Xiaomi MI5C Surging S1 Smartphone Hands on, Design, Hardware, Camera, Battery Review

Yesterday Xiaomi released its first Surging S1 processor smartphone, Xiaomi MI5C, as the fourth chipset manufacturer with its own processor, Xiaomi has prepared it for over two years. It’s said that Xiaomi MI5C performance can beat those Snapdragon 625 smartphones, and it is the most beautiful smartphone of Xiaomi, so it is real? Let’s know the truth.

Design

Xiaomi MI5C aims at light and thin design, it only has 5.15 inch JDI screen, only 7.09mm thickness, 135g weight. Currently smartphones with large screen are very popular, so this small smartphone is quite exquisite. Xiaomi MI5C has matte black, rose gold and champagne gold.

Xiaomi MI5C matte black has black 2.5D glass panel, and Xiaomi MI5C has 8MP front camera, four round design, which is similar to Xiaomi MI5/5S, there is home button under the screen to support fingerprint scanner on the front design. Home button looks like that of Xiaomi MI5, and it also adopts like FPC fingerprint scanner of Sweden, which enjoy fast and accurate unlocking experience.

Xiaomi MI5C Back adopts common three step design,  but the upper and lower part of Xiaomi MI5C both use glass material, and the middle is aluminium alloy, glass and metal joint control has relatively excellent design, not affecting the hold feeling. Xiaomi MI5C uses 12MP back camera, 1.25um, without  standing out. And the left side of the camera is LED flash.

Xiaomi MI5C has 7.09mm thickness, very thin and sleek，which can hold very comfortably, similar to Xiaomi MI4C. Xiaomi MI5C has three colors, the matte black is the best color, bringing superior quality.

In addition, Xiaomi MI5C uses USB Type C port, equipped with infrared transmitter as a remote control. In general, Xiaomi MI5C design has nice and excellent level, which is good and comfortable to hold in one hand.

Hardware

Xiaomi surging S1 processor aims at mid-range chipset, using 4+4 Cortex A53 architecture, 2.2GHz, small core 1.4GHz, it uses ARM Mali T860 MP4 GPU, in press conference, Xiaomi has not emphasized the exact LTE CAT level, but say its bandbase can be upgraded by OTA. It’s worthwhile to know that Surging S1 supports VoLTE voice phone calling. Surging S1 uses TSMC foundry process, but it doesn’t say how many nm.

It’s interesting that Xiaomi MI5C is in running mode in default, but it only launches 6 core in balance mode. In addition, two big A53 core is in sleep state. The other two big core has 1.85GHz, in order to save power.

But running the other mode, performance mode, CPU main frequency is more active, running all Octa core CPU, the main frequency is high, and the performance is stronger. So in default of balance mode, will Surging S1 running affect system’s fluency or play games with stuck?

After test, in default of balance mode, whether sliding desktop or playing games, Xiaomi MI5C runs very smoothly. In the test of King of Glory, we can see the game frame is at 28 frames, after testing in performance mode, it still shows 28 frames, therefore, we can see Surging S1 processor can keep user experience and save more power.

After running two modes of its CPU, let’s test Xiaomi MI5C antutu.

Antutu test

After testing its Antutu, it has got 62,773 points, which is similar to Xiaomi official data. Therefore, Surging S1 performance is a little stronger than Snapdragon 625 processor and Helio P20 processor.

Geekbench 4:

From Geekbench, it mainly tests its CPU, Xiaomi MI5C single core has got 731 points, and multi-core 3,393 points.therefore, its multi core points are over that of Snapdragon 625.

GFXBench

In GFXBench, its Mali T860 MP4 performance is good, also better than Snapdragon 625 and Helio processor.

According to performance test and game test, Xiaomi Pinecone surging S1 performance is under mid-range level, a little better than Snapdragon 625 and Helio P20 processor. But Pinecone Surging S1 uses 28nm, which has a little disadvantage in power consumption compared with those two processors. We can see as a new processor, it can have such kind of performance, we have to think highly of it.

Battery

Xiaomi MI5C has 2,860mAh battery, supporting Xiaomi Surging quick charge technology, up to 9V/2A, 18W, after testing , it can reach 18W, charging speed is similar to Snapdragon QC3.0. Of course, Xiaomi Surging quick charge also has heating issue sometimes, but in control range.

In addition, due to time issue, we can’t test in the real scene, but in balance mode, Xiaomi MI5C battery life can compete with other smartphones with 3,000mAh battery.

Camera

Xiaomi MI5C uses 12MP ultra light sensor camera, 1.25um, Xiaomi Pinecone Surging S1 uses 14 bit dual core ISP processor, especially image processing ability, ultra light sensor and dual de-nosing optimization can make it take photos at night better. Let’s see the real photos of Xiaomi MI5C camera.

Although Xiaomi MI5C doesn’t use dual rear camera, this 1.25um 12MP back camera still has nice performance, which can deal with different scene to take nice photos with high analysis, and fast image speed. We can see Xiaomi MI5C camera module has good optimization in software and hardware.

Conclusion

It’s the first time that Xiaomi enters into its own processor field. We can see Xiaomi has done well on its first own processor smartphone, Xiaomi MI5C. We can feel that Xiaomi MI5C is the successor of Xiaomi mi4c. This light and thin smartphone can be popular with different kinds of people. If you like 5 inch smartphone, you can consider this one.