We’ve already reviewed the Xiaomi Mi A1 and found its stock Android and Bokeh pretty satisfying, plus the battery. Now we’re tackling the twin, the Xiaomi Mi 5X, that comes with the same specs, but changes the platform to MIUI 8.5. This handset unboxed below is priced at $214 on GearBest.com.
Available in pink, gold or black, the phone has a slim metal body, measuring 7.3 mm in thickness and it weighs 165 grams, although it actually feels lighter in the hand. Inside its box we find the typical Xiaomi accessories: a small charger (5V/2A), USB Type-C cable, manual and SIM key, no headphones or case this time. This dual SIM phone has a 5.5 inch Full HD IPS LCD display, the famous Snapdragon 625 CPU and 4 GB of storage.
Interestingly it has two storage versions, 32 GB and 64 GB, while the Mi A1 only came with 64 GB. Both share the microSD card slot, the 3080 mAh battery and of course the dual back camera, with 12 MP sensors. It also has PDAF, F/2.6 aperture, 4K video capture and optical zoom, plus a telephoto lens. Selfies are taken with a 5 MP camera. The device is able to pull off Portrait/Bokeh captures and it runs on MIUI 8.5 on top of Android 7.1.2, unlike the crisp and stock Mi A1 and its clean Android One.
Specs end with a fingerprint scanner and 4G LTE. One interesting fact: both phones share the same custom MIUI camera interface, in spite of the fact that Mi A1 runs Android One. At first sight, I’m a bit bummed out by the fact that the Mi 5X has some Chinese menus, even though I clearly selected English at setup. Also the browser points me to the Xiaomi site one too many times…
We’ll try to see past that and we’ll be back with a full review soon. You can find the phone here.
