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Why Xiaomi Mi5 Is Not Overpriced

Xiaomi Mi5 is not overpriced
First of all, let me tell you that i am not a fanboy of Xiaomi or any company. But what i am a fan of is value. I have been reading a lot about this phone on the internet and almost everywhere i read about it, i found one thing common, a lot of people are calling it overpriced. How can anyone call this phone overpriced is beyond me. But why you can’t is what i am going to tell you.

This post is going to be long and include a lot of explanation, so hang tight. Okay then, here we go.

Let me ask you a question, how many phones with Snapdragon 820 chip-set currently do you think are launched(as in readily available in the market for consumers to buy) in this world from known companies?

Lets count, Samsung Galaxy S7, Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, LG G5 just three, are we missing something? oh yes, …Xiaomi Mi5.

Now count how many phones with Snapdragon 820 are readily available in India to buy?

Lets count Samsung… oh wait, the couple of Galaxy S7 phones that are launched in India comes with Exynos or Xynos(if you consider ‘e’ as silent and it sounds better like that, anyway) not with Snapdragon 820.

So how many phones are we left with Snapdragon 820 in India? ZERO! That’s right.

But wait that’s not entirely correct because come this 6th of April Xiaomi Mi5 is going to change that. It is going to become to first ever phone launched in India with Snapdragon 820. That is a tremendous value in itself.

Now, why i am telling you this? i am telling you this because Snapdragon 820 is a big deal. Unlike before when Qualcomm betted on wrong processors and advertised them like they were the best in the world. This time they and other companies are under estimating them.

Again, allow me to explain. You see, just two processors from Qualcomm this year are enough to beat the entire lineup of processors from Mediatek, Samsung and one more competitor HiSilicon(Huawei).

Let me take you back to last year, when even low end processors like Mediatek 6752 were able to beat Snapdragon 615. What was the problem back then? You see both of them had same CPU(Cortex A53 in 4+4 clusters) but it was the GPU that made the difference. Mali T760 was way more powerful than Adreno 405 inside Snapdragon 615.

Same goes for the flagship processors like Snapdragon 810 and Mediatek 6795 there weren’t that much difference in practical performance between both of them, and also almost all processors suffered from heating issues last year.

Fast forward to 2016. First phone Xiaomi launched in India Redmi Note 3, came with Snapdragon 650.

You know i underestimated this year’s lineup of Snapdragon chip-sets myself. But then Sony Xperia X happened. Now, you might wonder what does that phone has to do with anything here?

You see, when i read about Xperia X during MWC i saw the processor part and saw that it comes with Snapdragon 650, and i was like ‘Sony has gone mad why would anyone launch a flagship phone with a renamed Snapdragon 618 which isn’t even that powerful than 615’.

How wrong was i… just like Qualcomm, they also realized that Snapdragon 618 is nothing like 615, so they gave it a new number. Which is still not correct i believe, it should be called Snapdragon 815 or something.

I also found out that it comes with completely new two cores known as Cortex A72 about which i knew a little at that time. Then i searched and found its leaked benchmark scores, turns out it was beating last years flagship processors easily. That’s when the bell inside my head rang. And that’s when i realized ‘oh teriiiiiiiii’. This is big.

You see, Sony knew the value of Snapdragon 650(and it is still probably going to over-price it xD) and Xiaomi just gave it away, Snapdragon 650 does not belong anywhere close to 10,000 Rupees. It belongs in 20,000 Rupees range. But nobody complained then and said ‘hey Xiaomi you have underpriced a phone’.

With Xiaomi Mi5, Xiaomi is reaping what it sowed, i guess. ‘Aur bigaado aadatein baccho ki Xiaomi, acchhe phone saste mein deke, ab bhugto’.

Why i am telling you about Snadragon 650 while i should be telling you about Snadragon 820 and Xiaomi Mi5. It’s because Snapdragon 650 is also a big deal and they are both extremely similar.

First see these screen shots of pre-launch Snapdragon 820 and Redmi Note 3(Snapdragon 650) antutu score.

Snapdragon 820 Antutu score

Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 Benchmark (9)

Notice something? if you look carefully you’ll notice that there’s only roughly 10% performance difference between Snapdragon 650 and Snapdragon 820. You know, how do you get just 10% difference in power between two chip-sets without any proper software optimizaton? Simple, give them different GPUs and slightly higher clock-rate.

You know in what other two chip-sets there was roughly 10% difference? Mediatek 6752 and Snapdragon 615, only because of their GPUs. Snapdragon 820 is also only 10% more powerful than Snapdragon 650 only because of its GPU. According to this score or screenshot at least. And yet 650 is considered as a low end or mid-range chip-set.

Now that was pre launch score by the way. The retail Snapdragon 820 inside Xiaomi Mi5 actually scores more than 1,20,000. I don’t know what Qualcomm did but they optimized the hell out of it. And now it scores almost double than Snapdragon 650.

