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But the Mi 5 might be the phone that Xiaomi uses to finally break into the Western market. Despite its name, Mobile World Congress generally focuses on phones for Europe and the US, and Xiaomi's first-ever appearance may be a sign of things to come. Xiaomi is also sending review units to a few US press outlets—we didn't import this one. The company opened online stores for products like its earbuds and headsets in the US, UK, France, and Germany, but the stores don't sell smartphones yet.

Design and build quality

SPECS AT A GLANCE: Xiaomi Mi 5 SCREEN 1920×1080 5.1" (428ppi) LCD OS Android 6.0 Marshmallow with MIUI 7 CPU Quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 Standard: (two 1.8GHz Kryo cores and two 1.6 GHz Kryo cores) Pro: (two 2.15GHz Kryo cores and two 1.6 GHz Kryo cores) RAM Standard: 3GB Plus: 3GB Pro: 4GB GPU Standard: 510MHz Adreno 530 Plus: 624MHz Adreno 530 Pro: 624MHz Adreno 530 STORAGE Standard: 32GB Plus: 64GB Pro: 128GB NETWORKING Dual band 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS, NFC BANDS GSM/EDGE: 850/900/1800/1900MHz

UMTS/WCDMA: B1/2/5/8

TD-SCDMA: B34/39

LTE (FDD): B1/3/7

LTE (TDD): B38/39/40/41 PORTS USB Type C, 3.5mm headphone jack CAMERA 16MP rear camera with phase detection autofocus and OIS, 4MP front camera SIZE 144.6 x 69.2 x 7.3 mm (5.69 x 2.72 x 0.29 in) WEIGHT 129g (4.55 oz.) BATTERY 3000mAh STARTING PRICE Standard: RMB 1999 (~$305) unlocked Plus: RMB 2299 (~$353) unlocked Pro: RMB 2699 (~$415) unlocked China only OTHER PERKS quick charging, IR blaster, notification LED

The Mi 5 is very much a "budget flagship" phone: it feels and performs like a high-end device, but Xiaomi saves money by trimming features where most customers won't notice. The Mi 5's Snapdragon 820 only runs at 1.8GHz instead of the 2.15GHz you'd get on a Galaxy S7. The Mi 5 skips the crazy smartphone display resolution wars by going with a sensible 5.1-inch 1080p screen. The 428 PPI will lose a spec sheet battle with a 577PPI Galaxy S7, but when you consider an iPhone 6S only has a 326 PPI screen, 428 PPI is just fine. You get "only" 3GB of RAM, a full 1GB less than you'd get on the S7, but that's still plenty. There's no out-of-control spec creep, and you even get some important extras, like a fingerprint reader, NFC, an IR blaster, dual SIM cards, and the USB Type-C port I mentioned earlier.

But if you really want to fight the spec sheet battle, there's also a "Pro" version coming soon, which should be more comparable to something like a Galaxy S7. For just RMB 2699 (~$415), the Mi 5 Pro will have a 2.15GHz Snapdragon 820, an extra GB of RAM, a whopping 128GB of storage, and a "ceramic" back. The Galaxy S7 doesn't come in a 128GB version, and last year the MSRP on a 128GB Galaxy S6 was $1000.

The Mi 5's design is reminiscent of a Galaxy S6 or S7. The phone is a glass sandwich with a metal band around the sides, and Xiaomi added a Samsung-style clicky home button/fingerprint reader to the front with capacitive touch buttons on either side. The glass back of the device curves along the long side, just like the Galaxy S7 and the Xiaomi Mi Note. The curved rear edge that has started to show up in these phones is a step forward in comfort.

As usual with Xiaomi flagships, the build quality is every bit as good as what you'd get on a $700 device. The whole device feels solid. The only complaint we've heard is from people who (for some reason) equate weight with quality; they think the Mi 5 is too light. The button action is great—the power and volume buttons are particularly solid and clicky, and they stick out of the phone quite a bit thanks to the curved edge on the back.

The paint job on the white Mi 5 is designed to conceal the side bezels as much as possible. The top and bottom of the phone is white, while a black frame surrounds and blends into the LCD, creating the impression that the screen stretches from edge to edge. It looks cool and reminds us of those silly "concept renders" of phones with impossibly small bezels.

The front has an oval-shaped hardware home button with an integrated fingerprint reader. The fingerprint reader is fast and accurate—just hold your finger on it for a reading, same as an iPhone or a Nexus.

To the left and right of the home button are two capacitive buttons that act as "back" and "recent apps". These capacitive buttons are the weakest element of the hardware design—they're totally unlabeled. The buttons are invisible if the button backlight is off, and even when the lights are on, the touch points are only marked with two little dots—you can see where the button is, but not what it does. The buttons aren't labeled because you can swap the "back" and "recent" functionality in the software, a compromise between Samsung's "Recent, home, back" order and Google's "back, home, recent" order. Any user interface designer will tell you unlabeled buttons are bad for usability. We wish Xiaomi had just picked an order and labeled them.

While this is a phenomenal piece of hardware for the money, the big downside is that Chinese phones meant for China lack a ton of LTE bands that international phones need. If you bring the Mi 5 to the US, you'll have a shot of getting 3G and making phone calls, but LTE is out of the question for most carriers. You might have a chance with Sprint, but then you won't have the CDMA bands for phone calls.

