Jul 18, 2016 08:49 PM
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The moment you take it out of the box, the Redmi Note 3 looks and feels incredibly premium, especially in gold. The full-metal body gets a smooth matte finish that doesn't attract fingerprints. It's easy to keep clean too, as dust and grime come off with a simple wipe.
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. Mercifully, the capacitive buttons at the bottom are backlit. The volume rocker and power button are quite ergonomically placed on the right, while the left side houses the hybrid Dual-SIM tray. 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 quality of the accessories seems good, and they should last.
I feel that Xiaomi has done a terrific job with the design and aesthetics of the Redmi Note 3. The finish of the phone is excellent and the display is crisp and vibrant. The IPS panel has very good colour reproduction and features Xiaomi's Sunlight Display hardware feature which indeed makes it decently legible even under direct sunlight.
We also like how comfortable the phone feels in the hand. It's a bit tricky to use one-handed, but is fairly slim at 8.7mm with good weight distribution.
The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 might be a budget smartphone but there's certainly nothing low-end about the hardware it packs. This is the first phone to roll out with 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.
In benchmarks, we witnessed some pretty impressive numbers especially considering the price of the device. We got an average of 74, 303 in AnTuTu, which is higher than what we got from many high-end phones based on the Snapdragon 810. GPU performance is equally impressive, and we recorded 31fps in the T-Rex test in GFXbench, which once again is competitive to scores posted by Snapdragon 810 devices.
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, but you can opt for the other model with 2GB of RAM and 16GB storage if your budget is tight. Officially, storage can be expanded by up to 32GB by using a microSD card instead of a second SIM in the hybrid slot, though unofficially you can put cards of bigger storage capacity as well.
Thanks to the Qualcomm chip, the phone features Category 7 LTE for Band 3, 5, 40 and 41 along with VoLTE support. You also get dual-band Wi-Fi b/g/n/ac, Bluetooh 4.1, USB OTG, FM radio, Miracast, GLONASS, and BeiDou. NFC is one feature that's missing.
The phone ships with an Android Lollipop fork called MIUI 7, which is has been reworked from the ground up. Compared to earlier versions of MIUI, version 7 is certainly more likable and better polished. It's still a single-layered interface, but it does let users customise the look and feel with transition effects and themes. The Theme Store app has a pretty good selection of free themes, and we particularly liked the Marshmallow one.
The lock screen gets a feature called Wallpaper Carousel, which displays random wallpapers from a user-selected collection which is updated daily. The notification shade has separate tabs for incoming alerts and toggle switches, to avoid clutter. There's also a lite mode for those looking for a simplified interface, and a child mode that lets you restrict which apps your children have access to when you let them play with your phone. The Settings app is where you'll find the most interesting changes.
Reading mode, which is essentially a bluelight filter, can be toggled from the notification shade. The strength of the filter can be adjusted in the Display sub-menu. The fingerprint sensor can recognise up to five fingerprints. Xiaomi Vice President Hugo Barra stated during the phone's launch that it's possible to record your lip pattern too, though it failed to unlock the phone when we tried it.
The rear camera has a 16-megapixel sensor and a wide f/2.0 aperture. Both landscapes and macro shots captured in daylight have good detail. Colour reproduction is good too. However, objects in focus lack a bit of definition and aren't very sharp, but this is only visible once you zoom in. Images look good on the phone's display though, and as long as you don't need to crop the picture at full size, you should be good.
The non-removable 4050mAh battery managed to get us through 12 hours and 21 minutes of continuous video playback, which is quite good. During actual usage, we easily managed to go more than a day, and this was without resorting to the battery saving modes. The phone supports Qualcomm's Quick Charge feature, and we managed to charge the Redmi Note 3 up to 20 percent in half an hour. We wouldn't call this super quick but it's better than nothing.
