Xiaomi launched the Xiaomi Mi 5 flagship yesterday, and since that time, we have come across lots of coverage about the device. In fact, a few hours ago, we revealed the real world benchmark results of the Mi 5 and they were quite good. And now, the Xiaomi Mi 5 is getting the teardown treatment. Yes, less than 24 hours after the phone was launched, someone decided that a Xiaomi Mi 5 teardown was necessary.
This is the ceramic version (top end) of the flagship, and not the 3D glass back version. So, let’s take a look what the company has used inside its newest flagship smartphone.
We have added comments wherever possible to ensure that you understand what’s going on in the pictures given below.
Xiaomi Mi 5 Teardown
First of all, this teardown confirms that there is no MicroSD card slot on the device. As for connectivity, the phone supports dual SIM 4G+ (LTE A) SIM cards.
Starting with the teardown, the Mi 5 doesn’t come with a removable back. So, you will have to use a suction cup to remove the back cover from the overall body.
Once you remove the 3D ceramic back cover, you will find a number of screws. These screws are covered with stickers, which means you will lose official warranty once they are removed.
The inside of the Mi 5 uses a three-stage layout. The portion above the battery and below it can be taken off, once the supporting screws are removed. And yes, there’s NFC (as labelled in the image).
Like mentioned in the specs, the phone comes with a compact 3000mAh lithium ion polymer battery inside. You could replace it without much hassle, but that will void your warranty.
The top PCB board is supported by a metal frame wherever needed. The chipset is coated with thermal grease / gel. But there doesn’t seem to be any other equipment for cooling the CPU. So, looks like Qualcomm did a good job with Snapdragon 820 in terms of heat efficiency.
So, these are the camera units. On the left is the 16MP Sony IMX298 sensor with 4-Axis Image Stabilization which is the rear camera. On the right is the 4MP Ultrapixel sensor used on the front.
This is the USB Type-C data interface from the Mi 5.
Next up is the physical home button, integrated with a fingerprint sensor. Unfortunately, the picture doesn’t reveal the maker of the fingerprint sensor on the device. So, its confirmed that the FPC 1245 fingerprint sensor is inside.
This picture shows us the closeup of the Synaptics IC. It says that this is the fingerprint sensor, but I believe that the chip is actually the touch controller.
The mighty Snapdragon 820 chipset above along with the 4GB RAM module.
The 128GB flash memory on board the Mi 5, which is using the latest UFS 2.0 standard, faster as well as more efficient than eMMC 5.0.
So, this was the Xiaomi Mi 5 teardown. To be honest, I didn’t expect to see someone teardown this beast so fast.
Like you can see in the pictures above, the Mi 5 teardown reveals how well the company has placed all the components inside its thin 7.25mm body.
