So the Xiaomi Mi5S gets an upgrade.
It now has a Snapdragon 820 processor which is the fastest you can get on android at the time of this review. It now has NFC support, as you can see no more glass and what we have lost is the IR blaster from the top.
Let’s have a look at it in greater detail.
We have the new ultrasonic fingerprint reader, USB type-c port microphone and loudspeaker on the left side. We have a dual sim, that takes to nano. I assume that device support 4g. On the front we have 4 2.5 d glass or dragon tail that hasn’t actually been confirmed. 4 megapixel front-facing camera, ambient light sensor, an earpiece and on the rear the new alloy body. No more glass and we do have the volume up and down balance. Made out of metal jewel tone, LED flash, secondary microphone and the 12 megapixel camera. 1080p panel at all with good colors deep blacks.
But you will notice that there is still the black bezel around the screen and it’s perfectly viewable in the shade. I can still make out what is on the screen. Launch applications, send a text message and use the phone without too much difficulty. Quality of it isn’t bad.
It has a premium feel to it. The new rear housing that it has on it does feel more solid than the glass that was used in the previous Mi5 and inherently easy access to those volume on and power buttons feels nice. Only a hundred and fifty grams. I do like the build of it. It’s not bad but still not quite up to speak of the latest Samsung and Apple flagships. So the ultrasonic fingerprint reader works really well. I find it works actually flawlessly that entity in times. It’s gonna work for me even with the sweetie finger. It will unlock the screen without any problems. So it does perform very well. I haven’t experienced any lags or anything. Now what is not going to be for everyone – this is Ace custom skin that is over android 6.0. One either love it or hate it. You see that I run it because its the chinese and english only version. I’ve got some apps that keep popping up with all those Chinese everywhere. That’s something to bear in mind. If you’re gonna get it early like I did when I would say wait for the global rom.
Some features that are quite handy:
It is double tap to wake you. It can actually run dual applications. So it has a Snapdragon 820 one is mentioned and Adreno 530 graphics. So it’s very easy for the CPU to get a smooth fluid 60 frames per second. Literally every single game I have tested I haven’t noticed any micro lags that I sometimes see on the Snapdragon 650 or 652. It works very quickly, super smooth and extremely playable every game out there. GPS performance is perfectly fine, getting very quickly. So we got camera modes, the typical that you see in the UI. 8 manual settings, focus, exposure, time control. But unfortunately no control of the shutter speeds. We do have various different filters. Camera records in slow mo which is 720p and that records a hundred and twenty frames per second. I found the quality to be quite disappointing. We can adjust a few settings in here so video quality goes all the way up to 4k now. 4k video does not have image stabilization as digital. There is no optical image stabilization.
If you drop that down to full HD, then it needs to get to the stabilization. I find that the audio quality is quite disappointing. The rate is only 96 kilobytes per second. Definitely lacking compared to other flagships and with no optical image stabilization images tend to be quite shaky. You’re probably going to need a tripod if you want to get any decent kind of video. It does have face detection & autofocus which does work but there are some issues now.
Then you’ll notice with the focus going in and out and now 18 ATP sample with 1080p you can enable digital image stabilization. It does a really good job of keeping steady and taking shake out of the image. Front camera has an if 2.0 aperture and it can record up to 1080p max. The video quality isn’t bad at all. But once you get into low-light the frame rate will drop down and it does get a bit choppy.
Conclusion:
I find that this is a very fast phone. SnapDragon 2.1 performs really well this place. All the latest games run super smooth. You’re going to experience no light whatsoever and the ufs 2.0 storage that it has is blazing fast for mobile. So performance-wise it is really good. The build quality is good. I find it slightly better than Mi5 because it does now have a stronger material. As much and it just feels more solid in hand and better overall now the performance of the camera I find to be very disappointing. They hype the sub to be an amazing camera and it is an amazing piece that it does have the sensor but we lost optical image stabilization which is a real shame. And it results in very shaky 4k video. Now 4k video also has a lot of artifacts in it. Focusing issues and the bitrate of audio and video I find to be too low for a flagship. It does charge very fast. The call quality is excellent. Wireless range and speed to really good. So it’s not a bad. That show me really needs to step up their game when it comes to camera performance. They have a lot of tweaking to do. The hardware is there. They just need to focus on improving that and hopefully they will.
Thanks so much for reading this review. Now I will have the review of the only 5S Plus coming up hopefully next week or so. Keep an eye out for that if you haven’t already. See you soon.
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