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The era of saying, “that’s a Chinese phone” in a negative manner may have finally ended, and that will be purely thanks to the fact that a lot of Chinese manufacturers are ready to put that norm to rest.
When it comes to communication and social networking, smartphones have been ruling the personal space in almost everyone’s life today. With the launch of the touchscreen interfaced iPhone, Apple has changed the way we use a mobile phone. However, with Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone OS, other rival operating systems are not too far away from possibly taking over Apple’s premium OS, the iOS. Apple has been leading the race with one of the most advanced hardware and best operating system on their premium handsets. However, Android phones are not too far behind.
DESIGN & DISPLAY
Xiaomi’s flagship phone is an extremely slim and light device, measuring 5-inches with a thickness of a mere 8.1mm and weighing in at only 145g. Its slim build is the only outstanding feature about its looks though — other than that, the rectangular phone is a bit clunky and doesn’t sit well in my hands.
As for the screen, the Mi 3′s 1080p IPS display produces a fantastic resolution — so visuals and text are extremely clear, while the colors are brilliant and consistent from any angle. What’s more, the screen is very sensitive to touch, which makes it much easier to play games that require you to tap on the display (think Flappy Bird-style). Indeed, one of the nifty features touted by Xiaomi is that even when you are wearing gloves during the harshest of winters and struggling to use your phone, the Mi 3 screen still responds to your touch, just like the Nokia Lumia 1020.
The software design is where Xiaomi’s devices really shine though. This is the first time that Xiaomi is launching its highly-customizable MIUI firmware, which is based on Android, officially in English. The Mi-3 runs on Android 4.3 optimized with MIUI version 5. Xiaomi Global VP Hugo Barra previously noted that it was a big challenge as the team had to change a lot of things around the UI to accommodate English characters. The result of all that hard work, however, is impressive. The UI is simple and easy to navigate, while you can easily customize the look of your phone via different themes.
And here we come to what I love best about Xiaomi’s devices — its themes, which are basically different outfits for the phone. In conjunction with its move into Singapore, Xiaomi released two new themes to commemorate the city, and there are many great-looking ones in the theme store available to download for free. They show up particularly well on the Mi 3 due to the high-resolution screen, and it’s a joy to be able to change the entire look and feel of your phone so easily when you get tired of its appearance.
BUILD QUALITY AND HARDWARE
Let’s say this, finding a phone this well made, for this price, is practically impossible. The Xiaomi Mi3 is encased in a solid brushed aluminium shell and laden with Gorilla Glass 3 in the front. Possibly one of the only phones with a reinforced micro USB port, the Xiaomi Mi3 has held no bars in design and build quality.
Hardware wise, the Xiaomi Mi3 is pretty top notch, unlike its latest version; the Mi4, the Mi3 carries a Snapdragon 800 chipset with quad cores clocked at 2.3 GHz, a full HD 1920 x 1080p IPS LCD display made by Sharp or LG, 2 GB of RAM, 16GB of storage and a whopping 3050 mAh battery. Apart from that you get the Adreno 330 GPU and Bluetooth 4.0 LE along with Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac.
Just putting the parts together will cost you more than a phone. However someone at Xiaomi has the right contacts with suppliers.
ANDROID AND MIUI
The Xiaomi Mi3 in India comes preloaded with Android 4.4.2 out the box, which is skinned with MiUi, a very iOS like skin which does not contain an application drawer. The UI is fast and snappy and offers a lot of customisations including themes which can be downloaded from the Mi Store. The Mi3 will give full access to the Play Store and allow for launcher downloads as well as launcher replacement if so be the case.
The UI is snappy and not laggy at all, the phone has good multitasking capabilities and will blaze through the live applications, despite few software glitches, that may often cause slowdowns and crashes.
PERFORMANCE AND GAMING
The phone is a beast for the price range. It does not break any records as per say, but is truly top notch in its price bracket, in fact pretty much compares to phones in double the price bracket. The phone runs through mostly all our tests and scores good results in our benchmark tests.
As far as gaming is concerned, the Mi3 can handle anything that is thrown at it, basically, any game that exists on Android will run on the Mi3, which is mostly thanks to the heart of the handset being a Snapdragon 800 – one of the most stable chipsets when it comes to apps and software.