We know that 820 has four specifically designed kryo cores inside while 650 has standard two Cortex A72 and four Cortex A53 inside. A Kryo core is not exactly like Cortex A72 but it is extremely similar in performance. Pre launch Snapdragon 820 scores also demonstrates that.

So just to keep it simple, i am going to say that Snapdragon 820 actually has four renamed Cortex A72 cores inside with two cores clocked around 2GHz while the other two lower than 1.6GHz to preserve power.

Finally, after all that nerd talk. Questions must be rising in your head. Like, why is that important, why should you care, what does that have to with Xiaomi Mi5’s price?

You see, Xiaomi always launches an affordable phone with flagship specs and processor every year. But they do it very late. By the time when the processor is about to become obsolete or old in a month or two. And there are a lot of phones available in the market with the same chip-set.

And here is the million dollar answer you were waiting for. If you buy Xiaomi Mi5 right now. It’s not going to become underpowered or obsolete in a month or two, know why? Because Snapdragon 820. It has already beaten rest of the flagships chip-sets in performance and it’s proven both practically and through benchmarks.

Hell, even i can confirm it because i have used a phone with a gem called Snapdragon 650 which like i said and showed before is extremely similar to Snapdragon 820.

Here are the Antutu rankings of some top ranking chip-sets
Antutu rankings

Exynos 8890 can’t beat it, that’s the processor inside Samsung Galaxy S7 series phones and mind you it is an octa core chip-set that means it is powerful but also it will generate much more heat while Snapdragon 820 is a quad-core chip-set. That just proves that more cores does not mean more power. Optimization does.

Just like that, Mediatek X10, P10 and P20 all three of these chip-sets couldn’t beat Snapdragon 650. As far as flagship processor goes, Mediatek X20 also has two Cortex A72 prcoessors and 8 separate Cortex A53 processors, it could probably come close to Snapdragon 820 but i don’t think it will be able to beat it and also because of so many cores it will run very hot and use more battery power.

I have always liked Mediatek chip-sets. But this year, Mediatek is screwed. Unless they launch a mid range or low-end chip-set with Cortex A72 processor.

And, unless any of those companies decides to make and launch a new processor in the middle of the year, no phone is going to beat Xiaomi Mi5 or any phone with Snapdragon 820. Making your phone future proof as in it is not going to get old in terms of performance for at least a year. Till Snapdragon 830 launches or till the new iPhone launches if you care about cross competition.

You are getting that kind of flagship value for just 25,000 Rupees. And if you still think that it is overpriced. You have serious issues my friend.

Now ‘i don’t like phone’s colour, it doesn’t have hybrid sim slot, no memory expansion slot’ blah blah blah, these are all personal preferences. If you don’t wanna buy it because its back is ugly and all those other reasons then that’s your own choice or opinion. Doesn’t mean the phone is overpriced.

You have got to make some sacrifices to get that kind of flagship performance, you know. The processor inside this phone alone is worth more than 20,000 Rupees. You actually should be glad that you are getting this processor so early in the year at such an affordable price.

That’s all i wanted to say. If you don’t agree with what i typed or written or said then you are most welcome to raise a point or any other concern in the comments below.

8 replies on “Why Xiaomi Mi5 Is Not Overpriced”

Well good points made congrats ! But still i think people have justified reasons that as you said that perfomance diffrence of sd650 and sd820 is not much i do not think it would be noticable on fhd so actully why someone would want spend more than double to buy a smaller screen phone with lesser battry and same ram almost same camera no expandable memory which is the main reason for calling it overpriced because why anybody want that gimmick of sd820 rather than gaming and 4k vediography but in around 20 GB you can’t do those things much (you know better) . However could be an another story if they could have launched 4GB ram and 64GB rom as even yutopia and had expendale memory .

On the contrary. It will actually be more noticeable on full HD Resolution. As your phone will get old and new games keep launching it will still be able to play them smoothly because of the resolution. And you are comparing it with wrong phone. It should be compared with flagships which have Snapdragon 820 inside.

And just like i wrote in my post, you are one of those that are underestimating Snapdragon 820. Previous Snapdragon high end chip-sets after 800 were gimmicks and only flagship thing about them was the number. Even though they were powerful but they weren’t any different or innovative or drastically different from each other in terms of architecture(810 was the worst one). 820 is different.

And i know that for some people 20 or 25GB is not enough but again like i said that’s personal preference. Hell, i can live with just 16GB, i am currently using Redmi Note 3 as my personal phone without any memory card installed. Also you have to keep in mind that we are still talking just 25,000 Rupees here, not 50,000 like most flagships. You can’t have everything at this price. It’s just like i wrote ‘Xiaomi ne aadatein bigaad di acchhi cheezein saste mein deke’. And they shouldn’t have given away Snapdragon 650 at just 10,000 Rupees. Look at Vivo V3 Max it has got the same Snapdragon 652(only difference is in the 4G speeds between 652 and 650 if i am not wrong, which doesn’t matter much) and it’s selling for around 23,000 which is actually the correct price for a phone with that chip-set.

