Normal fingerprint readers are no longer novel. They are a thing of the past. Infinix sports it, for chrissake! And to go with the times, you must be edgy, as edgy as the new Xiaomi Mi 5S and Mi5S Plus.
Xiaomi just launched the Mi5S, the popular Mi5’s descendant. (These model names are confusing. Let’s just go with ‘the new one’ as a moniker for now, yeah?)
As usual, Xiaomi didn’t fail to impress with new features and once again, like Oppo, a Chinese company is leading the charge in mobile innovation. So what do we have here?
Well, the new one (Mi5S) is not so much different from the Mi5. It is now fully clad in metal, rather than the glass sandwich design and the antenna lines are back, HTC’s original design.
The two new features here include a pressure-sensitive (3D touch screen) that retains the unique 5.15 inch size and an already famous ultrasonic under-glass fingerprint sensor that eliminates the need for swiping, pressing or tapping usual fingerprint scanner points for authentication. This works merely on tap, apparently and can work even with wet fingers. It also has a capacitive touch-sensitive home button, much like the new iPhone 7. The camera on the smaller Mi5S is a 12 MP Sony unit and a 4 ultra-pixel snapper up-front for selfies (another HTC nod).
A Snapdragon 821 thrums under the hood, much like Acer’s recently launched Zenfone. This makes the Mi5S (and Mi5S Plus) the second devices to be launched with the updated processor.
It is said that there are two variants of the device with the base model shipping with 64GB internal storage with 3GB RAM and the other being a 128GB edition with 4GB RAM. The base 64GB/3GB version will apparently go for about $300 while its beefier twin (128GB/4GB) retail for an attractive $345 in China. There are 4 colour variants too, Silver, Gray, Gold and Rose Gold.
Its bigger brother, the Mi5S Plus was also launched with much of the same features as the Mi5S. It has a 5.7 inch screen and has 2 13MP cameras at the back. One of the two sensors is a monochrome (black and white) sensor while the other is a full-colour one, like the Huawei P9. They can work either independently or simultaneously to give photos richer details and less noise. They both support RAW format shooting, HDR, PDAF and are accompanied by a dual tone LED flash. It can shoot 4K videos at 30fps, 1080p or 720p at 30fps and 720p slow-motion videos at 120fps. The front camera, like the Mi5S, is a 4MP shooter.
The Mi5S Plus also comes with four colour variants: silver, grey gold and rose gold and will have two variants: 4GB RAM and 64GB of internal storage and 6GB RAM with 128GB of built-in memory (both UFS 2.0). the 4GB/64GB version is said to go for about $344 while the 6GB/128GB version retailing at $389.
Both of these devices come with dual-SIM capability and will go on sale online at Xiaomi’s web store starting September 29th.
