He moment you take it out of the box, the Redmi Note 3 looks and feels incredibly premium, especially in gold. The full-metal body gets a smooth matte finish that doesn’t attract fingerprints. It’s easy to keep clean too, as dust and grime come off with a simple wipe.
In the front, we have the 5.5-inch full-HD IPS display with very narrow side bezels. There’s a glossy rim running along the edge of the front facia, which is elevated above the rest of the display to protect it from scratches when the phone is placed face-down. It’s a nice design touch but it’s also a bit of an annoyance on the ear when you’re making calls. The display has a scratch resistant layer, although Xiaomi hasn’t explicitly stated this anywhere.
Specifications
The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 might be a budget smartphone but there’s certainly nothing low-end about the hardware it packs. This is the first phone to roll out with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 650 SoC, which is a pretty big deal given its near-flagship level performance in some benchmarks. It’s a hexa-core SoC, much like the Snapdragon 808 found in the Moto X Style, but instead of the Cortex-A57 cores, we have two of ARM’s more powerful Cortex-A72 cores running at 1.8GHz. The other four cores are Cortex-A53s which chug along at 1.4GHz. This SoC still uses the 28nm fabrication process but the GPU is a newer Adreno 510, which is one notch lower than what’s present in the flagship Snapdragon 820 chip.
Software
The phone ships with an Android Lollipop fork called MIUI 7, which is has been reworked from the ground up. Compared to earlier versions of MIUI, version 7 is certainly more likable and better polished. It’s still a single-layered interface, but it does let users customise the look and feel with transition effects and themes. The Theme Store app has a pretty good selection of free themes, and we particularly liked the Marshmallow one.