Look and feel
When we first saw the Xiaomi Redmi 3S Prime, it looked like a mini Redmi Note 3 from nearly every angle. Xiaomi phones have started to look quite similar in design. For the company, this might be a way to establish a linear look throughout its product portfolio but sadly this is what Samsung did few years ago with its Galaxy smartphones, and we weren’t fans of that move for long.
In this case, the front of the Redmi 3S Prime is almost identical to that of the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, except for the placement of the sensors above the display. We get capacitive Home, Back, and Recents buttons right below the display, and the sensors and front camera sitting on either side of the earpiece just above it. To some extent, this phone also looks inspired by the Mi Max which features a massive 6.44-inch display. However at 8.5mm thick, the Redmi 3S Prime isn’t as sleek as the more premium Mi Max ( Review) which is just 7.5mm thick.
Specifications and software
Under the hood, the Redmi 3S and Redmi 3S Prime both pack the octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 ( MMB29) processor, with four cores clocked at 1.1GHz and four cores at 1.4GHz, plus an integrated Adreno 505 GPU. Apart from the fingerprint sensor, the only differences between the Xiaomi Redmi 3S and Redmi 3S Prime are the amounts of RAM and storage. The Redmi 3S features 2GB of RAM with 16GB of inbuilt storage, while the Redmi 3S Prime has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.
The 5-inch IPS display has a resolution of 720x1280 pixels. Our Redmi 3S Prime review unit’s screen was vibrant with sunlight visibility not suffering at all. Xiaomi’s Sunlight Display hardware feature, which the Redmi Note 3 sports but is absent in this smartphone, could have further improved legibility under direct sunlight. The brightness levels on the Redmi 3S Prime were good and colours never looked oversaturated. The viewing angles on the Redmi 3S Prime were also decent and the display for the most parts was fairly sharp and reproduced accurate colours.
Performance
The Xiaomi Redmi 3S Prime sets a standard for other smartphones in the same price band. We didn’t face any lags while multitasking on this device, and there were no noticeable frame rate drops while playing games like Dead Trigger 2.
Battery Life
The non-removable 4100mAh battery on the Xiaomi Redmi 3S Prime managed to run for 14 hours and 50 minutes in our continuous video loop test, which is excellent. The Redmi 3S Prime trumps the bigger Redmi Note 3, which managed around 12 hours in our loop test, in part because of this phone’s lower-resolution display. Even with heavy usage, the Redmi 3S Prime easily managed to last through an entire day, with a minimum of 20 percent juice still left in the battery.