Xiaomi Note 3, a gold handset with 16GB of internal storage and 2GB of RAM. To buy this phone from GearBest today you’ll pay £121.11, although it’s also worth considering the Note 3 variant with 32GB of internal storage and 3GB of RAM, given that there’s no support for microSD and performance should be better. The 32GB Note 3 costs £141.07 from GearBest.(Bear in mind that although shipping to the UK is free, you are liable to paying import duty from China, so you may prefer to pay a little more to buy from the EU warehouse - see our grey-market tech buying advice.)
One of the things to watch out for when buying a phone from China is that it is supported by your network. In the UK, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 operates on only the UK 4G LTE bands 3 and 7, which means band 20(or the 800MHz) frequency used by O2 and piggyback networks such as giffgaff is not supported. Should your network be supported, however, the Note 3 offers 4G connectivity on both of its dual-SIM slots(this is a dual-standby phone that accepts two Micro-SIM cards). Also see: Best dual-SIM phones and dual-SIM phone buying advice.
Other connectivity options are excellent, too, covering the latest 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, an IR blaster, GPS and GLONASS, although there’s no NFC.
Despite being a budget smartphone, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 has some capable hardware inside, with the 2GHz MediaTek Helio X10 chip, a PowerVR Rogue 6200 GPU and a huge 4000mAh battery. Even the 2GB of RAM model was capable of raw processing performance faster than that of every phone we’ve tested bar the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and S6 Edge, although it fell down somewhat in our graphics tests. Also see: Best budget smartphones 2015/2016.
As Xiaomi’s first all-metal Redmi Note, the 3 is a gorgeous in its gold incarnation(also available in silver and dark grey) with a sandblasted smooth outer shell and 5.5in full-HD display. A fingerprint scanner is fitted to the rear, alongside a 13Mp camera with two-tone flash. Around the front you get a 5Mp selfie camera. Also see: Best MiFi 2016.
The MIUI 7 Android 5 Lollipop-based OS is well regarded in China, if not ideally suited to UK users out of the box. As we’ve said it’s quite possible to change this setup, but it’s perhaps not something novice Android users would be comfortable in doing. But that’s all that would stop us thoroughly recommending the Redmi Note 3 as one of the best budget Android phones money can buy. Let’s find out why.