Review of the Xiaomi Mi5S Plus 6GB/128GB – An amazing “beast” in your hand (With real photos and video presentation)

For all you readers of igeekphone.com, that know me very well, they know that I’m a big Xiaomi fan. I have several gadgets from the company and 5 (!!) Xiaomi mobiles. I started with the Xiaomi Mi3w, then bought, Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G, then Xiaomi Mi Note Pro that I had till very recently and before some months the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 for my wife with 3GB RAM/64GB ROM. Yes…we are a Xiaomi family! Now, after 2 year having in my company the Xiaomi Mi Note Pro, it was time to renew it with something better and stronger. The candidates where two, Xiaomi Note 2, the next model from my Xiaomi Note Pro or the Xiaomi Mi5S Plus 6GB RAM/128GB ROM, a mobile almost similar with Mi Note 2. In the end the Mi5S Plus won the battle. Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus smartphone was launched in September 2016, when Mi Note 2 was launched on October of 2016. So let us have a look why I choose it and if you are searching for a flagship, why you should choose it!

I bought it at the beginning of the January at a very good price back then and came to me with SF Express. This way of transferring is very important specially for EU citizens, since by this way you don’t have to pay any customs, so I propose to use it, when ordering. It came to me after 15 days, a very good time period. Opening the package, I came across the new boxes that come now from Xiaomi, white from luxurious paper.

At the back of the mobile we can see all kind of important information about the mobile, like SoC, RAM, ROM, battery mAh, screen dimensions, camera MP, network connections.

Opening the box, inside all we find is the mobile of course, a pin holder for the SIM tray, a manual in Chinese, a USB Type-c cable and the power for the socket wall.

The Mi5S plus that i bought from Coolicool, was in gold, which is a really beautiful color. You can also find it in Gray, Silver and Pink. The mobile is made out of metal. It is very light and immediately you feel the difference in your hand. Don’t forget it weights only 168g. The dimensions of Mi5S Plus are 154.6 x 77.7 x 7.95 mm. It comes with a IPS LCD 5.7″ inch display with a 1080 x 1920 pixels screen resolution, at a PPI of 386 pixels per inch, 74.50 % Screen-to-body ratio and Peak brightness at 550 cd/m2 (nit). At the back we find the fingerprint sensor, that can save up to 5 different fingers, to use them to open the mobile or in various apps. The fingerprint sensor works really very fast and till now never have lost a try.

Under the hood, the powerful Quad-core 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 MSM8996 Pro  clocked at 2340 MHz makes the mobile roar! For the graphics, the Adreno 530 does what is wanted by the card so easy, so you don’t have to worry anything. These two are copped by the 6GB RAM and the 128GB of internal storage. It doesn’t support for extra SD card, but really now, are you gonna need more space than the 128GB given from the Xiaomi…I don’t think so!

The extra feature of this mobile are the dual camera that are on the rear. This is the main difference with the Mi Note 2, that won me. The dual cameras are of 13MP and come with dual flash. The cameras at the rear support Autofocus (Phase detection). You can shoot in Burst mode, High Dynamic Range mode (HDR), Panorama or using various Effects included. You can modify the Exposure compensation, ISO control, White balance presets, in order to take the perfect shot. The camera features RAW image capture, Touch to focus, Smile detection, Face detection, Self-timer, Digital zoom and Geo tagging. The camera can shoot real 4K (3840 x 2160) video in 30fps or 1920 x 1080 (1080p HD) in 30 fps, 1280 x 720 (720p HD) in 120 fps. The front camera is a 4MP which supports Wide Angle.

The Mi5S Plus is equipped with Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Compass, Hall and Barometer. Features BT v4.2 for connecting with other devices. Also supports GPS, A-GPS, Glonass, BeiDou. It also supports NFC, so you can use it in digital payments either with Mi Pay or other services. From WiFi, supports Dual Band and 802.11 a, b, g, n, ac. The Mi5S Plus doesn’t have the typical USB slot, but a USB Type-C, so be careful. Supports Dual Sim Dual Standby and takes only 2 nano sim. It supports OTG, but it doesn’t have built-in radio-FM. The Mi5S Plus comes with a 3800mAh battery, that will give you at least a day of usage.

When I first received it from Coolicool, it had inside a non-original ROM.

It says MIUI Global Stable 8.0.6.0.0, which is non-original. Here and a antutu test that I ran with this ROM

The score is not bad, but still could get improved. So, with the guides I have given you, I unlocked the bootloader, installed TWRP and then installed the custom ROM from the Greek Xiaomi-MIUI forum, which has several customization that give extra boost to the mobile. The tweaks that the Greek ROM has are the following:

  • Kernel supporting init.d
  • Build.prop and init.d tweaks and scripts
  • Ram optimization scripts
  • Battery optimization scripts
  • 3way Power menu 
  • Gps.conf tweaks
  • Sysctl tweaks
  • Some Smiui tweaked binaries
  • Sqlite optimizer
  • Apps zipalign at boot
  • Disabled HW acceleration
  • Change of the default theme

and this is the new score I got with the Greek ROM

According to the Antutu rank list, LeEco Le 2S Pro has 159043 and OnePlus 3T has 162978, but after been caught to cheat OnePlus with Antutu, Mi5S Plus make it the 2nd best mobile at the Antutu list for Android mobiles. Not bad for such a “beast”!

Here you can see my video presentation of the amazing Mi5S Plus

The Xiaomi Mi5S Plus is a really amazing mobile. Very fast, very strong, elegant, light at the hand, you are going to fall in love with it!

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