Xiaomi Mi5c full review

Alright, it's time for me to do a full review of xiaomi mi5c, i had this phone for about two weeks now, i use it everyday to get to know the performance and user experience of this phone.

Design and built quality

First let's talk about the design of this phone, xiaomi mi5c has unibody design like most smartphone today, the built quality is excellent, this phone feels like a flagship smartphone. Xiaomi mi5c is the slimmest phone in the mi5 line up, it is slimmer than mi5, mi5s, and mi5s plus.

With a slim body and premium metal material makes holding xiaomi mi5c feels like holding an iphone 6, in fact the design of the phone resembles an iphone 6, specially on the back. When it comes to built quality, xiaomi mi5c is really good, i'm impressed.

One of the issue is the back of the phone can get dirty easily, the back of the phone is fingerprint magnet, so becareful when you touch the phone, make sure your hand is clean, although if it's do get dirty, it's not very hard to clean.

Another problem is, because the phone is very slim, there is a chance that it will slip from your hands, so you might want to pick up a hardcase for this phone. Despite all of that, overall i really like this phone, xiaomi mi5c has very good design and built quality, it feels like a flagship.

Display

Xiaomi mi5c comes with 5.15 inch display just like mi5 and mi5s, the resolution and pixel density also same as mi5 and mi5s, 1080p resolution display and 428 ppi pixel density.

The screen of mi5c is really good, it is sharp and bright, colors are great too, it has auto brightness feature, where it can adjust the brightness automatically when the surrounding is dim or bright.

Hardware performance

Xiaomi mi5c is the first smartphone that use pinecone chipset, the chipset that made by xiaomi itself, the pinecone surge s1 is considered as mid-range class processors, so don't expect high performance from this chipset.

If you are type of person that admire smartphone with high score benchmark, you will be disappointed with mi5c, the benchmark score for this device is only 57247 (antutu), which no where near mi5 and mi5s benchmark score.

Xiaomi mi5c comes with 3GB of ram and 64 GB of internal storage, out off the 3GB you will get around 1,5 to 1,7 GB the rest of it will be used by the operating system and the MIUI 8. From 64 GB internal storage you will get 56.76 GB of actual useable storage.

With xiaomi mi5c, you can't expand your storage because there are no micro SD card slot available, the phone can support 2 sim card but no micro SD slot, so you are limited with 56.76 GB of storage.


Camera performance
The camera on mi5c is quite good for still photos but not very good for video, on the back you got 12 megapixel camera and 8 megapixel on the front.

Both camera can capture beautiful images under good lighting condition, but not for low light, after all this is a smartphone, the sensor is very tiny, not very good for low light.

Personally i don't really care about camera when i buy a smartphone, i prefer using a real camera (dslr, mirrorless) if i really want the best quality image. I use smartphone just for casual shot or snapshots, if you want quality use a real camera.

Battery life

Xiaomi mi5c comes with relatively lower battery capacity, 2860 mAh, what a shame, in my opinion 3000 mAh is the standard capacity for 2017 smartphone.

The battery life is not great on mi5c, for normal usage (social media, web browsing, etc) you can make it through the day but for heavy gaming the battery only last for a couple of hours.

It seems that the pinecone surge s1 chipset is not optimize very well for low power consumption, it's too bad, since the hardware performance not impressive i was expecting at least great battery life on xiaomi mi5c. 

Xiaomi mi5c key features:

• great built quality
• iphone 6 like design
• slim and light
• great display screen
• xiaomi first attempt on creating their own chipset
• analog FM radio (which rare these days)
• affordable price

Conclusion

Xiaomi mi5c is definitely not for people who love playing high end games in highest setting, surely you can play the latest game with this phone but not in high settings. I would not recommend this phone for gamers.

But if you are looking for a good looking phone with a great display, excellent built quality, and you just using the phone mostly for social media, web browsing, watching movie, and maybe little bit of casual gaming, xiaomi mi5c is a good choice.