Xiaomi’s Redmi series has been wildly popular over the past few years and for good reason. The low prices and good features have really set these models apart, and even other Chinese players have found them hard to compete with. 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.There’s a 5-megapixel camera on the top along with a notification LED for alerts.In addition to the headphones socket on the top, we also have an infrared(IR) emitter. The phone uses a standard Micro-USB connector for charging and data transfers.Around the back, we have a 16-megapixel camera, a dual-tone dual-LED flash, the fingerprint sensor, and a speaker grille at the bottom. The Redmi Note 3 ships with a 10W charger, data cable, SIM ejector tool, and instruction leaflets.The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 has 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.The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 will come in two variants. What we have today is the one with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage and with 2GB of RAM with 16GB storage.Xiaomi Redmi Note 3’s hardware and software come together nicely to deliver a very pleasing Android experience. The interface is fluid with barely any noticeable stutter when multitasking. Call quality is good and the phone had no trouble latching on to multiple carriers’ LTE networks