Xiaomi Mi 5 review: a great phone, but that might not be enough

Xiaomi’s newest flagship doesn’t have two cameras like Huawei’s does. It didn’t scrap the headphone jack in favor of a do-all USB Type-C like LeEco did. It’s a phone without any gimmicks, without any “Oh my god, they did that??” features – and that’s not a bad thing.

It’s a good looking, solid piece of phone. I tested it out for the better part of two weeks for our review, and this is what I found.

Hardware

The Mi 5’s design is a sleek combo of metal and Gorrilla Glass that’s easy to use with one hand. The Mi 5 Pro, the line’s high-end model, features a black “3D ceramic back,” as Xiaomi calls it – my model was the more pedestrian glass, but it’s still a good looking device. The Mi 5 is smaller than some other flagships on the market, with a 5.15-inch screen.

With the screen turned off, it looks as though the Mi 5’s display has no bezel at all – just a razor-thin slice of metal that lines the phone. But when the screen is on, it’s clear that the pixels stop short from the metal edge, making for a fairly thick black border that’s especially apparent on the white model.

The screen itself is bright and crisp, and sports a 1080 HD display. Even with the brightness settings only at about 50 percent, the colors are sharp – if cranked up to 100 percent, they jump off the screen.

Beneath the display is an oblong, metal-ringed home button with built-in fingerprint reader that looks pretty much identical to Samsung’s. It’s flanked by unlabeled Back and Recent Apps buttons that appear as lights beneath the glass surface.

Crammed inside is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor.

The fingerprint reader is responsive, most of the time. I occasionally found myself pressing the button several times before the device unlocked, but managed to remedy this by adding my thumb’s profile into the phone’s database twice, as if it were two different fingers. It’s a bit of a workaround, but I found it helpful.

Inside, the Mi 5 is crammed with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, 3 gigs of RAM, and 64 gigs of storage (the highest-end model has 128GB of storage, with 4 gigs of RAM). The processor blazes along, loading apps quickly while staying cool.

The phone also sports a 3,000 mAh battery that seems reluctant to ever die. On a standard usage day – where I’m on and off the phone, sending messages, listening to podcasts, reading news, etc. – beginning around 8am, I never had the Mi 5 die on me.

Camera

The OS

The competition