Xiaomi Redmi 5 Review: Hardware
Xiaomi Remi 5 Display
The Display is a 5.7-inch HD+ display with an IPS LCD panel. It has 1440 x 720 pixel, resulting to 282 Pixel Per Inch. Interestingly, Xiaomi decided to cover the entire front panel with a Corning Gorilla Glass, aimed at preventing scratches on the screen. The phone maintains a very thing bezel on it four sides, resulting to about 76% screen to body ratio.
Now as for display quality, 18:9 aspect ratio is currently the best in the mobile industry, and as you would expect, the Xiaomi Redmi 5 is not an exception. The phone produces very bright and well saturated colors that users will not struggle using even under bright sunny days. However, I still find the display on the Ulefone Mix 2 to be a little better than the display on this device. While the display is nothing to complain about, the Ulefone Mix 2 tend to produce better and richer colors than the Xiaomi Redmi 5.
The device comes with reading mode built-in which becomes effective when the auto brightness is turned on. What this does is to crash the display brightness to under 50 Nits, especially when using the smartphone at night. The purpose of this is to;
- Reduce the effects the display might have on your eyes, for folks who spend much time with theirĀ smartphones at night and
- Improve the battery performance of the device.
However, I do always leave the auto brightness disabled when I’m indoor because the reading mode is too aggressive in my opinion, making the display too deem in indoor use
Xiaomi Redmi 5 CPU and OS
As a matter of facts, Xiaomi have always stood with Qualcomm, using Snapdragon CPUs in almost all of it smartphones, from the more premium Xiaomi Mi Mix 2 powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, to mid-range smartphones like the Redmi 5. Now, how mid-range is the Redmi 5 smartphone?
Powering the device is the aforementioned Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 octa-core processor clocked at 1.8Ghz. This processor is a 64-bit chip, built on a 14nm architecture. It is netted together with Qualcomm in-house Adreno 506 GPU, along with 3GB RAM and 32GB internal storage.
The device runs on MIUI Global stable version 9.2 based on Android 7.1.2 Nougat. Of course, Snapdragon 450 processor is not a top-notch in the industry, but combining it with MIUI V9 based on Android 7.1 helped the Redmi 5 to be smooth and fluid in operation. The protecting Gorilla glass also help add such a smooth, slippery feel, giving the device the feels and operations of high end smartphones.
Navigating through demanding web pages was not much a problem for this device. The Adreno 506 GPU was able to handle all the graphical games I tested on this device without any issue. Please click here for a detailed gaming and performance test on the Redmi 5.
As for the OS, MIUI is one of the most customizable user interface in the entirety of Android ecosystem. Almost every single aspect of the phone is customizable. You can customize the behaviors of the power button and volume rockers, as well as the behaviors of the onscreen navKeys, and if you love seeing different display skin on your smartphone, then you can safely dive into MIUI thousand of custom skins and displays, which can be downloaded directly from MIUI theme store.
The OS also supports dual app features. This feature allows you to have a single app with dual functionality on your device. For example, you can have dual WhatsApp applications, which allows you to use two different accounts simultaneously, without logging out of any.
The OS comes with all Google apps pre-loaded including Play Store, which allows users to install apps of their choice from Google store. As mentioned before, the device is fluid and smooth. Even under heavy use, you hardly notice lags and hangs, but sadly, I do still get some Google apps like Google services, force closing with errors.