermediate or advanced photographers.

Software

Xiaomi is shipping the Mi 5 with its own custom version of Android, MIUI 7, over Android 6.0 Marshmallow. MIUI may receive a fair bit of criticism for its iOS-like design, but it is actually very enjoyable in day-to-day use. That’s at least partly thanks to the amount of customization that Xiaomi has packed in, which will please many Android enthusiasts.