Though this phone is one of the most preferred handset of all time, but I have owned one for about an year now and realise now that it wasn’t a wise decision to go for this device.
First of all the built of this phone. Damn it looks the business, but unfortunately has a very slippery feel to it and you can easily drop this phone unknowingly causing severe damage.
The back is a finger print attractive aluminium and gets dirty when used in sweaty hands.
The performance sector is well maintained.
The specs that this phone may look promising but that’s just on paper. In reality the phone lags quite a lot and tends to heat up drastically under heavy usage.
Coming to the fingerprint scanner/sensor. The initial response from the fingerprint sensor was nice and snappy, but with days passing this phone sometimes fails to reads the fingerprint leaving you with no option other than manually putting the password which prove to be risky at times.
The UI of Redmi note 3 i.e., MIUI has a very rich experience but still misses out on some of the likeable features like double tap to wake or sleep. The themes are customisable to a very large extent but eventually prove to be laggy and tend to slow the overall performance of the device.
Coming to the screen. The screen doesn’t come with and protector on top to protect it. No Corning Gorilla or Dragontrail. If you tend to accidently drop the phone from a height of almost half a foot then may God be with your phone. Due to lack of protection, the screen tends to gain small scratches easily hence ruining the display quality. It’s better to get a tough screen protector on.
The same thing is with the body also. The upper and bottom portion at the back are made from plastic and lose their colour with time making it look very ugly. And the aluminium has a tendency to gain dents as well. Minor drops can give the phone major dents.
Moving to the camera front, this is one place where the phone doesn’t disappoint much. The camera performance on the phone is above average and is quite decent for the price at which it comes. You can take quite good photos with this handset both from the 16MP rear and 5MP front camera.
The audio output via the speakers at initial stages of usage was loud and clear. After now after almost 10 months the audio doesnt sound as loud and clear. But the audio output via the headphone jack has always been great. Even after heavy music playback the phone doesnt produces bad sound.
The worst complaint that every MI user have is customer service. The customer service is not readily available everywhere and take quite a lot of time for getting the things fixed. Moreover the genuine parts of MI in india are quite expensive and the issue of unavailability remains unchanged here as well.
Overall, the Redmi note 3 makes a good deal on paper only. The reality lives far away from perfection. Only if the performance issues were taken into serious consideration the phone could do even better.