Xiaomi actually did a mistake by launching Redmi Note 3 for just 10,000 Rupees. Now people have a phone that have better performance than all of the last year flagship phones that had Snapdragon 810. Like i said they under estimated or under valued Snapdragon 650. So now, obviously people expect Xiaomi to launch a phone with Snapdragon 820, 5.5 inch 2k display, 128GB storage and what not for just 20,000 Rupees. Which is not going to happen.

Although, i agree that Xiaomi could have given micro SD card slot but then there would have been no point in launching two different variants. Probably what’s going to happen now is Xiaomi will probably reduce the price of this one to around 22,000 Rupees and launch 64GB version later on.

Well I am a very geeky about chipsets and i know that Sd 820 is way better than apple A9 in gpu multicore and a bit more in single core geekbench for the first time in android’s history ! It makes me proud for being android user and secondly sd 652 is octacore with two more cortex A72 so its way much better than sd 650 but in android single core perfomance is most important and cortex a72 with 1600 points lags behind kryo with 2300 points because it is under clocked 1.8 ghz (hisilicon and helio have 2.5 ghz)they underclocked it so that it should not beat Sd820 and as of Gpu an Anandtech writer said that adreno 430(450gflops )was enough for 4K but 530(588 gflops)is an overkill similarly adreno 330(166 Gflops) was good enough for fhd but adreno 510(220 gflops) is an overkill if optimized properly . I know gflops are not as mali t880 Mp4(120 gflops) of kirin is way less than adreno 330 and adreno 420(250 gflops) still it out perfomed the 330 in every test and even 420 in some benchmarks .Moreover no new games are available in android which can’t be played other than gta liberty city . I don’t know what happened to gameloft . In around 2011 they were launching around 1 hd game per month( i still like to play shadow gaurdians ,hero of sparta and splinter cell via apks) that was like a golden period for mobile gaming now they now launch only two to four max and they are also not that good like brother in arms 3 and gods of rome etc. We are still stuck to 4 years old ashalt 8 ,nova 3 and gangstar vegas which they use to launch every year and even worse real football series seems to be dead .Anyway could you tell me good hd games which are not that popular but still good ?

Oh well, i didn’t know that. Good for me, i guess. I learned something. But it’s still not much better than 650 though, as in the benchmarks it scores only a hair better. Oh and by the way 820 has another advantage on all these mid range chip-sets, it’s built on 14nm fabrication process. Which means low power consumption and less heat generation. Even though 650 is built on 28nm, it also surprisingly doesn’t get much hot.

And what happened with Gameloft is, piracy. Modern Combat 1,2,3,4, Asphalt 7,8 and many more Gameloft games, they were all pay to play games. You had to pay upfront. But nobody was paying for them, since it’s so easy to pirate games and apps on Android, they were all downloading them for free. So Gameloft turned almost all of its latest games into free to play games. No company can afford to give games away just for free, you know.

Now they only update in game content. Like a car in Asphalt 8 which costs real money to buy. Before, Gameloft gave 1,500 coins as a starting bonus in Asphalt 8 to buy your first car, now they have even removed that. And most free to play or always online games doesn’t even work without a working internet connection because they can’t show you ads then. Some example of this are EA UFC, Modern Combat 5.

And sorry but i don’t play much on my phone. So can’t help you there. I mostly play on my PS4. I only play games like Subway Surfers on my smartphone and that too only when power goes out in my area or house or you can say ‘jab ghar mein light chali jaati hai xD’.

Thanks ! one request now when gta liberty city stories is available on android so please include it in future reviews as many phones can run gta sa well now but gta lcs is a big upgrade in graphics and lags on many high end phones . Would love to watch it on redmi note 3 and it will give an idea of how futureproof it is. And i know that you are expert in installing apk so would like you to install gta in that way as its not free . If you are able to do that then please tell me which way worked !

One more thing when we update a big game than we have to download it again so does that game becomes double . For eg would gangstar vegas will become around 4-5 GB after updating ?

It doesn’t work like that. When you install an update it only downloads and install the updated part. The core or base files stay the same. It only adds a bit more data over that base and sometimes if it’s not needed it also overwrites the same files to save storage(if its just a stability update or something) it all happens automatically in the background while the update is installing. Your file size will only increase if the developer has included something that wasn’t in the core files. Like, when Call Of Duty gets updated with more maps as DLC. The maps weren’t there before so obviously your overall file size for the game will increase.

GTA Liberty City Stories was originally a PSP game and PSP was weaker than PS2, so technically it’s inferior than GTA San Andreas. But just like they updated GTA San Andreas’ assets for more powerful hardware, they also updated GTA Liberty City Stories’ assets too. Anyway i will try to install it on Redmi Note 3 and see how it goes.

LeEco 2s and Max 2 seriously needs a review from you . Specifically max 2 as its cheaper and comes with real sd 820 not the underclocked virsion like in Mi5 !

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