There has been stiff competition in the sub-Rs. 10, 000 segment, and majority of smartphones launched lately in this price band have great specifications. This year in particular has been a good one for Indian consumers looking for budget phones, as companies are racing to offer more for less.
Both the Redmi 3S variants sport all-metal bodies and pack large batteries. We got our hands on the Redmi 3S Prime, which offers more RAM, more storage space, and a fingerprint scanner for a small price increase.
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.
t the time of their launch, Xiaomi claimed that the Redmi 3S and Redmi 3S Prime are the first smartphones with the all-new new Snapdragon 430 SoC shipping in India. Both models support expandable storage using a microSD card(up to 128GB).
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.
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.
overall best budget phone (honest review)