Xiaomi mi 5 after 6 months.

Xiaomi flagship mi 5 has been out for about 6 months now. It was once a highly regarded device that offers you serious performance of the Snapdragon 820 for a reasonable price of just 25,000 INR. But a lot has changed since then. With the rise of Oneplus 3 and le max 2, where does the mi 5 stand now? Let's find out!

Design wise, mi5 is still one of my favorites. It has that unique curved back which really helps with gripping onto the device. It's called 3D glass for some reason. It does attract fingerprints though, but that's pretty common with any glass surface. The buttons are all quite robust and tactile. no squeakiness or loose parts on the phone anywhere. The camera sensor is completely flush with the body and doesn't protrude in any way. So there's no wobbliness when you keep the phone on the table, and no damage to the camera either, which is great!

Speaking about the camera, it's a 16 mp sensor on the rear which has that new 4 axis stabilization built into it. Personally I think it's a gimmick. I didn't notice any major difference between a 3 axis camera sensor and this one. Even the 2 axis one on the iPhone 6s plus seems to work just fine. So I don't know what the added advantage is with the extra axis here. The camera app us traditional MIUI styled with filters, on swiping left and several settings to play around too. But I found that the phone heats up quite a lot while using the camera for longer than 10 minutes. It even crashed one time which can be pretty frustrating, if it happens during a video recording. Maybe software updates can fix the issue in the future as I don't think it's the hardware that's causing it.

The phone runs and performs really well though, these are the specs, in case you were wondering:

• 1.8 GHz quad core Snapdragon 820 CPU
• 3GB DDR4 RAM
• Adreno 530 GPU
• 32GB fixed storage
• 3000 mAh battery
• 5.2' 1080p IPS LCD panel
• 16 mp rear camera f/2.0 aperture and 4 ultra pixel front camera. 

The phone runs on MIUI 7 on Android 6.0 marshmallow. But that's also the bad part as MIUI isn't for everybody. There are no Google goodies like the now on tap, or doze mode. Those features are actually quite handy and Xiaomi users are missing out on them.

The fingerprint sensor / home button on the front is very fast. It's feels clicky and quite reliable. The back and recent apps can be swapped if you want.

By the way, the front camera is an ultra pixel sensor, not a megapixel one which means the overall pixel count is less but individual pixels are bigger. So more light and details can be captured into the pictures and it's certainly true for the most part. The selfie smaller produces great looking photos in pretty much every scenario. The only part where it struggles with exposure is when you're indoors or if the light source is behind you.

The inbuilt 32 GB memory is quite enough for regular users as you'll get about 25 GB. It's a bit less from my point of view. The phone does exhibit minor slowdowns and slight heating as you full up the storage. But overall the silicon side keeps things fast and smooth.

Currently the Xiaomi mi5 us available for 22,999 INR. It's bigger brother the mi 5 pro, with 4GB RAM/ 128GB storage is coming to India soon. I can say that even though it's not the best phone put there, it ages very well and can serve you with the quite a good experience for at least 2 years.

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