OnePlus 3 Vs Xiaomi Mi 5: Which One You Should Buy?

There are plenty of phones in India to choose from under Rs 30,000. But not all of them give you a near flagship smartphone experience.

Recently in India OnePlus launched their 2016 flagship killer smartphone the OnePlus 3. But it finds itself a worthy competitor in the form of Xiaomi's Mi5. Both the phones are by Chinese smartphone makers and both the brands have their own fan following. But which one is a better option among the two? We try to break it down for you in this bout.

Price

The OnePlus 3 is now available without an invite and at a price tag of Rs 27,990. Whereas the Xiaomi Mi 5 is priced at Rs 24,999. Yes, the Xiaomi is a good Rs 3,000 cheaper than the OnePlus 3 but you only get a non-expandable 32GB on-board storage (in India) on the Mi 5 as compared to the 64 GB of on-board storage on the OnePlus 3. So, in a way you get double the storage on a phone if you dig your pockets a little deep. So, OnePlus 3 scores a point over Xiaomi on this one.

OnePlus 3 Vs Xiaomi Mi5: 1/0

Design

The Xiaomi Mi 5 has a much more compact design than the OnePlus 3. It's good for a single hand usage as well. The Mi 5 also weighs less at 129 grams as opposed to the OnePlus 3 which weigs 158 grams. The difference is not much but design is purely subjective. The Xiaomi Mi 5 in a way derives its design lines from the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and the OnePlus 3 is more skewed towards the HTC One series.

The OnePlus 3 is a metal unibody smartphone and the Mi 5 has a nice metal and glass finish to its body. In terms of the design we like the Xiaomi Mi 5 more than the OnePlus 3 but then looks are subjective to users.

OnePlus 3 Vs Xiaomi Mi5: 1/1

Display

The Xiaomi Mi 5 comes with a 5.15-inch touchscreen display with a resolution of 1080 pixels by 1920 pixels at a PPI of 428 pixels per inch. OnePlus decided to go with the same 5.5 inch display on the OnePlus 3 which is carried forward from the OnePlus 2. It sports a 1080x1920-pixel screen that has a pixel density of 401ppi and is not as bright as an IPS LCD display.

While both the display's are acceptable in their own terms, the Xiaomi's Sunlight display and more vivid colors make it score a point more than OnePlus 3.

OnePlus 3 Vs Xiaomi Mi5: 1/2

Performance and Software

The Xiaomi Mi5 comes loaded with a Snapdragon 820 Quad-core Kryo 1.8GHz chipset that's backed by 3GB LPDDR4 dual-channel RAM. It's a powerful device but the CPU speed is clocked lower than what you'll find on the Samsung Galaxy S7 (US Version) so, don't actually expect it to perform like a flagship smartphone. The MiUI experience also hinders in the performance of the Mi5.

The OnePlus 3 on the other hand comes with a power-packed Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoC that’s clocked at 2.2 GHz for two cores and 1.6 GHz for the other two cores. All this is backed by 6 GB of LPDDR4 RAM. The colossal 6GB RAM and higher clock speed of the OnePlus 3 along with a less heavy Oxygen OS bloatware on top on Android Marshmallow OS makes the performance on the OnePlus 3 way better than what you get on the Mi5. Both the phones are 4G LTE compatible and give you all the necessary connectivity options.

Gaming performance on the OnePlus 3 is also way better than what you get on the Mi 5 and both the phones use Adreno 530 GPU on them. So, the OnePlus 3 scores over the Mi 5 in this aspect.

OnePlus 3 Vs Xiaomi Mi5: 2/2

Camera and Multimedia

The OnePlus 3 has improved on the camera as compared to OnePlus 2. The Xiaomi Mi 5 also packs in a powerful camera. Both the phones come with optical image stabalisation (OIS) and it works well on both of them while taking videos.

The OnePlus 3 comes loaded with a 16-megapixel Sony IMX 298 sensor primary camera delivers a good picture quality and features phase detection autofocus and RAW image format support. You can also shoot 4K videos and slow motion at 120 fps. The front 8-megapixel sensor with 1.4-micron pixels does the job with ease and it can also shoot videos at 1080p @ 30fps.

The Xiaomi Mi 5 on the contrary comes with a 16-megapixel rear camera with 4-axis OIS that calibrates in 8 directions and a 6-piece lens with f/2.0 aperture. The font camera module is a 4-megapixel one with a large 2-micron pixels, f/2.0, 80-degree wide angle lens.

The image quality on the OnePlus 3 is way better than what you get on the Mi5 and if you like to shoot 4K video the OnePlus 3 has more storage on-board for users to make longer videos. OnePlus 3 uses Google's camera app which is cleaner and easier to use, whereas the Mi 5 has it's own camera app and the experience is just a little complicated.

The image quality on both the phones is not as good as the Samsung Galaxy S7 but the OnePlus 3 scores over the Mi 5 when it comes to the camera department.

OnePlus 3 Vs Xiaomi Mi5: 3/2

Battery

Both the OnePlus 3 and Xiaomi Mi 5 are power hungry smartphones and both come with USB Type-C for charging. Both the phones also pack in 3000 mAh non-removable battery and both support quick charging. For us both the phones easily lasted a day. So both the phones score equally good in this area.

OnePlus 3 Vs Xiaomi Mi5: 4/3

So Which One You Should Buy?

Under Rs 30,000 both the phones have their own merits and demerits. The OnePlus 3 clearly scores way ahead of the Xiaomi Mi 5 and also way more than many flagship smartphones in the market.

And this big bout between the two major Chinese phone company goes to the OnePlus 3.