Xiaomi has just unveiled its newest flagship, the Mi 5, at the Mobile World Congress this week, with a forward-looking goal to continue offering great specifications at a cheaper cost, as well as a design that is recognizable and stands out on its own.
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When it comes to specs, Xiaomi went all out on the Mi 5. The company announced in January it only shipped just over 70 million devices in 2015, but growth was still strong at almost 18 percent year over year, TrendForce said.
Vice President Hugo Barra said the Mi 5 had been built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820, the same processor that powers Samsung’s Galaxy S7 launched on Sunday in Barcelona, where the industry is gathered for the Mobile World Congress. The Mi 5 achieves that with aplomb, showing off design hallmarks that Xiami introduced with its Mi Note, and looking nothing like Apple’s aluminum-clad flagship. At the event, Xiaomi revealed the smartphone will be going on sale in its home market of China starting March 1. He even highlighted that the 3D-curved back of the Mi 5 is the first in the market. Xiaomi does not sell in the USA or Europe. The basic Mi 5 has 32 GB of flash memory, 2 GB of RAM and a glass body.
The Xiaomi Mi 4 has a Qualcomm MSM8974AC Snapdragon 801 chipset, a quad-core Krait 400 processor clocked at 2.5GHz, an Adreno 330 graphics card and 3GB of RAM.
Xiaomi Mi Pro the top version has 4 GB RAM, 128 GB internal storage and ceramic rear panels.
It will be made available in enticing colors like white, pink, gold and black colors. There’s no camera bump on the back of the device, for example, and the camera sensor isn’t centered on the back. The Beijing-based smartphone maker continued to release budget smartphones under its RedMi lines to retain its market share in China.
According to the executive, Xiaomi is an Internet company, suggesting that it isn’t entirely focused on selling smartphones anymore.
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“We see the Indian market as a local market. There’s so many frequencies, the carrier requirements are so steep, but at the same time, if we manage to launch a phone in the USA, from an engineering perspective, we’ve arrived”, Barra says.
