Leading smartphone company Xiaomi unveiled its latest flagship Mi 5 during its Mobile World Congress (MWC) debut today, showcasing a sleek and beautiful work of art powered by the next-generation Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 820 processor with up to 4GB RAM and 128GB flash memory.
Priced from RMB1,999 (US$305), Mi 5 will be one of the first devices with Snapdragon 820 to be commercially available, with sales starting March 1 on Mi.com and Mi Home outlets in China. It will be made available in selected global markets at a later date.
Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun said: “Mi 5 is truly all you ever imagined, and more. Our latest flagship has been in the making for 19 months, and it’s the most beautiful device we have unveiled so far. With several tech breakthroughs built into Mi 5, it is insanely fast. I am extremely excited to start 2016 on such a strong note, and I’m really looking forward to unveiling even more amazing products in the year to come.”
Mi 5 builds upon the design language of Mi Note, featuring elegant curved edges that transition from glass to metal seamlessly. While 3D glass already makes Mi 5 a beauty to behold, Mi 5 Pro takes that to the next level with a 3D ceramic body, which is strong and durable with the texture of marble.
Weighing only 129g and with a thickness of only 7.25mm, Mi 5 is light beyond imagination. Even with a large high-density 3000mAh battery and a front fingerprint sensor, Mi 5 features an extremely slim frame and a high screen-to-body ratio, made possible only by an innovative structural design that was nearly two years in development.
Mi 5 boasts insanely fast performance with an Antutu score of over 140,000, thanks to the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor. By moving to the Kryo architecture, the Snapdragon 820 CPU has double the performance of Snapdragon 810 at half the power consumption. The Adreno 530 GPU is 40% faster and 40% more power efficient than the Adreno 510. Mi 5 is also the first Xiaomi smartphone to ship with UFS 2.0 high-speed flash memory, which is designed to greatly surpass the performance of eMMC 5.0 by up to 87%.
For better connectivity, Mi 5 also supports the next-generation 4G+ network (Cat 12) and VoLTE. The 16MP camera on Mi 5 also sports several tech breakthroughs, in particular 4-axis Optical Image Stabilization (OIS), which is more effective at compensating for handshake in a variety of shooting scenarios. Mi 5 is one of the first devices in the world to ship with the new Sony IMX298 sensor, which is also Xiaomi’s first camera featuring Deep Trench Isolation (DTI), a pixel-to-pixel isolation technology for cleaner color separation.
Mi 5 features a very vibrant display with 600-nit brightness, stemming from an increase to 16 LED lights behind its LCD display. The screen is also 17% more power efficient, which means that it is battery-saving despite being extremely bright. Mi 5 also supports full NFC functionality for both reading and writing, as well as Quick Charge 3.0, which can charge up to 90% in just one hour, and is able to give two and a half hours of talktime after charging for just 5 minutes.
Mi 5 will ship in three models and three colors: black, white and gold. Mi 5 32GB (Snapdragon 820 1.8GHz, 3GB + 32GB, 3D ceramic glass) will be available for RMB1,999, Mi 5 64GB (Snapdragon 820 2.15GHz, 3GB + 64GB, 3D ceramic glass) for RMB2,299 and Mi 5 Pro (Snapdragon 820 2.15GHz, 4GB + 128GB, 3D ceramic body) for RMB2,699.
