Review Xiaomi Mi 5

The Samsung Galaxy S7, LG G5 and HTC 10 are all great phones. No doubt about it. But, they're also expensive. You'll need to shell out at least £500 to buy each device outright or pay £40 a month as part of contract. But what if you could get a handset with a similar spec for hundreds of pounds less?

The Xiaomi Mi 5 is just that phone. It has the same CPU as the HTC 10, a camera with the same megapixel count as the LG G5 and a design similar to the beautiful Galaxy S7. Yet it can be had for just £275.

It sounds like the perfect deal. And in many ways it is. The Xiaomi Mi 5 is a fantastic phone, with one major downside. It's not on sale in the UK, or Europe or even the USA. And it probably never will be. If you want this phone then you'll have to import it.

XIAOMI MI 5 – DESIGN

If you’ve caught sight of any images of the latest slew of high-end phones from Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei and Oppo, it won’t come as any surprise that the Xiaomi Mi 5 is a beautifully crafted piece of kit.

Like the Samsung Galaxy S7, the Mi 5 is a mix of aluminium and Gorilla Glass 4. There isn’t a hint of plastic anywhere – antenna lines aside – and it’s an exceptionally well put together device.

The front is equally sleek, with a reflective "Mi" logo on the top, alongside the front-facing camera, and an elongated home button sitting below the 5.1-inch display. That single button has an embedded fingerprint sensor inside it, which is fast – really fast.

In my tests, the phone was quicker than both the HTC 10 and Samsung Galaxy S7 and on a par with the Huawei P9. It’s accurate, too, failing to recognise my digit only once in around 20 attempts. Although it's an actual physical button that can be pressed down, it’s capacitive, meaning you can simply touch it to get back to the homescreen.

Xiaomi is playing up the almost bezel-less nature of this phone. And yes, while there is very little space between the edges of the phone and the screen, there’s quite a large black bar running around the display that spoils the illusion somewhat. In reality, the Mi 5 has about the same amount of bezel as the HTC 10.

However, when you consider that the big selling point of this device is its low cost when compared to other flagship phones – it retails for between £275 and £390 on Gearbest.com – the fit and finish on offer here is impressive.

The feel of the metal isn't quite as good as that on the Galaxy S7, and it appears ever so slightly hollow and flimsy, but these are minor issues. In fact, it feels far superior than the odd "metal that feels like plastic" build of the LG G5.

If I’m being really picky, I'd say that the Xiaomi Mi 5 is too light. On unboxing the handset, I thought it was missing a replaceable battery as it was so light; this wasn't the case. I prefer phones that have reassuring heft; the Mi 5 feels like it might turn to dust if it were to accidentally drop to the floor.

XIAOMI MI 5 – DISPLAY

When you consider that the Xiaomi Mi 5 is mostly fitted out with high-end components, it may be surprising to learn that the 5.15-inch display is merely a 1080p panel rather than the retina-slicing quad-HD variety you’ll find on the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge and HTC 10.

Does this make a huge difference on a screen of this size? Not really. The LCD IPS display is impressive, and if I'd been told that it had a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution as opposed to 1,920 x 1,080 then I'd probably have believed it.

Pixels are indistinguishable from each other, and since it's an IPS panel viewing angles are actually far better than the AMOLED of the Samsung Galaxy S7. There’s also no pinkish tinge when you tilt the device to the side, something I found quite common on the HTC 10.

The display is superb to look at, offering punchy colours that are saturated and bright – but not overly so. Reds are accurately represented, rather than being almost luminous, and blacks are inky and deep. Whites look great, too, with no sign of any muddiness creeping in.

It might lack some of the vibrancy you’d get with an AMOLED panel, but you'll truly only notice this if you have multiple phones lined up next to one another.

XIAOMI MI 5 – PERFORMANCE

Instead of making only a single model of the Mi 5, Xiaomi is offering a few variations, each with a slightly different internal spec. For instance, the base model on review here comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 CPU paired with a respectable 3GB of RAM and 32GB internal storage.

