Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus Hands-On, First Impressions

About a month ago, Xiaomi announced the Mi 5s Plus as one of its flagship offerings. It sports top specs but it doesn’t cost as much as the bigger and well-known brands. Let’s take a look at what Xiaomi has for us in this first impressions.

The Mi 5s Plus is the larger and beefed up variant of the Mi 5s and also, seems to be a much better version of the Redmi Note 4 which we just reviewed (read here). It has a 5.7-inch IPS LCD with a Full HD resolution at 386ppi. It’s not Quad HD even though it’s already in the phablet territory but the pixel density is still above the threshold. The front is protected by a slab of scratch-resistant glass (although it’s not specified what type) and covers the front camera, sensors, and the trio of backlit capacitive keys.

The edges of the phone are chamfered, so the grip is a bit sharper than usual. The right side of the phone is where the volume rocker and power/lock button are while the left hides the SIM card tray. A lot will be disappointed to know that it only accepts two Nano-SIM cards, there’s no space for a microSD card. At least you get 64GB of internal memory.

The top end has the 3.5mm jack, noise-cancelling mic, and the IR blaster. It’s amusing to find infrared which is a consistent sensor on most Xiaomi phones.

The USB Type-C port is at the bottom sandwiched by the holey-grilles for the main microphone and the loudspeaker.

The back of Mi 5s Plus is similar to the Redmi Note 4 without the unsightly antenna bands, though. Xiaomi put in plastics on the upper and lower portions of the rear. It’s coated with the same pattern and effect of the metallic portion making it appear as one. There’s also the dual rear cameras which are both 13MP sensors with two-tone LED flash. Of course, the fingerprint scanner is situated on the back as well.

It’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 with a fast UFS 2.0 ROM and 4G+ radios. There are two memory and storage options available for the handset — 4GB + 64GB and 6GB + 128GB. The one we have for review here is the 4GB variant. It runs MIUI 8 Global out of the box complete with the Google Play Store to get you started. No Chinese apps on board leaving us with over 57GB of usable space. The phone has a large 3,800mAh battery to give you enough juice for a full day or two.

Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus specs:
5.7-inch IPS LCD @ 1920 x 1080 pixels, 386ppi
Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor
Adreno 530 GPU
4GB / 6GB RAM
64GB / 128GB internal storage
Dual 13 MP Sony rear camera w/ dual-tone LED flash
4MP front-facing camera
4G+
Wi-Fi 802.11ac
Bluetooth 4.1
GPS w/ A-GPS
NFC
USB Type-C
Fingerprint scanner
3800mAh battery w/ Quick Charge 3.0
MIUI 8

We’ll be reviewing the Mi 5s Plus to test it out with our usual benchmarks and trials. It is available at Widget City for Php20,500USD 349INR 29,614EUR 333CNY 2,544 (4GB+64GB) and Php23,000USD 392INR 33,226EUR 373CNY 2,854 for the higher variant. See listing here.