The Coolpad Note 3 Lite, as the name suggests, is a toned down version of the Coolpad Note 3(Review| Pictures) that launched back in October last year. It was one of the first phones in the sub-Rs. 10, 000 price segment to sport a fingerprint sensor, and today, the company is bringing this feature available at an even lower price segment.
Look and feel
The Coolpad Note 3 Lite has all the hallmarks of a budget phone but a few good design choices help it stand out. The gold trim running along the edges of the body, camera lens, and fingerprint sensor jazzes up the phone a bit. The quality of the plastics and the overall fit and finish of the parts is quite good, and the phone feels sturdy and durable on the whole.
In the front, we have a 5-inch HD IPS display with scratch protection. The screen has a noticeable thick black border running around it, which detracts from the otherwise sleek edge-to-edge appearance of the display. The capacitive buttons for navigation are responsive, but sadly lack backlighting. There’s a 5-megapixel front camera on the top along with a notification LED.
The power and volume buttons are placed ergonomically on either side of the phone and are within reach for single-handed use. The rear cover has a grippy chequered design and is removable. Here, we also have the 13-megapixel camera, LED flash, and fingerprint sensor. The speaker is placed towards the bottom, just below the company’s logo. If you’re not a fan of white plastic, the phone will also be available in black.
Specifications and software
With budget pricing comes budget specifications, but even here, Coolpad has tried to raise the bar. The SoC of choice is a run-of-the-mill quad-core MediaTek MT6735, but the Note 3 Lite is one of the most affordable phones to come with 3GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. You can expand the latter by up to 32GB using a microSD card. There’s also Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, USB OTG, FM radio, GPS, and a non-removable 2500mAh battery. The phone has two Micro-SIM slots with 4G support on band 40 through both.
The phone runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop with Coolpad’s custom CoolUI 6.0 skin. We wrote about the interface in great detail in the Coolpad Note 3 review so we’ll just skim over the essentials here. You get a single-layered UI by default but you can switch to two-layer setup with a dedicated app drawer if needed. Even though the option is labeled "traditional style", it’s not the stock Lollipop launcher and just complicates things.