Xiaomi Mi 5 Specifications & Features

It’s been over 18 months since Xiaomi announced the Mi 4 back in June 2014, and today the company is finally ready to release the sucessor in the form of the Mi 5. The western launch here in Barcelona was presented by VP of Global, Hugo Barra, and we were lucky enough to have the opportunity to live-blog the event and get a more in-depth hands-on later in the day. The Mi 5 is Xiaomi’s 5”-range form-factor flagship device and will be one of the main devices competing for buyer’s attention this generation.

In a fashion that is very popular with Chinese vendors, Xiaomi was eager to talk about the detailed specifications of the Mi 5 during its presentation, so without much ado, let’s go over the device’s full specification overview:

 

NETWORK	Technology	GSM / HSPA / LTE

LAUNCH	Announced	2016, February
	Status	Coming soon. Exp. release 2016, March

BODY	Dimensions	144.6 x 69.2 x 7.3 mm (5.69 x 2.72 x 0.29 in)
	Weight	129 g / 139 g (4.90 oz)
	SIM	Dual SIM (Nano-SIM, dual stand-by)

DISPLAY	Type	IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
	Size	5.15 inches (~73.1% screen-to-body ratio)
	Resolution	1080 x 1920 pixels (~428 ppi pixel density)
	Multitouch	Yes
		- MIUI 7.0

PLATFORM	OS	Android OS, v6.0 (Marshmallow)
	Chipset	Qualcomm MSM8996 Snapdragon 820
	CPU	Dual-core 1.8 GHz Kryo & dual-core 1.6 GHz Kryo - Standart edition Dual-core 2.15 GHz Kryo & dual-core 1.6 GHz Kryo - other editions
	GPU	Adreno 530

MEMORY	Card slot	No
	Internal	128 GB, 4 GB RAM - Pro edition 32/64 GB, 3 GB RAM - other editions

CAMERA	Primary	16 MP, f/2.0, phase detection autofocus, OIS, dual-LED (dual tone) flash
	Features	1/2.8" sensor size, 1.12 µm pixel size, geo-tagging, touch focus, face/smile detection, panorama, HDR
	Video	2160p@30fps, 1080p@30fps, 720p@120fps
	Secondary	4 MP, f/2.0, 1/3" sensor size, 2µm pixel size, 1080p@30fps

SOUND	Alert types	Vibration; MP3, WAV ringtones
	Loudspeaker	Yes
	3.5mm jack	Yes

COMMS	WLAN	Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA, hotspot
	Bluetooth	v4.2, A2DP, LE
	GPS	Yes, with A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS
	NFC	Yes
	Infrared port	Yes
	Radio	To be confirmed
	USB	Type-C 1.0 reversible connector

FEATURES	Sensors	Fingerprint, accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, barometer
	Messaging	SMS(threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Mail, IM
	Browser	HTML5
	Java	No
		- Fast battery charging: 83% in 30 min (Quick Charge 3.0) - Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic - MP4/DivX/XviD/WMV/H.265 player - MP3/WAV/eAAC+/FLAC player - Photo/video editor - Document viewer

BATTERY		Non-removable Li-Po 3000 mAh battery
	Stand-by
	Talk time

MISC	Colors	Black, White, Gold, Ceramic
	Price group	8/10

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.

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.