So this is the last Xiaomi mobile phone release here for 2017 we've got the
redmi 5 and the redmi 5 plus which i'm reviewing here which is the larger
better model the other model only has a 720p screen which for me to go back to a
720p screen in 2017 I don't think I could handle that so that's why I got
this model now it's interesting to note that a lot of people are claiming that
have inside information that this is in fact what was going to be called the
redmi note 5 but they haven't released that but what it is is really the redmi
note 4 x it's got the same specs so a snapdragon 625 which they have really
overused that chipset now it's a shame they didn't go for the more modern
Snapdragon 6-3 6-4 gigabytes of RAM 64 gigabytes of storage dual sim 4,000
milliamp hour battery and all they've done to change it from the redmi note 4
X is just changed the screen to the 18 by 9 aspect ratio so resolution of 10 25
21 60 s what it has and then the rear camera they also changed that so
starting out with the screen here if you've seen with my unboxing I did have
a little go at the viewing angles over because I came from the more premium
phone then I looked at the screen and straight away you can see the difference
now perhaps that was a little bit unfair but if you do angle the screen away from
you you will notice straight away that that screen does dim and quite a bit
more than other panels like for example the IPS panel the sixteen by nine one
that we have in the redmi note 4 X I feel this panels not quite as good but
it is a decent panel it does have good colors once you set the calibration of
the screen to natural I found out of the box it was just way too saturated for my
own liking there but it depends on your personal preference of course but a very
decent panel very bright too 530 Lux it also looks ok in sunlight now you
also notice that we don't have Hardware touch navigation keys in the bezel below
here so they've gone for on-screen ones which is perfectly fine but I prefer to
have the touch capacitive once in that space did it to me it's wasted
they put them in there the net will give us the option then wouldn't it up the
top we have the earpiece good call quality by the way out of this earpiece
and the microphone on the bottom five megapixel front-facing camera than F 2.2
aperture proximity sensor light sensor and we do have 2.5 D glass as well down
the bottom we have a micro USB 2 port which I feel is a bit of a mistake here
they should have put type C on here for two reasons
it really is the standard now we're almost into 2018 and also the type C
port is much more durable a loudspeaker and then a microphone and if you have a
look at the right hand side we've got metal volume and power buttons they feel
fine no complaints whatsoever with them on the left hand side we have a dual SIM
tray so it will take either two sims or a micro SD card and SIM now the backing
of it you notice that the textured looks a little bit different at the top and
bottom we've got those strips there it is in fact painted plastic so not metal
it does not have a metal unibody which I feel the gain is a bit of a shame here
they should have gone with a unibody if they could have but perhaps the budget
was all used up on that 18 by 9 aspect ratio screen but other than that I mean
it does feel good in hand it doesn't meet all the main part here we have an
always-on fingerprint reader that works flawlessly it literally works ten out of
ten times it's really quick just as good as the redmi note 4 X's dual tone LED
flash the camera lens does protrude by about 1.5 millimeters and the lens in
there is F 2.2 and the sensor is 12 megapixels I'll give you some samples
off the camera later on in this review but it's actually quite decent for the
price of this mobile phone finally at the top here we have an IR transmitter
secondary mic and 3.5 millimeter headphone jack in the box you will also
get this soft rubber case for the phone which is great because without it the
phone is really slippery it protects the camera all the corners and of course it
has perfect cutouts for all of your ports there now to quickly put it
side-by-side with my note 3 you can see the difference here between 16 by 9
aspect ratio and then 18 by 9 so by nine makes it look a little slimmer a
little more modern doesn't it because the top bezel okay it's not as large as
the note trees but the note 3 does have a fingerprint reader down here but when
you look at the side bezels they are actually about the same they're not any
slimmer on this one and it does make their mobile phone a little taller there
so we have 5.5 inches screen diagonally on the note 3 and then 5.99 inches on
the redmi 5 plus my read me five plus is running the Chinese ROM so it only
supports English and Chinese and it's version 9.0 point for stable now I have
encountered a couple of bugs with this but first I wanted to mention the
performance that just like any other Snapdragon 65 device that it's
reasonably quick here now we are running of course me UI 9 and it does have a few
little tweaks but I'm not going to go into the details of that because it
would just fill up the review too much and I'm pretty sure most of you know
there it's just an enhanced version of me UI 8 that they call lightning
slightly faster performance but I have encountered this bug here so the worst
part so far is the GPS performance is quite terrible so the accuracy should be
a lot better this is my best result that I could get was 11 meters accuracy now
other mobile phones with a Snapdragon 625 that I have can get three to four to
five meters of accuracy and most the time it's hovering around 20 18 meters
and what that means is that when you use something like Google Maps open it up
it's actually reporting that you're probably on the next street it's not
accurate at all and didn't track me very well so that's the only complaint with
the ROM now it isn't quite as fast of course as flagship chipset so the
Snapdragon 805 will launch applications a lot quicker you notice that sometimes
the UI doesn't really lag the only kind of like you get is launching
applications so shadow fighter 3 here see that took about two or three seconds
to load up now on other flagship devices that will be almost instantaneous quite
