Now comes the most interesting part. Somehow, Xiaomi has managed to cram all the components of a 2013 flagship into a 2014 budget phone. The spec list starts with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoC with four Krait 400 CPU cores running at 2.3GHz and an Adreno 330 GPU. The screen is a 5-inch full-HD(1080x1920-pixel) IPS panel and the camera is a 13-megapixel Exmor unit with a dual-LED flash. There’s also 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage space, a 3050mAh battery, NFC, Wi-Fi b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0 and A-GPS with GLONASS.
It’s still a bit hard to digest the fact that all this hardware is contained within a phone that costs just Rs. 14, 000. The Moto G, which has been the most obvious phone to recommend at this price ever since its launch is based on a Snapdragon 400 SoC and has a 720p screen - and that was what we considered a breakthrough in value devices just six short months ago.
There’s only one shortcoming, but it’s a really big one. For some strange reason, the Xiaomi Mi 3 lacks a microSD card slot. With all this power at our fingertips, it’s a crying shame that storage space is limited to 16GB(only around 13GB of which is user-accessible). Xiaomi does sell a 64GB model internationally, but it is not being offered in India at launch time. If the company stays on track and keeps the price premium minimal if or when it does launch, there should be no reason to buy the 16GB version anymore.