The Chinese Mobile giant Xiaomi announced their flagship this year, Xiomi Mi5, in China at MWC16. The good part about this guy is it is coming in different variants to pick from with different price brackets to fit into different customer bases. The price is ranging from 1999 Yuan ($306/ Rs.20,969 approx) for base 32GB variant to 2699 Yuan ($413 / Rs. 28,312 approx) for the top one 128GB). The middle variant, of course, is priced at 2299 Yuan ($351 / Rs. 24,092 approx).

If you look at specs of this device on paper, you’d see that it has got many things that would compete with Apple and Samsung high end flagships. Starting from the display, Xiaomi Mi5 packs a 5.15 inch 1080p display with curved glass on the front with 600 nits brightness. The display got spread until the edges making you feel no side bezels. On a screen sizing around 5 inches, FHD would give you great visual experience, without a doubt. The top variant features a 3D ceramic body (weighing 139 grams) while other two guys are made up of glassy ones. (weighing 129 grams). Mi5 is only 7.25mm thick, and feels lighter in hands without a doubt. High powered 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 quad core chip coupled with Adreno 530 GPU would run this device. Being equipped with 4GB LPDDR4 RAM in top variant and 3GB LPDDR4 RAM in remaining two, Xiaomi Mi5 comes in three flash storage options – 32GB, 64GB and 128GB, as mentioned earlier. No SD Card slot in this device and therefore no way to expand the storage.

Coming to the software, Xiaomi Mi5 runs MIUI 7, the company’s own customization skin on top of Android Marshmallow, v6.0. This device impresses us in the camera section too. It has a 16MP primary Sony IMX298 sensor( dual tone LED, Phase Detect Auto-Focus, f/2.0, 4-axis Optical Image Stabilization, 4K video) on the back and 4MP front side shooter (80 degree wide angle, f/2.0) on the front. Xiaomi always known for delivering sharp images even with less pixels, having this camera won’t disappoint you in image and video quality. Busy people are going to like this device as it comes with 3000mAh battery (non-removable) with Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 technology which would offer 2.5 hours of talktime with 5 minutes of charge, as claimed by the Company.

There are lot of features that need to be mentioned in this device. Xiaomi Mi5 is a Dual SIM (Nano + Nano) 4G LTE enabled device with VoLTE support, and comes with Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac dual band (MIMO), Bluetooth 4.2, GPS. It also has other misc features such as NFC, USB Type-C, Fingerprint scanner (on the font) and Infrared Sensor. The best part regarding Xiaomi Mi5 is being available in different price brackets. Even though it lacks some features such as Micro SD Card slot, it has great specs in many areas. If you are a person who would bother regarding backup in your device and price, you can go for the middle one (2.15GHz chip, 3GB RAM, 64GB storage, 2299 Yuan) instead of the base variant(1.8GHz chip, 3GB RAM, 32GB storage, 1999 Yuan). But, if you aren’t concerned about money, then you can definitely choose the lightest, premium 3D ceramic build big buy (2.15 GHz chip, 4GB RAM, 128GB storage, 2699 Yuan). There is approximately 4k gap between the 64GB variant and 128 GB variant, which wouldn’t be a significant burden for many people. You can choose your favorite color among Black, White and Gold.

All in all, Xiaomi Mi5 packs top notch specs on paper that couple compete with iPhones and Galaxies. It is great to see how smartphones are getting cheap and good every year. According to the announcement, Xiaomi Mi5 is going to hit the China Market in 1st of March and we can expect it to release in other countries as well. Other details would get announced soon.