Xiaomi Mi3 was such a colossal hit that Xiaomi had literally struggled to match the Mi3 in last two years. The Mi4 was a good phone but used to overheat and had no LTE support at all in India. The display and the camera received mixed emotion and the phone was ignored till the price dropped below 15,000 rupees. The successor to Mi4, announced at Mobile World Congress can be considered as (almost) spot on. The Mi5 looks amazing, has superb build quality and MIUI 7 based on Android 6 Marshmallow looks breathtaking. But, will it be able to challenge the Nexus 5X and the OnePlus 2, the current midrange kings? For a detailed comparison of these three phones, head to http://www.gadgetdetail.com/comparison/mi5-vs-op2-vs-n5x/
Why are we comparing the Mi5 with the OnePlus 2? When OnePlus released their second generation flagship phone, the punchline was ‘2016 Flagship killer’. Given that Mi5 is Xiaomi’s 2016 flagship, lets see how these two fare. Do note that our analysis is based on paper specifications only and we will add more analysis once we get to test/review Xiaomi Mi5.
If I have to keep this really short, I would say that Xiaomi Mi5 is better than the OnePlus 2 in every way. The build quality is better and it has far better look and feel. The display though is where OnePlus 2 scores. The bigger 5.5” display gives more real estate and when you are using lot of widgets, it helps a lot. MIUI 7 based on Android 6 is absolutely feature rich and far more stable than the Oxygen OS provided by OnePlus which is a bit too simple and is yet to get full scale Marshmallow roll out.
Xiaomi Mi5 is powered by the screaming fast SnapDragon 820, which is at a whole different level when compared to SD810 which tends to overheat a lot. The SD820 brings QuickCharge 3.0 which is 25% faster in charging the battery compared to QC2.0. Mi5 also offers higher onboard storage for entry model (32GB vs 16GB) and there is a 128GB storage option too. The problem though is that Xiaomi never released all variants of their phones in India or outside of China.
The Sony camera on the Mi5 is also much better too but thanks to laser autofocus, the OnePlus 2 can focus on subject faster than Mi5 (not visible to naked eye) which has Phase Detect AutoFocus. The quality of images and videos will be much better on the Mi5 and OnePlus cannot match Xiaomi in HDR algorithm. Xiaomi’s HDR photos look amazing.
Xiaomi Mi5 comes with NFC, which OnePlus lacks. Given how fast Android Pay is spreading, this is a necessary addition. . The Mi5 also has a USB Type-C which is not only faster, the connector can be reversible. Coming to battery life, we expect this to be better with OnePlus 2 thanks to bigger battery and cleaner UI.
We had put this to vote and Xiaomi Mi5 ended up being the unanimous winner here.
How can you declare a winner without even testing the phone in the real world? You yourself said that you are using on paper details so how come you checked the image quality and details of mi5?
Worst review ever!
Thanks a lot for taking your time to provide feedback. First of all, we never said that this is a review and we clearly mentioned that the comparison is purely based on paper specification. Coming to image quality part, the image quality is from the sample images that are posted by those who clicked photos using the Xiaomi Mi5 that gave enough detail on how the camera quality is. Third, we declared the winner by vote and not by saying ‘we have used these two phone and we know that the Mi5 is better’. And our verdict did indeed turn… Read more »