Review: Xiaomi Mi 5

Whatever smartphone you're currently carrying in your pocket, you'd still probably be astonished by the Mi 5 anyway. The latest smartphone from Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi is powerful, well built, and relatively cheap. (You can get one for under $400, but it's not available in North America, so you have to poke around a little.) More than a few handsets can claim those advantages, but the Mi 5 is noteworthy because of the excellent capabilities of its hardware. The fingerprint sensor is fast and accurate, even if you have wet hands. The camera is among the best you'll find in a mid-budget smartphone. And the gorgeous, bezel-free display is a beauty.

That giant display, a 5.15-inch HD LCD panel with a sharp 1920x1080-pixel resolution, is bright enough for outdoor daytime use. At the bottom of the display, there's enough room for the first physical home button Xiaomi has ever put on a smartphone—the company has traditionally relied on capacitive buttons. The home button also doubles as fingerprint scanner, one I've found as fast as Apple's Touch ID sensor. Xiaomi's is more accurate than Apple's in some instances: the Mi 5 works perfectly with wet fingers, succeeding right where the iPhone fails.

A single press brings you back to the home screen, but you can set up the button to work as a capacitive sensor instead of a physical button if you prefer. It also has the ability to launch Google Now, show recent apps, or close the current app with a long press. The navigation soft keys at the bottom of the screen are also customizable, letting you assign multitasking and back functions as you wish.

The curved glass on the back looks and feels great, while the metal frame that goes all around bends on each side and adds a kind of premium feel. This effect is boosted by the ceramic finish of the more expensive "Pro" version (selling online for around $550). However, the Mi 5 doesn't stand out from the crowd as visually unique. I've found it nice enough to carry around, but it's just a big Android phone with no flair or swagger.

Turn it on and you'll find the latest version of Xiaomi's Android-based MIUI operating system: it comes with no apps drawer, a flat colorful look, lots of customizations, and literally thousands of wallpapers and themes. Some even have games you can play on the lockscreen. Built on top of Android Marshmallow, MIUI 7 includes some new features such as an integrated call recorder, a password protected child mode, a do not disturb mode, and guest modes. An additional one-handed mode works similar to Apple's reachability: it reduces the software interface down to only 3.5 inches. You active one-handed mode by just swiping a finger from the home button to the side where you want the display to collapse to. A useful perk is the Smart Lock feature that relies on trusted places, paired devices, voice recognition, and on-body detection to authenticate a user. So if you're wearing your Xiaomi smart watch or if you're on your home Wi-Fi network, for example, you can skip the lock screen when you wake up the phone from standby.

One of my favorite features on this phone is the camera, a Sony 16-megapixel unit covered with sapphire protective glass. It takes excellent and clear images with its f/2.0 aperture and unique 4-axis optical image stabilization system. Overall, the camera is great for its price range: in daylight shots, it performs as well as a high-end smartphone, producing fine details and accurate colors. Even indoor, the camera still stands up to the more expensive options, and it's only in low-light conditions that the sensor isn't very impressive. In dimmer scenes, it tends to overexpose and lose details. It's only in low light that the differences between the camera on the Mi 5 and the ones on higher-end phones start to show.

Xiaomi

The camera's software comes with 11 filters, including one that adds a privacy patch on a customizable area of the picture. There are also nine modes, including Panorama, Tilt-Shift, Fisheye, and an "Auto-Straighten" mode that enables perfectly framed shots in almost every condition. There's a "Handheld Twilight" mode that's a sort of HDR treatment for nighttime pictures. It takes a series of shots with different exposures and then automatically combines them to create an optimized single photo. There's a Timer mode, too, but even better is the Audio mode—fire the shutter just by saying "click", "capture" or "snap." And of course there's a Beautify mode, with a creepy built-in tool that guesses age and gender of the recognised face—it guessed my age within one year; luckily one year younger than I actually am. The feature automatically applies a filter to your selfies, picking the most appropriate filter of its 36 choices based on your age and gender.

Hands-on camera nerds will appreciate the Mi 5's manual mode, which allows you to adjust parameters most people can't be bothered with: white balance, focus point, ISO, and exposure time. More usefully, exposure can be adjusted on auto mode too, from -2 to +2 in regular 0.3 stops. The digital zoom goes up to 8x, but I wouldn't recommend ever using it: just like with any other smartphone, it is way better to crop the image after the shot.

The image stabilization technology works great for stills and for videos, which remain well stabilized even when you're shooting them with one hand. However, the video camera acts oddly in low light conditions. It kept refocusing constantly, disrupting the vibe of my beautiful family holiday videos.

Everything on the Mi 5 runs very fast, thanks to Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 820 chipset and a choice of 3 of 4 GB of RAM. The built-in browser is even faster than Google Chrome, and comes with a handy text resizer that applies any zoom level to web pages. The phone often felt warm, but it never get close to overheating in my testing, even while handling games or pushing through heavy multitasking sessions. I consistently got an entire day of use out of the 3000 mAh battery between charges.

There's no microsSD slot for storage expansion, but I don't see that as a downside: the Mi 5 offers either 32 or 64GB of internal memory on the regular version, and 128GB on the "Pro" model. Each phone also comes with 5GB of free Mi Could Storage in addition to every possible service of sort, from Google Drive to DropBox.

It's an excellent phone that, while lacking visual flair, makes up for it with great hardware and an innovative customized Android experience. One last note about that software. The Mi 5 comes in two different versions: one for the Chinese market with Xiaomi's Mi Store on board, and one for international markets with the Google Play Store and Google's services. If you're going to buy it somewhere online and you don't live in China, be sure to get the international version.