Xiaomi released a graphics poster titled, MI Dual 11 on Weibo last week. It triggered a lot of rumors regarding the company unveiling the highly-awaited Mi5. Sadly, it is yet to materialize.
Later, it was revealed that Xiaomi decided to commemorate Singles Day in China by offering one-day exclusive discounts on various Xiaomi smartphones in the Mi and Redmi series of devices on popular e-commerce sites like Alibaba, T-Mall and many more.
As a result, people are wondering whether Xiaomi Mi5 will be released this year. The Mi4 made its debut around a year and a half earlier but there has been no announcement regarding the release date of Xiaomi Mi5.
Rumors suggest that Xiaomi and Qualcomm were in the middle of a disagreement over payment of royalties for the 4G/3G modem technology.
Further rumors suggested that talks have been initiated with MediaTek in order to supply the new Deca-core Helio X20 processors for the Xiaomi Mi5. This is probably one of the reasons why the release date of Xiaomi Mi5 got delayed.
Meanwhile, Kevin Wang, the head of IHS Market Research firm dismissed all the various speculations in a categorizing manner. He further revealed that the Xiaomi Mi5 will be introduced with a 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 Quad-Core SoC processor.
He cleared all rumors involving a disagreement with Xiaomi and instead, declared that Qualcomm was one of the first companies to invest in the initial days of Xiaomi. As reported by Gizmo China, these two companies still enjoy a good relationship.
Meanwhile, hours before this report was published, the benchmark result for Xiaomi Mi5 surfaced online. It confirmed the presence of the Snapdragon 820 processor. Rumors indicate that Xiaomi Mi5 will be released on 3rd December and it will hit shelves on January 2016 or by 2015-end.
There are various expected features of the Xiaomi Mi5. Reports indicate that it will sport a 5.2inch display with a resolution of 2560×1440, while working on the latest Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS from Google.
It will have a Snapdragon 820 quad-core processor under the hood, along with 4GB RAM and Adreno 420 graphics. It will come with storage variants of 32/64GB. Xiaomi Mi5 will feature a 16.0-megapixel camera with dual-LED flash along with Phase Detection Auto Focus.
On the front, there will be a 5-megapixel wide-angle camera. Meanwhile, keeping up with the current trends, the device has been reported to include a fingerprint sensor and USB Type-C port.
Earlier, it was revealed that Xiaomi Mi5 will release on 11th November but later, it turned out to be false. The present reports indicate that the upcoming Xiaomi Mi5 may not come with a Qualcomm processor due to some royalty disagreement.
However, as mentioned earlier, this rumor was also debunked. Meanwhile, Xiaomi Mi5 has been codenamed Xiaomi Gemini and recently it was spotted in several benchmarks. In these benchmarks, the Mi5 was seen using the Snapdragon chipset but rumors indicate a MediaTek chipset for Xiaomi, in the long run.
According to MyDrivers, a Chinese publication, the Qualcomm fees which are necessary or hosting the premium chip are a bit too high for Xiaomi. Xiaomi is known all over Asia, especially in China and other Eastern countries. This is because it comes at a fraction of the cost of the latest iPhones but features the same specifications.
Rumors indicate that due to this, Xiaomi is currently operating at a loss. The company makes use of a lucrative software business in order to make up for that. Xiaomi faced a pretty shaky last year, due to problems like overheating issues on their Snapdragon 810 processor chip.