We gamed on the Mi3 extensively and found it to be seamless and smooth, although the 16 GB runs out, and it runs out fast. You would be better waiting for the 64 GB variant if gaming is your bit because space is tight.
The Xiaomi Mi3 is excellent in day to day use and offers excellent performance, whether its running apps or multitasking, you will not be disappointed.
MULTIMEDIA AND CAMERA
The Xiaomi Mi3 has a beautiful display with excellent viewing angles and a full HD resolution. Xiaomi has gone as far as calling it a “retina” display, because the panels are made either by LG or Sharp, both of which supply to Apple for the iPhone.
The display is big and bright, and you will enjoy consuming media on this phone, the audio is excellent out of the 3.5mm jack, and you will be happy with the overall experience. The onboard speaker is not overly loud, but can be adequate, of course, which could be different for different folks, we would have liked a better speaker though.
The camera is the best in class, with a 5 element lens and f2.2 aperture, the 13 MP shots are right on the money. The colours are accurate, and images are perfectly sharp. Low-light performance is excellent, and video is good. The front camera is good for 2
MP shots which will more than suffice for the selfie nerd in you.
PHONE AND BATTERY LIFE
Phone networks are strong, and network performance is good where we tested (Delhi/NCR and Mumbai), the phone supports 3G networks mostly globally and without issues in India. There is no 4G/LTE and expecting it would be inappropriate.
Battery Performance
Our standard battery test for mobile phones includes the following parameters:• Looping a 800 x 480-pixel video with screen brightness and volume at 100 per cent
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
• Constant data streaming through email and Twitter
Even though the Mi3 has the largest battery capacity among the phones compared, it did not last the longest in our video looping battery test. It only managed five hours and 44 minutes in our battery test, which is about average from the list of other phones compared. For your information, the power setting of the phone was set to Balanced mode.
The crux of the issue seemed to be the phone's high power draw, in some cases nearly twice as much as its competitors. It's strange to see the Mi3 drawing so much more power despite sporting the same 5-inch Full-HD display and the same family of Snapdragon 800 processors. Could the device be more optimized for performance and thus the higher benchmark results seen earlier? It's a possibility, but a the moment, the phone's battery life is just average.
Portability
We measure the portability of a device by calculating its battery life to (weight x volume) ratio. Due to its average battery life, the Mi3 ranked second last in the Portability Index even though it is one of the slimmest and lightest phones.
Real World Battery Performance
But benchmarking gives only one view to the above assessment. To give you a more realistic understanding on how the Mi3 fared under real world usage conditions, we included screenshots of the usage and history graphs based on our usage.
The device logged onto the 3G network because the Mi3 does not support 4G LTE connectivity and the SIM card used is a 3G SIM card. The device logged onto Wi-Fi connections from time to time. Our typical usage scenarios include making some voice calls, texting via WhatsApp, capturing some photos and sharing them on social networking sites, the occasional web browsing via Pulse News Reader and emailing.
Do note that battery mileage varies depending on your usage patterns. For us, the Mi3 had no problems lasting through a day at work with enough battery juice to last till we plugged in the charger at night.
Battery life is impressive thanks to a well balanced chipset, which helped us get through almost two days without a recharge on the 3050 mAh battery pack.
- Talk Time 6-7 hours
- Music 19 hours
- Internet 10+ Hours
Just a few months ago, Motorola broke the bank in India by launching the Moto G in this price bracket using a similar sale strategy (the Flipkart way). Now Xiaomi seems to have this in their pocket for the Xiaomi Mi3 and possibly for the Mi4 in the near future. There are several complaints, already of handsets with faulty Sim card trays, heating issues and handsets that refuse to boot or get charged.
Around 35-service centres will offer, support and Flipkart has a brilliant reverse pickup for faulty and dead on arrival products. So device and support “should not be” a problem. However, there is no clarity on who is behind the sales, an Indian partner or the company itself? How dedicated are they and how serious do the consider one of the larger mobile markets?
With confirmed news of the new Mi4 coming soon, and OnePlus showing interest in India, the Mi3 may be a miss for some. However for those who need a phone now, it doesn’t get any better than this. If you were considering a last generation Nexus 5, this overthrows that with half the price. Get the drift? Now get the phone!
