Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus review: Widening the lead

Note: This article was first published on 20th May 2018.

Take on Mi

When you unbox or power on some Xiaomi phones, you may be greeted with a message that translates as "Always believe that something wonderful is about to happen."

Since its inception in 2010, we have indeed come to expect all kinds of wonderful from Xiaomi. But in sticking firmly to its ethic of providing the best possible value at affordable prices, the Beijing-based outfit has still had its share of misses, most recently with the original Mi Mix, which had a disappointing camera. Not just for a flagship - disappointing, period.

Yet the stunningly beautiful, borderless Mix carved an indelible notch for Xiaomi on the bedposts of the often promiscuous phone industry, where features like dual cameras, display "notches", and headphone jacks (well, the removal thereof) spread from device to device seemingly within weeks. But the world also saw the Mix as more than a vector of a "borderless" contagion. This was clearly a show of virility by a relatively young startup, a loud statement of being able to make the headlines like the big boys.

And the irony of it all is, Xiaomi has never needed to rely solely on borderless ceramic phones to make the headlines. In their world, less money almost always means more value. Say hello to the Redmi 5 Plus.

Design

Unbox a Redmi Note 4 and place it shoulder-to-shoulder with the 5 Plus: they look exactly alike on the back, and even on the front it's clear that the only difference is the 18:9 display on the latter.

Clearly, ain't nothing broke in the design of the Redmi Note 4, so why fix it? You still get the same reassuring aluminium build, although improved machining technology has probably made it possible to build the Redmi 5 Plus in a more unibody-like fashion, with nicely curved edges instead of the flat and sharp sides of the Note 4, which not only jarred a little in the hand but also served to remind its user that some aspects had to be built to a price. 

Speaking of being built to a price, you should not expect that all aspects of the 5 Plus are bang up-to-date with the latest smartphones. The charging port is a micro-USB one, rather than USB Type-C, and the dual speaker grilles only serve to conceal a single-speaker reality, though it’s a world of well-balanced tones and reasonably good bass (for an entry-level class smartphone).

What you do get - and what some of you will probably be eyeing this phone for - is its “3-choose-2” hybrid SIM slot, which either allows you to have one SIM and stretch the 64GB of internal storage to 192GB with a microSD card, or have two SIMs, but not both. There’s also an IR blaster, so you can line up your movie marathon as you set your air-conditioner to freeze the room.

Also, the fingerprint sensor on the back is among the faster ones we’ve seen, and (though we certainly didn’t expect otherwise) there is a headphone jack, phew!

Let’s switch our gaze to that 18:9 aspect ratio, 5.99-inch (why can’t they just say 6 inches?!) IPS LCD display. Don’t hold your breath: this doesn’t break any new ground in brightness, resolution, colour saturation, or outdoor legibility. Oh well, at least it’s 1,080 pixels in the vertical, which is way better than the more expensive vivo V7+...

Software

MIUI 9 is the latest take on Xiaomi’s homegrown Android skin, and we’ve covered different versions of MIUI extensively in previous Xiaomi phones. Disappointingly, the Redmi 5 Plus was not launched with Android 8 Oreo, but MIUI’s maturity in design - and extended feature set compared to stock Android 7 Nougat - may make you forget about what you’re missing out on. Let’s take a look at a couple of new features.

MIUI 9 Overview

For those of you not familiar with MIUI, it resembles Apple’s iOS in many areas, including the desktop, which has no “drawer” where all the apps are stored:

The lock screen is also extremely clean, though the way it displays the app icon with each notification somewhat detracts from its tasteful design:



However, MIUI 9 handles notifications like Oreo, meaning that they’re grouped and you can, of course, drag down to see more.



 

Split Screen

One of the advantages of skinned versions of Android is that they can implement features found in newer versions of Android than the one on which they are based. The heavy-hitter here has to be Split Screen, which works exactly like the version found on Oreo in, say, a Pixel 2:





 

Updates

Xiaomi is known for providing very frequent updates - in some cases as often as once a week - though we’ve also come to find that they don’t always give you what you’re looking for, such as… er… Oreo…

Regardless, we were quite pleased to find an update immediately after powering on. Not bad for a phone which was only a couple of weeks new to the market when we first trialed it:

Gallery

Unfortunately, in their rush to offer as many features as possible, Chinese OEMs sometimes trip over themselves and cram in stuff that was not entirely thought through. The Gallery app’s Erase Objects function is one such feature:-



While it is extremely useful and should work in principle, the reality was very different. We had trouble removing objects unless the background was perfectly clean, which makes us question why Xiaomi would put time and money into building this when it could simply have left the job to an app like Adobe Photoshop Fix for Android.

No doubt MIUI 9 is a better introduction to the world of smartphones for someone who might make the Redmi 5 Plus their first, such as Grandpa Jimmy or your primary school-aged kid. But we’d still understand if some of you end up waiting for a Mi A2 with the same features - but stock Android.

Performance benchmarks

The Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus’s budget roots are exposed in yet another area with the choice of processor, albeit a venerated one: the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625. Eight fast 2.0-GHz Cortex-A53 cores, coupled with a power-thrifty 14nm architecture, have proven a recipe for success employed by everyone from BlackBerry to Motorola to Samsung.

Accordingly, the Redmi 5 Plus served up performance that has become par for the course, even for devices in this price range. While playing graphically demanding games would of course result in a thrashing against faster Snapdragon 8-series devices, and you can expect web page loading and scrolling to be slightly slower and more jerky as well, you realize this is really nitpicking when you remember its price tag.

