Xiaomi Mi 5X review: Popularity contest

Gallery

The Xiaomi Mi 5X comes with the Mi Gallery app that shows the camera row by default, but the second tab includes all images and videos on the phone. You can set up a photo backup with your Mi Cloud account.

There is a new smart image search, but it's currently not available to everyone. It is supposed to search your images by keywords thanks to the new machine learning process.

The Gallery app

The integrated editor offers various effects, filters, and enhancements, plus fun stuff like stickers and doodling.

Editing an image

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.

The music player • Albums • Now Playing • Audio settings • Audio settings

Xiaomi Mi 5X 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.

Video player

MIUI 9 comes with a separate video app. It supports paid streaming content for China only, but you can opt to disable it. Local content is here, of course. There's no subtitle support here, but DLNA is on board.

The paid content for China • The simple video player • Now playing

FM radio

The FM radio requires a headset to be connected, but can play sound either through this or through the loudspeaker. The app can record audio and there's a sleep timer.

FM Radio

Audio output impresses

The Xiaomi Mi 5X demonstrated perfectly clean output when hooked up to an active external amplifier. Its loudness was among the highest we’ve seen too rounding up a rarely great performance in the first half of our test.

Volume remained just as impressive with headphones and the degradation was minimal too, so we were in for another excellent showing here. Stereo quality was the only notably affected reading and even that was above average for the occasion.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Xiaomi Mi 5X	+0.15, -0.04	-90.1	91.3	0.0017	0.0085	-82.3
Xiaomi Mi 5X (headphones attached)	+0.15, -0.04	-90.0	91.1	0.016	0.043	-64.9
Samsung Galaxy J7 (2017)	+0.01, -0.03	-92.8	92.8	0.0032	0.031	-92.3
Samsung Galaxy J7 (2017) (headphones attached)	+0.23, -0.15	-92.1	91.8	0.013	0.223	-77.3
Sony Xperia L1	+0.10, -0.11	-93.6	92.9	0.0090	0.013	-93.8
Sony Xperia L1 (headphones)	+0.79, -0.10	-92.9	91.9	0.010	0.420	-53.1
Nokia 5	+0.02, -0.03	-94.3	92.8	0.0035	0.019	-91.9
Nokia 5 (headphones)	+0.00, -0.09	-92.4	89.9	0.0041	0.016	-68.6
Xiaomi Redmi 4	+0.06, -0.02	-94.3	90.8	0.0024	0.0089	-94.0
Xiaomi Redmi 4 (headphones)	+0.06, -0.04	-93.8	90.6	0.035	0.044	-79.5

Xiaomi Mi 5X frequency response

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