At the heart of the Mi 5 we find the Snapdragon 820 processor
powering the device. Xiaomi chose to use two different variants of the
Snapdragon 820 depending on the configuration and price options. The
lowest priced option with 32GB of storage comes with an MSM8996lite
which is a lower-binned Snapdragon 820 whose Kryo cores reach up to
1.36GHz on the efficiency cluster and 1.8GHz on the performance cluster.
Furthermore the 32GB version only supports LPDDR4 up to 1333MHz. The
64GB and 128GB options come with the full 1.59GHz/2.15GHz speed bins and
1866MHz memory.
Power efficiency of the new SoC was has been a big discussion topic
revolving the Snapdragon 820 and I know a lot of readers are impatient
on new information on the matter, so I took the opportunity to try to
measure the power draw of the new Kryo cores on the Mi5. The values
presented here are just estimates based on power measurements from the
device’s input charge power so there’s likely some voltage converter
inefficiency at play and more thorough measurements in the future may
result in lower figures.
Xiaomi Mi 5
We do see some significant improvements for Qualcomm and the
Snapdragon 820 represents a substantial reduction in power over the
Snapdragon 810 and 808. At first glance though it seems Qualcomm isn’t
able to beat HiSilicon’s Kirin 950 in terms of efficiency – although it
looks like it will be able to display better efficiency than the Exynos
7420. A bit worrisome was the rather high 1 core power load but it’s
still too early to determine if this is CPU-core related or rather power
from another SoC block. Nevertheless it seems that the Xiaomi Mi5 and
other Snapdragon 820 devices should be able show off concrete
improvements over last year’s flagship phones.
On the GPU side we see some good improvements as well, although it
seems the Snapdragon 820’s GPU is yet again oversized for smartphone
form-factors as power figures are well above sustainable thermal
envelope of phones such as the Mi5, so significant long-term throttling
should be expected.
Continuing on with the rest of the MI 5’s specifications, we find a
5.15” 1080p IPS LCD display. I think Xiaomi did well in staying with a
1080p display as it will help with DDIC and display controller power to
achieve better battery life for device. Xiaomi went one step further to
improve power efficiency of the screen and disclosed that they’re using
more backlight LEDs than in conventional designs – 16 instead of the
usual 12-14. According to Xiaomi, this enables the Mi5 to reach up to
600nits of brightness as well as increasing overall backlight efficiency
by 17%. While we still have to verify all of these claims, what I did
notice is that the quality of the IPS panel that Xiaomi uses on the Mi5
is excellent. The display’s viewing angles are among one of the best
I’ve seen on an LCD panel so it’ll definitely be interesting to see if
Xiaomi was also able to provide accurate colour reproduction.
Further hardware specifications on the internals of the device
include a switch to UFS-based NAND storage which promises to reach
data-rates of up to 450MB/s – a figure that I wasn’t quite able to reach
as quick testing shows the NAND speed reaching only 239MB/s read and
30.76MB/s writes (AndroBench 4.0, 256/4KB buffers, 1 thread). It’s
possible that Xiaomi is quoting numbers without encryption and FDE on
Android 6.0 is slowing down the maximum achievable speeds by the
hardware.
Design-wise, this might be Xiaomi’s best device to date. The
designers were able to adopt the Mi Note’s bevelled back sides to
achieve excellent in-hand feel. To improve on the Mi Note's design which
only curved half-way through the side of the device, the Mi5 now also
curves the metal frame to try to give a more continuous feel between the
metal and the glass/ceramic. Although the device sports a 5.15” screen,
thanks to the design it feels more like a 4.7” or smaller device. The
in-hand feel is reminiscent of the Galaxy S7 and I’m definitely happy to
see that companies this year focused on improving their ergonomics. The
only area where I wish Xiaomi had improved a bit more was on the front
edges of the device as the lack of 2.5D glass does accentuate the rather
sharp feel of the metal frame on the front.
I mentioned
glass/ceramic earlier, and yes, there is a distinction between glass and
ceramic as the MI 5 will come in three variants with two options for
the back material. The cheaper 32 and 64GB variants will come with a
more traditional glass back, while the 128GB variant comes with a more
premium ceramic back cover. Advantages of the ceramic version will be
that it'll be much more scratch resistant due to the hardness of the
ceramic. One thing that wasn't mentioned during the presentation, but
does make a large difference in the device's rather light baseline
weight of 129g is that the ceramic back adds in 10g more which was
definitely noticeable when holding both variants of the phone.The right side of the device sports a power button with a volume rocker
above it. We find a SIM tray on the upper left side of the phone. At the
top we see a IR blaster, microphone hole and the 3.5mm headphone jack.
The bottom features a USB-C connector which is flanked by 4 speaker
holes on each side, although similarly to Huawei’s devices only the
right side contains a speaker as the opposing speaker grill serves only
as a symmetrical design feature and housing for the main microphone.
The MI 5 is Xiaomi's first smartphone with a physical home button.
Primary reason for this is the new inclusion of a fingerprint sensor
whose accuracy I found to be quite high. I was also very impressed with
the implementation of the device wakeup feature: If you wake the device
via the home button then it will immediately unlock the device without
showing the lock-screen, not requiring a second gesture or trial &
error with reading the fingerprint after the initial press. When the
device is unlocked the fingerprint sensor also acts as a capacitive
button so you never actually have to press the button during normal
usage beyond initially waking the device up, effectively enabling full
capacitive button navigation for the Mi5.
