Jul 06, 2016 11:23 PM
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That's not to say it is a great experience out of the box for UK users, which is largely down to the fact that Xiaomi phones don't come preinstalled with Google apps and much of the language in the preinstalled software is Chinese. But these things are easy to tweak, and we had our Xiaomi Note 3 up and running as we would any other UK Android phone within minutes. We'll explain how we did so in the Software section of this review.
As we mentioned, Xiaomi doesn't officially sell its phones in the UK, but you can buy them from third-party suppliers such as GearBest. Indeed, GearBest supplied our review sample of the Xiaomi Note 3, a gold handset with 16GB of internal storage and 2GB of RAM. To buy this phone from GearBest today you'll pay £121.11, although it's also worth considering the Note 3 variant with 32GB of internal storage and 3GB of RAM, given that there's no support for microSD and performance should be better. The 32GB Note 3 costs £141.07 from GearBest.(Bear in mind that although shipping to the UK is free, you are liable to paying import duty from China, so you may prefer to pay a little more to buy from the EU warehouse - see our grey-market tech buying advice.)
One of the things to watch out for when buying a phone from China is that it is supported by your network. In the UK, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 operates on only the UK 4G LTE bands 3 and 7, which means band 20(or the 800MHz) frequency used by O2 and piggyback networks such as giffgaff is not supported. Should your network be supported, however, the Note 3 offers 4G connectivity on both of its dual-SIM slots(this is a dual-standby phone that accepts two Micro-SIM cards). Also see: Best dual-SIM phones and dual-SIM phone buying advice.
Other connectivity options are excellent, too, covering the latest 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, an IR blaster, GPS and GLONASS, although there's no NFC.