That said, we’d seem to be doing the benchmarks for curiosity’s sake, rather than expecting to crow about any improvement, incremental or otherwise. Let’s start with SunSpider, our favourite test that measures the browsing performance of a device when processing JavaScript. It not only takes into consideration the underlying hardware performance, but also assesses how optimized a particular platform is at delivering a high-speed web browsing experience:

The Redmi 5 Plus didn’t surprise us here, even though its SunSpider score showed a pleasing improvement of some 24% - the changes are probably attributable to improvements in its Android 7.1 Nougat OS base over the 6.0 Marshmallow found on the other phones at the time of their tests.

Nothing new with 3DMark Sling Shot Unlimited 3.0 either. In this test, which uses a mix of graphics and physics tests to measure hardware performance, the Redmi 5 Plus keeps pace with its Mi A1 and Redmi Note 4 stablemates:

What did raise our eyebrows was the inferior BaseMark score. BaseMark OS measures overall system performance over a number of different metrics. In fact, we ran it a number of times to be sure there was no mistake, and could only get as high as 1249. We’re not sure quite why - perhaps the Redmi 5 Plus uses different RAM, or this particular build of MIUI 9 had some bugs.

Finally, we did our standard battery test, which involves:

• Looping a 720-pixel video with screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
• Constant data streaming through email and Twitter.

Another surprise. The Redmi 5 Plus lags the pack by quite a bit - we repeated this test as well, and obtained an even shorter time! Again, this has to be put down to poorly optimized software, or perhaps just that 18:9 display consuming more power:

In real-world use, the battery performance was very good, but not the best considering the large battery capacity and efficient Snapdragon 625 chip; we could certainly eke out an entire long day (8am-10pm) of usage if web browsing, social media, and messaging were kept to reasonable levels.

Camera performance

As we said, flip the Redmi 5 Plus over on the back, and it looks almost identical to the Redmi Note 4. But what hides under the ringed camera lens is very different. Instead of the 16- and 13-megapixel sensors sported by the Redmi Notes 3 and 4 respectively, which were serviceable at best, the Redmi 5 Plus switches to a single 12-megapixel sensor with 1.25µm pixels.

The eagle-eyed among you will immediately notice that despite the larger pixels, the aperture has been reduced to f/2.2 from f/2.0. What has all this done for image quality? Nothing really negative - as long as the light is in your favour, you can expect some awesome photos for the price:-

The only thing we weren’t quite happy about was a general lack of dynamic range (and, yes, of course we did wish Xiaomi could have put in a second depth sensor for portrait-mode bokeh hijinks):

The built-in HDR mode on the Redmi 5 Plus is quite good:

In low-light situations, the Redmi 5 Plus performed acceptably for its price point - though that’s still not saying much, and as tech pundits, we’re always hoping for someone that will break the duck in the budget segment the way Huawei did with its 40-megapixel monster in the flagship field. But as we always like to point out, budget smartphones are often saddled with smaller-aperture camera lenses and lack optical image stabilization to keep the bean counters happy. This inevitably means raising the ISO in low light, which leads to images that may not be blurred but are otherwise soft, or noisy, or both.

This brings us to the one beef we have with the Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus. Despite employing a camera sensor of decent quality, and despite being able to perhaps resort to multi-frame trickery or other methods to prevent blurring, the Redmi 5 Plus turned out really average night landscape shots (and we’re guessing the same would apply to other types of cityscapes.) What’s more, the “Manual” mode only allows white balance and ISO adjustment, so no long exposures are possible. If you’re going to be visiting Victoria Peak, Odaiba, or Baiyoke Tower at night, you’ll want to get another phone...

What’s really surprising is that in dim light, the Redmi 5 Plus more than holds its own:

Nothing interesting about video and the selfie shooter: the Redmi 5 Plus does 4K and 1080p at 30fps, like just about every other modern smartphone on the planet. Video quality was thankfully easy on the eye, but the audio was disappointingly muddy. The front camera is carried over untouched from the Redmi Note 4 and is a 5-megapixel affair that is good for pleasant, but unspectacular and somewhat noisy, images.

Conclusion

We’re fast running out of cliches to describe what Xiaomi does with the Redmi range. Let’s try this one: the Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus proves once again that the word “budget” doesn’t have to be a vulgarity. At a recommended retail price of S$299, you could do worse if you choose to pick up a competing device like the vivo V7+. The Redmi 5 Plus is arguably better built, packs a faster processor, responds more reliably in day-to-day use… and, well, vivo’s Funtouch OS can’t hold a candle to MIUI in terms of polish.

However, a number of past-generation bits and bobs won’t let you forget that you should expect S$300 worth of phone: the antiquated micro-USB port, the single camera and its shaky low-light performance, the lack of Android 8 Oreo (at launch), no dual speakers, and any sort of waterproofing. It could also be argued that some of the competition are now employing newer and faster Snapdragon 630 and 660 processors. But again, we bid you remember the price point. Even if Xiaomi were asking for half the money more, this still wouldn’t be an outlandish request given how solid a performer the Redmi 5 Plus is, so it’s safe - for now.

The journey of Android, now many leagues from its benighted days, is still best expressed in a phone like Xiaomi’s Redmi 5 Plus - yet, we are far from perfection and the field is also continually open to being challenged. Let’s always believe that something wonderful is going to happen, but while we wait for tomorrow, the Redmi 5 Plus is certainly a phone you can believe in today.