Unlike the large events that involve hundreds of fans, Xiaomi held an event in New Delhi, where they announced the all new Mi5. The device is going to be the first device is India to feature the Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 820 chipset. The company only announced one model today, the base 32GB one, the price of which left the fans in shock.
This time, the shock was not because of the low price, but because of a higher price than what was expected from the company after the recent Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 launch in India. Nonetheless, I tried out the device on the show floor today and here are my initial impressions of the device.
The devices showcased on the show floor were the ones in black and white colors only, the gold variant was not showcased. The black and white, both these variants look great in the design department. The back of the phone houses the camera on the top right corner of the device and has curved edges, on the top and bottom as well as the sides. The front of the phone houses the 5.15-inch full HD display with a physical home button. The home button also acts as a fingerprint scanner and has a clicky feel to it. The home button is also a capacitive touch button if you don’t feel like physically pressing the button.
Regarding the feel in the hand, the device feels really light as it weighs just 128 grams and when I was holding the phone in hand, I initially thought that this was just a dummy unit. But to my surprise, it was an actual unit. Also, the size of the phone is really great. It does not feel like a really big phone and that’s the best part of it even though it packs a 5.15-inch display.
The processor in the phone, the Snapdragon 820, clocked at 1.8GHz is the first to be launched in India. When using the device on the show floor, the phone felt smooth and snappy, just as any other phone feels at the launch event. I can’t really say anything about the processor’s performance at this stage because the phone was a new device, with almost no applications installed, just their stock applications. For whatever time I used the camera, it seems too quick on functions, and even loaded pretty quickly.
Although, the company showed statistics that stated that the phone performs better than the Exynos 8890 chipset, found in the latest Samsung Galaxy S7, but frankly, those are just numbers and it all comes down to how the phone performs in day to day usage.
The Xiaomi Mi5 is the first device from Xiaomi to ship with Android Marshmallow 6.0 based MIUI 7, but while using the device for this short while, I did not really notice any out of the box changes in the MIUI compared to the previous versions. It does have double tap to wake the device, which is a nice feature to have on any smartphone.
In terms of the bloatware that is installed on the device, you won’t find a lot of applications installed but only a few. These include applications like Facebook and a few other Xiaomi made applications. I forgot to check if you can remove these applications or not, but we’ll include that in our review of the device.
The camera on the phone is another great selling point for the device apart from the processor. The rear camera on the device is a 16-megapixel shooter with 4-axis Optical Image Stabilization for crazy stable videos from the device. The front camera on the device is a 4-megapixel shooter with larger pixel size of 2.0 microns, which will allow much more light to enter the phone’s camera for a better picture.
While testing out the camera, it certainly performed really well. Both the cameras on the device managed to click great pictures, with amazing detail in the few pictures that we took with it.
A lot of people went crazy about the pricing of the device at Rs. 24,999 for the 32GB variant, but frankly I think that the device is priced right, only maybe Rs. 1000 higher than what I had personally expected it to be. According to some rumors, the price was going to be around Rs. 21,000 and maybe that’s what got all the fans angry about the pricing for the 32GB variant.
I personally liked the device because of the good camera that is houses and the weight that it has. It weighs ridiculously light and has a great feel in the hand. The hardware inside the phone is top of the line, just like something that you would expect from a flagship device. Even the display of the phone is really bright. It was completely visible even in the direct sunlight where I used the device.
The only issue one should find here is not with the device but with the company’s strategy of bringing out only the 32GB model, and not talking about the other ones. It was the Mi5 Pro that many were waiting for, majorly because Indian market has become spec-hungry with time, and even if 3GB of RAM seems quite enough, they won’t settle down there because this is a flagship that they were waiting for over a year, and other Chinese brands have got devices with higher RAM capacity in lesser pricing. There’s a lot that can be argued about, but let’s end it with the Mi5 – on the early view, the phone has what it needs to be called a perfect flagship for the price.
