Le Max Pro vs Xiaomi Mi 5 : Will the Real Flagship Killer Please Stand Up

Xiaomi with its announcement of the Xiaomi Mi 5 at events in Beijing and Barcelona today has come to lay claim on the title of being 2016’s biggest flagship killer. The handset which took Xiaomi two years to develop comes with mouth-watering specs at an affordable price point of RMB 1,999(Approx Rs 21,000).

Xiaomi with the MI 5 will look to eat up into the market share of upcoming flagships such as the LG G5 and Samsung Galaxy S7 when they finally hit Indian markets. But before it can officially take up the mantle of being this year’s best bang for buck flagship killer, it will face tough competition closer to home from the new kid on the block, Le Eco, which only yesterday announced the sale of its Le Max Pro handset for the same price in China.

So time to find out which of these two is the real flagship slayer of 2016. Let the battle begin.

What’s Under the hood?

The Le Max Pro became the world’s first Snapdragon 820 smartphone to go on sale after 1000 units were made available for purchase yesterday to customers in China, and as expected was quite quickly lapped up by the “Superfans” of the “Superphone”.

The Le Max Pro comes to the party equipped with a pretty impressive specs. It sports a 6.33-inch display with QHD resolution which is a massive upgrade over the Xiaomi Mi 5’s 5.15-inch Full HD display, but both the phones find common ground when it comes to the Snapdragon 820 SoC that runs the show for both these devices.The Le Max Pro comes with 4GB of RAM and 64 GB of flash memory while the Mi 5 brings to the table 3GB of RAM and 32GB internal storage.

The Le Max Pro has a slight advantage when it comes to the 3,400mAh battery when compared to the 3000mAh battery pack inside Xiaomi’s offering. Both the phones can be charged through a USB Type-C port and also feature fingerprint scanners come running Android 6.0 Marshmallow with their company’s respective skins out of the box.

Camera

Camera’s on both the phones are pretty impressive. While Le Max has gone the traditional way and overloaded the specsheet with details about high megapixel count of the phone, Xiaomi has gone ahead and like most big names of the industry has looked towards real world performance in place for extra megapixels to brag about.

Le Max comes with an able  a 21MP sensor for the back of the phone which is expected to take good pictures and a 4MP sensor for the front while Xiaomi has sports a 16-megapixel rear sensor that uses Sony IMX298 with important additions such as PDAF, DTI image enhancements and 4-axis OIS. The front features a 4-megapixel UltraPixel camera which is also expected to better than the Le Max Pro.

Design

The Le Max Pro features a bezel-less, full metal unibody design made completely out of aircraft grade aluminum which the company claims is highly durable. It also comes with the world’s first full-floating glass made by Sharp exclusively for LeEco. Because of its size, the phone feels big in the hand and one handed operation is difficult.

Coming to the Mi 5, it draws inspiration from the Mi Note in terms of design. The Mi 5 introduces a home button that houses the fingerprint scanner – a first for Xiaomi. The back features a curved edge with a 3D glass body. Meanwhile, the Pro variant comes with a 3D ceramic back. The front features an almost bezel just 6.95mm thick, seamless design and more curved than the Mi Note. The curved ceramic back seamlessly joins the glass on the front.