Newsletter
Xiaomi has managed to sell 70 million smartphones last year, which means the company failed to meet their sales expectation of 80 million handsets. Well, things might have been different if they introduced the Mi 5, a new flagship handset. Xiaomi has introduced Mi Note and Mi Note Pro flagship phablets back in January 2015, and have, since then, introduced a number of devices, but not the Mi 5 flagship. The company has opted to wait for the Snapdragon 820 to become available before the introduce that handset, and have announced several weeks ago that the launch event will happen on February 24th both in Beijing and in Barcelona during the Mobile World Congress (MWC). Well, the day has come, and Xiaomi has finally introduced their new flagship, read on.
The Xiaomi Mi 5 features a 3D glass / ceramic body (depending on the variant), and it sports a physical home button below the display, which means tons of leaks we’ve seen were actually right. This is an odd move for the company considering they were relying on capacitive buttons for a long time now. Anyhow, the Xiaomi Mi 5 features a 5.15-inch 1080p (1920 x 1080) ‘Sunlight’ display, along with 3GB / 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 32GB / 64GB / 128GB of expandable internal storage. The 128GB internal storage + 4GB RAM model is actually the Limited Edition Ceramic Variant (and is called Mi 5 Pro), the remaining two are regular 3D glass models. The device is fueled by the Snapdragon 820 64-bit quad-core processor, along with an Adreno 530 GPU for graphics. On the back of the Mi 5 you’ll notice the 16-megapixel 4-axis OIS camera, and an LED flash, while there’s a 4-megapixel snapper (4um pixel size) available up front. The aforementioned home button actually doubles as a fingerprint scanner, and the device packs in a 3,000mAh non-removable battery on the inside, which is not removable by the way. Android 6.0 Marshmallow comes pre-installed on this smartphone, and Xiaomi’s MIUI 7 OS is installed on top of it. Two SIM card slots are available on the inside of the Mi 5, and 4G VoLTE connectivity is also a part of this package, while the same can be said about NFC as well. The Xiaomi Mi 5 measures 144.55 x 69.2 x 7.25mm, while it weighs 129 grams.
The Xiaomi Mi 5 was a long time coming, and it’s finally here. The device does offer really powerful internals, and premium build, but will it be enough to awe consumers? Well, we’ll find that out in a couple of months when we see how well this smartphone is selling. Until then, keep in mind that the Xiaomi Mi 5 will be available in Black, White, Gold and Rose color variants.
