XIaoMI redMI noTe 3
A budget smartphone with best-in-class features for this category
Xiaomi with the Make in India initiative adds another budget smartphone in their Redmi series. Redmi is the widely popular smartphone series known for its affordable pricing and good specs. Redmi Note 3 is different in design from its predecessors and looks more appealing with its solid metallic body.
Look and feel: The back panel of the phone is completely built with metal, sandwiched between two plastic pieces. The top plastic piece is replete with a 3.5mm headphone jack, noise cancellation and infrared (IR) emitter whereas bottom has the standard MicroUSB connector for charging and mic. The body has a smooth matte finish that doesn’t attract fingerprints. You can easily clean dust and grime off from the body with a simple wipe. The front has a 5.5-inch Full HD IPS display with narrow bezels and a glossy rim running along the edges. The IPS panel of the phone has very good color reproduction and is easily visible under direct sunlight. The top of the screen has the standard ear speaker, sensor, 5 Megapixel camera along with a notification LED for alerts. The capacitive buttons at the bottom of the screen are backlit which is different from the previous Redmi models. The volume rocker and power button are placed on the right, while the left side houses the hybrid Dual-SIM tray. The phone feels quite comfortable in hands; however, it might be a little bit tricky for small hands to use it one handed.
Decent camera: Redmi Note 3 provides 16-megapixel f/2.0 camera with PDAF. The photos clicked outdoors in good lighting conditions come with good details, sharpness and color reproduction. The autofocus is pretty fast even in the low light, the images captured in low light are also decent and clearly visible. The front camera captures good selfies in daylight, thanks to the same wide f/2.0 aperture. The camera app is simple to use and comes with plenty of shooting modes like Manual, Paranoma, Fish Eye and more. Apart from different shooting modes, the app also provides different filters. In shooting mode option the Manual mode allows you to set white balance and ISO settings as per requirement but there aren’t any options for aperture or shutter speed.
Performance: The Redmi Note 3 is certainly not packed with low quality hardware. It has a Hexa-Core Snapdragon 650 processor running at 1.4 GHz alongwith Adreno 510 GPU and 2 GB RAM, which is a great combination. If we talk about storage, then it provides 16 GB onboard storage that can expand up to 128 GB by using SIM card slot 2 (which is a hybrid slot). The Snapdragon 650 doesn’t disappoint us much; we played multiple games including Asphalt 8 and didn’t find any heating and glitching issues while playing it. For security, it has a fingerprint sensor which works fine and quite fast at unlocking the phone. It has an option to add multiple fingerprints and the sensor recognized our finger prints almost every time to unlock the device. You can also lock your apps using the fingerprint sensor. The phone ships with MIUI 7 based on an Android Lollipop which is quite stable and intuitive. It is a single layered interface and user can easily customize it using the theme and transition effects provided by Xiaomi’s theme store. After updating this phone, we get a new feature called Wallpapers carousel, which displays random wallpapers on the lock screen. This feature selects the wallpaper from the collection provided by Xiaomi which updates daily using the internet.
In terms of preloaded apps, you get all basic productivity apps you need for day to day work. In addition, it also comes with an app called Mi Remote to support IR emitter functionality. This app lets you control infrared-capable devices such as TV, set-top box, AC, DVD player, projector and DSLR cameras. We have tested this app to control Philips LED TV and it worked perfectly. For power, this device it has a non-removable Li-Po 4000mAh battery which gives 7 hours and 25 minutes’ backup in continuous HD video playback test at full brightness and volume. We easily managed more than a day of normal usage with a single charge of battery.
Bottomline: Redmi Note 3 at Rs 9,999 with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage along with fingerprint sensor is a good choice if you are looking for a budget smartphone with quality features.