a bit quicker there so that's just the typical kind of performance you'd get
from a Snapdragon 65 apart from the slow launch times
applications you get at times other than that I mean Chrome this is very smooth
here letting in pages is also really good the performance you're getting
multitasking as well split-screen now have noticed that sometimes in Skype the
keyboard will get some horrendous lag but I don't think it's a problem of the
ROM I feel it's more a problem of actually Skype it could be a bug with
that which is at the moment it's not actually doing as I can't reproduce this
bug but it's happened quite a few times off camera now here's a benchmark school
here this is an - - so 63,000 very good score for this chipset the internal
storage and those speeds are quite decent for this type of storage here we
have not too bad of course not as fast as you FS 2.1 spec that we get in
flagships now here we have the wireless performance so I have a minor complaint
with the 5 gigahertz band of wireless it does take a long time to connect up and
speeds should be faster than this on my me max - with the same chipset testing
the same network will get about twice the speed so hopefully Xiaomi can patch
this no complaints for 4G performance in fact excellent really good I mean these
are the fastest kind of speeds you'll be able to get over 4G with this now I did
a throttling test here and after almost six minutes it doesn't really throttle
at all the Snapdragon 625 and I didn't really notice it getting that warm
either just slightly warm but nothing to be worried about now on to battery life
I got 10 hours and 20 minutes of on-screen time now this isn't as good as
the results I got with a very similar test on my redmi note 4 x now the reason
i believe is because of the operating system so i had me ui8 on my readme note
4 x and now i have me UI 9 and i think that's where the difference is coming
from me UI better life I found isn't as good as me UI 8 they still need to tweak
that and you can see how I was quite heavy so I used a lot of chrome chrome
for 3 hours and 21 minutes browsing shadow fight 3 for an hour and 45
minutes and then hit as well for 1 hour and 30 minutes so really in
hence use here that was pretty heavy on the battery so it held up well T nails
is really good of on screen time so pleasant surprise here when it comes to
charge times so it's not a Qualcomm quick charge three charger they have in
the box and that's because the phone sadly does not support Qualcomm quick
charge three but it will charge just as fast using this charger and the stock
cable I managed to charge it from three percent battery right up to 100% in only
two hours and 11 minutes so that's excellent for this type of mobile now to
quickly touch on the audio quality so the output from the 3.5 millimeter
headphone jack is okay there's no static there's no hiss or interference which is
great but it just lacks a little bit of volume to me now the loudspeaker when it
got one on the bottom sadly they did not incorporate one into
the earpiece like other Xiaomi models but I'll give you a sample of the
speaker now
so taking a look at gaming performance demanding games like World of Tanks here
have very smooth playable frame rates every game I've tested runs just fine
now won't be as fast as a Snapdragon 83 5 but the good thing is because it's
such an efficient chip you get longer gaming times and slightly better battery
life as a result because it just doesn't burn through it as fast
now sample of the video this is shot in 4k it doesn't have any digital optical
image stabilization you can't expect to have that of course at this price point
but the quality is quite decent now you will notice that the focus does struggle
a lot and even in this kind of perfect lighting conditions that we have at the
moment it will still do that focus breathing which tends to be an issue on
a lot of shammies phones and it seems that they can't actually fix that so I
do recommend that you disable that and the options while you override they
continue autofocus and you set the tap to focus option will give you a lot
better quality but I feel for the price it's detailed it's great to have 4k
there's a lot of other phones limit you to just 1080p let's have a look at the
front-facing camera now so the front facing camera you have no settings on it
whatsoever you cannot change the resolution so you're stuck with what you
get here but it's recorded in Full HD which is good and I find the quality
seems to be recently good for the price I have really no complaints with it
whatsoever in low-light it will tend to get a little bit grainy and drop a few
frames but that's typical
so okay overall this is a good phone but I wouldn't go as far to say this is an
amazing great the best of 2017 value mobile phone no because it has at this
stage my time of doing this review it's got that really bad GPS problem I mean
the accuracy is horrendous so GPS is terrible at the moment and the
5g wireless it does have a lot of problems connecting up or recognizing 5g
networks and the speed should be a little bit faster
and it's just so slow to connect up first to as well but I'm pretty sure
that giver will take two or three weeks that Xiaomi will have that fixed if it
is software related that is so should you buy this or should you get the redmi
note 4 X I'm not tempted to say go for the redmi note 4 X because it has a
slightly better panel it just has slightly better viewing angles and a
nicer screen I feel on that model but if you must have the 18 by 9 aspect ratio
by all means go for this mobile but wait for show me to patch the bugs to fix
that and of course wait for the price to drop down because at the moment it's
just a little too expensive for what it really is considering we've got the
redmi note 4 x and if this really is replacing the redmi note 5 then very
disappointing because they could have done so much more unibody housing type c
port front-facing loudspeaker snapdragon 636 and it would have been I feel way
way better than what it is at the moment thanks a lot for watching this review
and I do have to catch you back on the channel with more up-and-coming reviews
of course 2018 I will be coming be covering all charmese latest and
greatest miles as well here in the channel bye for now