Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus review: Black & white

The gallery

The Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus and its MIUI 8 comes with a redesigned Gallery app, now showing more photos on the screen than ever. It defaults to your camera roll, but it also supports different albums.

Xiaomi's new app now automatically stacks your photos in Camera, Video, People, Screenshots, and Panoramas albums. The People sorting, once chosen, sorts all of your photos by people's faces.

The MIUI 8 gallery seems to have borrowed some of the iOS Photos looks, but nevertheless it's better than before and we appreciate the new looks and features.

Gallery

The new integrated editor powered by Camera 360 offers various filters, crop options, enhancements (sharpen, contrast, brightness, saturation, vignette), and doodles. Oddly, this image editing app is less capable than the one supplied with the MIUI v7.

Editing an image

Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus may or may not come with a standalone video app depending on your ROM. Either way, you'll get a rather basic app or section in the Gallery, where you can browse and play all of your videos. The video interface is very basic; subtitles and pop-up play are not supported.

If you live in China, you will definitely get a proper Video app and it comes with paid streaming services on top of its basic functionality for offline browsing.

Browsing and playing videos

There is also a new video editor with MIUI 8. It supports trimming, filters, and adding text, and audio tracks.

Video editing within the gallery

Music player

The MIUI music player is a custom app with a well laid out, easy to navigate interface. The player has cool effects, transitions, and transparent elements, especially on the expandable Now Playing section. Lyrics are supported, too.

In some markets a streaming service similar to Google Play and Apple Music comes as part of the Music app, too.

Music Player • Albums • Songs • Now Playing screen • Options

Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus offers customizable equalizers within the phone's Settings menu - there are a few default presets already available for use. You can also try Xiaomi's MiSound enhancer, which comes into play when you use headphones, and especially, a Xiaomi-branded headset.

Audio enhancements and equalizers

Audio output has its ups and downs

The Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus delivered perfect clarity with an active external amplifier. The phablet has no weak points to its performance and its volume is among the highest around.

Headphones do cause a lot of trouble though. Volume drops to just above average, while distortion creeps in and frequency response gets slightly shaky. Stereo quality worsens significantly too, so it’s hardly a great performance here - adequate is a more accurate description.

And now here go the results so you can do your comparison.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus	+0.06, -0.02	-83.9	83.0	0.0033	0.047	-84.9
Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus (headphones attached)	+0.95, -0.10	-82.0	83.3	0.245	0.564	-48.0
ZTE Axon 7	+0.06, -0.10	-92.4	92.3	0.0015	0.0093	-80.9
ZTE Axon 7 (headphones attached)	+0.03, -0.11	-92.3	92.3	0.0011	0.012	-77.0
Apple iPhone 7 Plus	+0.10, -0.04	-93.1	93.1	0.0015	0.0098	-80.5
Apple iPhone 7 Plus (headphones attached)	+0.10, -0.03	-93.1	93.0	0.0013	0.015	-76.8
LG V20	+0.01, -0.03	-93.0	93.1	0.0036	0.0075	-93.7
LG V20 (headphones attached)	+0.04, -0.09	-92.4	92.4	0.051	0.105	-57.5
Huawei Mate 8	+0.01, -0.03	-97.8	99.1	0.0054	0.0087	-97.3
Huawei Mate 8 (headphones attached)	+0.02, -0.09	-97.3	97.9	0.015	0.078	-81.3

Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.