The software: Android 6.0 internals with an Android 4.4 interface















Unlike the Xiaomi Redmi 3 we imported earlier this year, our Mi 5 is a loaner from Xiaomi with the company's international ROM loaded on it. This is pretty much the "everywhere but China" software package for countries like India and Singapore. As a result, our Mi 5 arrived with the full loadout of Google apps, including the Play Store, instead of Xiaomi's app store, which is only for China.

Some weird stuff still sneaked in, like a "Security" app with a storage cleaner, phone block list, and virus scanner. The virus scanner might be a necessity in the free-for-all app market of China, but Google does a decent (if not perfect) job of keeping malicious apps out of the US Play Store. Our loaner came with a theme store, but unlike the theme store in China, Xiaomi doesn't offer paid themes.

Xiaomi needs to do something about its software

When we first looked at a Xiaomi device with the Mi 4, the company's Android skin, known as MIUI, was different and maybe a little weird, but it wasn't awful. That was an Android 4.4 phone with an Android 4.4 interface to match. Since then MIUI has had a "flat" redesign, and the functionality of the interface has pretty much stood still for two years. Now MIUI is a liability. Xiaomi seems to want a unified interface across its lineup, but that means the new, high-end phones running the latest version of Android have to be dragged down to match old, low-end phones.

MIUI is actually how Xiaomi got its start. Originally, Xiaomi was a software house that made its MIUI ROM as aftermarket software for popular phones. MIUI works a lot like CyanogenMod: you unlock your bootloader, pick your phone from the website, and flash the appropriate software package. Eventually the company moved on to making hardware with MIUI packed in, but it still offers software for many non-Xiaomi phones.

As you can imagine from the drop-in interface, MIUI makes the most drastic changes of OEM skins. Usually these changes make things look more like iOS and less Android. There's no app drawer. The icons all have square backgrounds with little red notification badges in the upper corner of the icon, just like iOS. The recent apps interface changed from vertically scrolling to an iOS-style horizontally scrolling interface, and the settings look just like iOS.

Xiaomi's skin development works a little differently than most OEMs. You would hope that every time a new Android version comes out, an OEM rebuilds its skin so it can incorporate the newest features from Google. For MIUI, however, the interface is independent of the Android version. MIUI is an interface that gets dropped on top of Android, wiping out whatever is there and replacing it with whatever Xiaomi came up with.

The Mi 5 ships with "MIUI 7" running on top of Android 6.0 Marshmallow, but "MIUI 7" works on devices going back to Android 4.4 KitKat. It's a unified interface, so there's a "lowest common denominator" effect going on. MIUI 7 only really supports Android 4.4 features, because it has to run on Android 4.4 devices. This means you'll usually get all the under-the-hood features from Android 6.0, but MIUI 7 removes interface improvements from Android 6.0 and Android 5.0 Lollipop.

So if you compare MIUI 7 versus stock Android 6.0, you'll lose:

It's crazy to see a company throw away mostly "free" features like this. MIUI is old, dated, and easily the worst part of the Mi 5.

The most important parts of an OEM skin are the notification panel, lock screen, and recent apps screen, because those are the three biggest UI elements that can't easily be replaced by users. These are areas that Google has really worked on in recent versions of Android, but because you're using a KitKat-derived interface, you lose important functionality in all of them.

Update: We originally said the Mi 5 didn't support lock screen notifications—it will display some notifications, but it works differently than stock Android. On stock Android, the lockscreen notifications are just an exact copy of the notification panel. On the Mi 5, if the phone is off and notifications come in, they will display once on the lock screen, but in subsequent viewings, the lock screen will be blank. It works as a "while you were away" screen, but it's not uncommon for the lock screen to be blank while there are a ton of older notifications in the regular notification panel.

Permission problems

A lack of support for Android 6.0's permission system is probably the Mi 5's strangest omission. MIUI has had a permissions system for longer than stock Android, but it's not compatible with Android 6.0's permissions system—the one Play Store and all the "Android 6.0-aware apps" (Apps targeting API 23 and higher) are written for.

In Android 6.0, Google added an à la carte permissions system, and also changed the way Play Store works. With the older, monolithic permissions system, Play Store was responsible for informing the user. It would pop up a big list of take-it-or-leave-it permissions before installing, and users could hit "accept" or back out of the app install. In Android 6.0, responsibility for informing the user moved to the system for Android 6.0-aware apps. For those apps, Play Store doesn't show a big list of permissions anymore; it's the system's job to pop up with an individual "allow or deny" box for each permission when it is used.

Now for the fun part: Xiaomi's OS is based on Android 6.0, but works like older versions of Android—all of an app's permissions are granted at the time of install. If you're installing an Android 6.0-aware app, Play Store never pops up a list of permissions. Instead, Play Store expects the system OS to be there with granular "allow or deny" popup boxes. Xiaomi never implemented the granular permission pops, though, so both Play Store and MIUI expect the other to be responsible for displaying permissions. The end result is that neither one displays the permissions. An app is granted all of the permissions it asks for without the user ever seeing or approving the list of permissions.

Again this is only for apps that target the newest version of Android. For apps that don't target API 23, Play Store will pop up with the old-school list of bundled permissions. Only the most modern, up-to-date apps will slip through the cracks.

MIUI 7 has a permissions system, but it only works for contact and SMS access. For everything else—things like your location, camera, and microphone—permissions are automatically granted. There is still a MIUI permission settings screen, where you can enable or disable permissions after installation (which in some cases would be after the permissions are initially granted).