MI3 - Best ever phone for day to day use. Review on Xiaomi Mi 3

I purchased Xiaomi mi3 from Flipkart and the phone was timely delivered on 9th August, 2014. The packaging of the phone from flipkart was standard and beautiful with safety and damage proof. Thanks to flipkart for bringing such product in the country and sending in a good packaging with reasonable price point. Now, it can be said that Xiaomi is widely known and accepted brand in the country for its state of the art manufacturing quality and MIUI version of android customization. The maiden Xiaomi’s smartphone just at a price point of Rs. 14, 000/- with such higher specifications matches those of its competitors' products which cost twice as much.

The Mi 3 looks great on paper as well as in original too.

Look and feel

The Xiaomi Mi 3 comes in a beautifully minimalist recycle paper cardboard box with nothing but a small MI logo in one corner. The phone itself is stunningly encased in a small cavity in the middle. It looks fantastic. The box contained apart from the phone a suitable charger, micro USB cable, sim ejector tool and surprisingly headphones are not there. Though one should check what is in the box before going for buying the phone.  First look to the phone is in one word is awesome and stunning not allowing you to de-eyes from the phone before you have a feel from all the corners. The look and feel of the phone gives an impression of a premium level high priced phone in the hand. The material quality is on par with that of similarly priced devices from Indian brands, so we have to remind ourselves not to expect too much.

The Mi 3 has a unique design, with the black front panel set into a unibody plastic shell. Its sides are rounded but the top and bottom are flat, resulting in corners that dug into our palms when we held the phone. The screen is large enough that one finger won't reach all corners, but shifting it around in one hand is also difficult. The front face is protected by reinforced Corning Gorilla Glass 3.

There's a bright silver MI logo in one corner above the screen. The three capacitive buttons light up when the screen is active but are invisible otherwise. There is a large speaker grille on the bottom, with the Micro-USB port set off to one side. The 3.5mm headset socket is on the top, along with an oversized SIM card tray and secondary microphone. The power and volume buttons are on the right edge, leaving the left totally blank.

The camera and flash are in the top right corner of the rear, and the rest of it is blank apart from another MI logo towards the bottom, right above a few regulatory logos. Overall, the Mi 3 is distinct, and we'd go so far as to call it handsome, but there's no confusing it for a top-end Sony or HTC smartphone.

Features and specifications

For any of the phone, technical and general specifications are the most interesting part. Somehow, Xiaomi has managed to cram all the components of a 2013 flagship into a 2014 budget phone. The specs list of the phone may be summarized as under:

• Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoC with four Krait 400 CPU cores running at 2.3GHz and an Adreno 330 GPU.

  
  




• The screen is a 5-inch full-HD(1080x1920-pixel) IPS panel

  
  




• The camera is a 13-megapixel with a dual-LED flash.

  
  




• Front camera is a 5-megapixel for selfies and video calling

  
  




• There's also 2GB of RAM,

  
  




• 16GB of internal storage space, mind it that it is not expandable

  
  




• a 3050mAh non removable battery,

  
  




• NFC,

  
  




• Wi-Fi b/g/n/ac,

  
  




• Bluetooth 4.0 and

  
  




• A-GPS with GLONASS.

  
  

It's still a bit hard to digest the fact that all this hardware is contained within a phone that costs just Rs. 14, 000. There's only one shortcoming, but it's a really big one. For some strange reason, the Xiaomi Mi 3 lacks a microSD card slot. With all this power at our fingertips, it's a crying shame that storage space is limited to 16GB(only around 13GB of which is user-accessible).

The MIUI

Xiaomi’s phones operates on MIUI interface customized android. Presently it is Android 4.4.2, but for better or worse, it's nearly invisible under Xiaomi's custom MIUI skin. Right from the lock screen, you know it's unique. You have to swipe downwards to unlock the phone, which takes some getting used to. You can also swipe in other directions to jump straight to the camera, phone or messaging apps. MIUI lets you define custom text that shows up on the lock screen, which could include your contact details so that people can return the phone to you if you lose it.

Xiaomi has gone with a redundant Menu button rather than a dedicated Recents button - this is a waste, considering menus are always visible in Android 4.4. Long-pressing the button brings up a custom app switcher which shows you how much RAM is currently occupied, and lets you close all open apps with one tap.