The budget smartphone game has always been a nasty one, with so many brands competing on the top spot, and Mi has been one tough player, delivering premium specs for a price that doesn’t get heavy on your wallet, and now they’ve got a new smartphone in town- the Redmi Note 3
Design and Display
The Redmi Note 3 boasts a 5.5-inch Full-HD display fused in a unibody aluminium chassis. The device is fairly easy to grip on even with the all-aluminium shell, and also gives a premium feel to the smartphone. All the buttons are to the right of the device.
To the left is the hybrid SIM card tray, which also allows a microSD card if the second SIM card slot isn’t in use. On the top is a 3.5mm headphone jack, an IR blaster and a secondary mic for noise cancellation.
At the bottom is the primary mic with a micro USB charging port. At the rear is the 16MP sensor with dual LED flash and a fingerprint scanner. You also have a loud speaker grille at the very bottom.
The display is one of the strong points of the device. It’s sharp, and accurate with colors. The IPS panel offers decent viewing angles. Moreover, this screen also gets the Sunlight Display feature as the Mi 5, which adjusts the contrast of the screen for better visibility under direct sunlight, and it performs brilliantly.
Performance
Under the hood we’ve got the Hexa-core Snapdragon 650 processor, making it one of the first devices in the world with this processor. The variant we had for testing was the 2GB/16GB.
The device also comes with the new Adreno 510 GPU The device was snappy, and was handling the heavy MIUI with ease. The phone came across slight heating issues, but it did cool down pretty quickly.
The device could handle games like Asphalt 8 and Dead Trigger with ease. On Antutu it gave a decent score of 73432. On 3DMark Ice Storm Extreme it delivered a good 17422, On PCMark work benchmarks it scored 5165 and on Basemark OSII it gave an overall score of 1452, making it one good performer.
Camera
The Redmi Note 3 features a 16MP sensor for the primary camera and a 5MP selfie camera. The rear camera delivers accurate colors and contrasts.
The camera app is snappy and simple to use. It has a handy HDR toggle button right near the shutter button which made the overall photography experience pure bliss.
Redmi can also shoot Full HD videos at 30fps, which delivers decent results but the lack of OIS does leave a sour taste.
The selfie camera isn’t the best, but really great when compared to its current competition.It offers good low light performance, and the camera is wide enough to take some decent groupies.
Software and Practical Usage
The device is running on Android 5.1 Lollipop with MIUI 7 skin on top. The MIUI isn’t one of my favourite skins on android, and the missing app drawer just makes it worse.
However, on closer inspection, you’ll notice that the OS is fast and responsive and the hardware complements the software very well.
The device doesn’t come with a ton of bloat ware which is really cool. Moreover users have an option to customise the entire UI with the help of themes on the Mi’s app store, which is a cool add on.
However, if you still miss the app drawer, you can always install launchers from the Google Play Store.
The fingerprint scanner at the back is surprisingly accurate and it detected my finger correctly 9 out of 10 times. The smartphone also comes with backlit illuminated touch capacitive buttons which just complete the entire package.
Battery life
The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 comes with a massive 4, 050mAh battery. The device also supports Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0. On a normal usage including gaming, browsing the web and streaming YouTube videos, the phone still had 45 percent of battery left.
On the PCMark work benchmark, it scored a decent 10 hour 41 minutes. Overall the device comes with a really impressive battery life and the addition of quick charging just makes it better.