Next in line is a 64GB model with the same CPU and RAM, but with a slightly higher clock speed. Finally, there’s the Xiaomi Mi 5 Pro with a beastly 128GB of internal storage, 4GB of RAM and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 with an even higher clock speed. Considering the high-end model will still only set you back £380, it’s a pretty strong deal.

However, I can’t say that I've been particularly clamouring for the extra gig of RAM or faster clock speed. Even the base model of the Mi5 is an absolute powerhouse. That top-end Snapdragon CPU paired with more than enough RAM and a lower-resolution display than the competition combines to make one of the fastest phones on the market.

 The Mi 5 speakers are poor, with heavy distortion

It will handle anything you throw at it with ease, even intensive gaming. The Adreno 530 GPU can manage pretty much any title – from Hitman Sniper and Real Racing to Monument Valley – and will run it without lag and dropped frames.

It manages to do all this without ever becoming hot, or even slightly warm for that matter.

In our usual suite of benchmarking tests, the Mi 5 excelled beyond its modest price. It scored 4,722 in the multi-score test and 1,919 in the single-core version, which puts it just behind the Huawei P9 and the HTC 10. Again, in AnTuTu it scored admirably with 111,215. That's higher than the Huawei P9 (98,000) but well below the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge (128,000).

If there's one issue with the Mi 5 then it's the speaker, which is incredibly poor. While the handset may appear to have dual speakers on the bottom, only one actually pumps out sound. The other, I assume, is a microphone. Music sounds distorted, even at low volumes, and there's no bass or detail in vocals. It will be sufficient for your morning alarm, but certainly not for anything else.

During my testing I was using a UK SIM on Three. Even though it's an import device, 4G worked fine and call quality was decent. As mentioned, although the loudspeaker produces distorted sound, the microphones pick up my voice with crisp quality.

4G will work in the UK, but, as a result of the bands used on the device, you'll be limited to 3G speeds on US networks.

XIAOMI MI 5 – SOFTWARE

I often feel like a broken record when talking about software on Chinese phones. Whether it’s Huawei, Meizu or Oppo, the issue remains that all feel the need to tinker and change Android so much that it’s almost unrecognisable from Google’s creation.

Xiaomi, however, takes this to another level. The Mi 5 runs Marshmallow 6.0, and the phone can be shipped with the Google Play Store installed, but if you didn’t already know then you'd the handset featured a custom piece .

There isn’t the faintest hint of Google’s Material Design here: no app-drawer, a completely different notification shade and settings app, and a whole new way of multitasking. The experience is more akin to iOS than Android.

It isn't ugly – a word I'd use to describe Huawei’s EMUI. In fact, much of it is actually quite nice.

The frosted notification shade, the simple yet functional native apps, and the clean settings sheet are all well done. However, if you’re coming from another Android device, especially the Nexus 6P, then it will feel like stepping into the unknown.

You can, of course, install a custom launcher and this will bring back the sacred app drawer – but it won’t change much else.

Most important is that the custom skin, which Xiaomi calls MIUI, actually works. It’s quick, it isn't full of bugs and it appears to play nice even when you begin installing a number of Google apps. There are frequent pushes to set up a Mi Account – which requires you to input your mobile number – and you’ll have to do this to use any of the custom themes, but it isn’t mandatory.

If you’re picking up a Mi 5 expecting a pure Android experience, then this isn’t the phone for you. However, I've been using it for a few weeks now and I’m not as annoyed by it as I expected to be.

I'd have liked to be able to use Google Now on Tap – which is completely unsupported – and the multi-tasking view is only a single line of icons; but these are my only two real big issues.

Note that issues may arise when Android N launches later this year, in terms of whether or not this phone receives an update. It's difficult to know, although other Chinese manufacturers have always been slow to get their phones on to the latest version of Android.

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