The Xiaomi Mi 3 comes in a beautifully minimalist Muji-esque cardboard box with nothing but a small MI logo in one corner. The phone itself is snugly encased in a small cavity in the middle. It looks fantastic, but unfortunately the label on the rear and the text on the protective plastic are in Chinese. There’s nothing in the box other than the phone, a charger head, USB cable, and a small sheaf of papers ( with a SIM eject pin much like Apple’s) - not even a headset. The papers are all in Chinese, and the charger has flat pins too. We hope the packages that end up in retail here are suitably localised.
The phone itself looks good at first, but that impression doesn’t carry through when you pick it up. It’s very plasticky and feels a bit insubstantial even though Xiaomi advertises an Aluminium-Magnesium alloy frame. The material quality is on par with that of similarly priced devices from Indian brands, so we have to remind ourselves not to expect too much.
The Mi 3 has a unique design, with the black front panel set into a unibody plastic shell. Its sides are rounded but the top and bottom are flat, resulting in corners that dug into our palms when we held the phone. The screen is large enough that one finger won’t reach all corners, but shifting it around in one hand is also difficult. The front face is protected by reinforced Corning Gorilla Glass 3.
There’s a bright silver MI logo in one corner above the screen. The three capacitive buttons light up when the screen is active but are invisible otherwise. There is a large speaker grille on the bottom, with the Micro-USB port set off to one side. The 3.5mm headset socket is on the top, along with an oversized SIM card tray and secondary microphone. The power and volume buttons are on the right edge, leaving the left totally blank.
The camera and flash are in the top right corner of the rear, and the rest of it is blank apart from another MI logo towards the bottom, right above a few regulatory logos and more text in Chinese. Overall, the Mi 3 is distinct, and we’d go so far as to call it handsome, but there’s no confusing it for a top-end Sony or HTC smartphone.
Features and specifications
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.
Software
The Mi 3 runs Android 4.4.2, but for better or worse, it’s nearly invisible under Xiaomi’s custom MIUI skin. Right from the lock screen, you know it’s unique. You have to swipe downwards to unlock the phone, which takes some getting used to. You can also swipe in other directions to jump straight to the camera, phone or messaging apps. MIUI lets you define custom text