Xiaomi has finally launched the Mi 5 in India at an event held in New Delhi. Priced at Rs 24,999, the 3GB RAM + 32GB storage variant will go on sale on 6 April. With the launch, India has become one of the first markets to get the Xiaomi Mi 5 outside China. We had a chance to play around with the device and here are our first impressions.
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Build and Design
The Xiaomi Mi 5 borrows a lot of elements from its Mi Note series phones and this was confirmed by Barra as well. Xiaomi has refined the 3D glass curve design, making it way more rounded than that seen on the Mi Note. The metal frame merges seamlessly onto the glass back on the edges. The chamfering has a lot more slope. In a word, the Mi 5 looks elegant and with just around 7.25mm thickness and weighing around 129g, it is impressive how it has managed to have the camera flush with the plane of the body and included a 3000mAh battery. There is a 3D ceramic variant as well.
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While the in hand feel of the device is good and the Mi 5 looks the part of a flagship phone, one must be careful when holding it as we found it to be too slippery for our liking. Also while the bezels on the sides are much thinner than those at the top and bottom, the 5.1 inch display on the Mi 5 means that the phone has a taller frame. On the front here is the slim home button which also functions as a fingerprint scanner. The soft buttons have a backlight which is good.
The left hand edge has the nano SIM card slot and the right had side has the volume rocker and power/standby button. There’s a USB Type C port at the base surrounded by two speaker grilles.
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Display
The Xiaomi Mi 5 sports a 5.15-inch full HD display which we thought was really reflective. It uses an IPS LCD panel which gives good viewing angles and the text appears sharp. Just as we had seen on the Mi4i, the Mi 5 also supports Sunlight Display which dynamically readjust the brightness on pixels, so that you do not have to strain your eyes when out in bright sunlight.
Chipset, RAM, Storage and Connectivity
The Mi 5  in comes in three variants in all – the 32GB and 64GB variants and the 128GB Ceramic variant. At the moment, Xiaomi is launching only the 32GB variant for the Indian market which will have 3GB of RAM. Xiaomi has employed LPDDR4 RAM and UFS 2.0 standard flash memory storage. Both phones house Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 chipset which has a customised quad core Kryo processors clocked at 2.2GHz along with Adreno 530 GPU. This makes the Xiaomi Mi 5 really fast to operate. And naturally there were no issues while navigating or trying on different apps on the phone. There is no provision for expandable storage.
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In terms of connectivity, all the Mi 5 variants will be supporting 4G+ or LTE Advanced with support for VoLTE as well. It takes in two nano SIM cards. There’s Wi-fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS with AGPS, NFC which supports read/write as well as card emulation for quicker pass through using just your handset and more.  Xiaomi has for the first time used a home button on its devices and this home button also works as a finger print scanner.