Xiaomi Mi3- a gladiator smartphone is one of the most powerful android devices available in the smartphone market. It has been quite a lot of time since the launch of Xiaomi MI in December 2013, but it had has a lot of news from then, and we are sharing a detailed review of the Xiaomi MI3 smartphone:
Look and physical aspects
The phone has a sleek design, with a complete black front protected by Gorilla Glass three. It has a MI logo, proximity sensor, light sensor, front speaker and a front facing camera above the display arranged clockwise. In between is the 5″ IPS OGS Display, and below the display, the phone has three capacitive soft buttons which can’t be seen when the display is off. The front part has very less bezel space, unlike most flagships, but still is larger than the LG G2 or G3. The side and the back are all one part, there is no replaceable back panel and the phone measures 144 x 73.6 x 8.1 mm, weighing 145 g (5.11 oz). It is pretty light, in relation to the size of the phone. There is a microUSB port on the bottom, and right to it lies the phone’s speaker. The Power button and Volume rocker keys (physical buttons) lie in the side of the phone. On the top, there are 3.5 mm earphone port and a micro slim slot. On the back, at the upper part you can see the Camera and beside it lies a dual LED Flash, and a mic too. In the lower part of back, there are some printed stuffs of Xiaomi sign and other.
Display
Having a 5 inches 1080 x 1920 pixels IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen display with 441 ppi pixel density, the display is pretty sharp and crisp. The display quality is great with crisp colors, and feels very natural. You can’t see the pixels in the display, even you are very close. Brightness setting works flawlessly, is very good and the viewing angles are also very good.
Performance, Processor and Storage
The Xiaomi Mi 3 loads a Qualcomm MSM8274AB Snapdragon 800 Quad-core 2.3 GHz Krait 400 main processor, supported by Adreno 330 GPU. The processor is highly advanced, as it is one of the most powerful and gives a great performance. It scored 35, 595 scores in Antutu Benchmarks, which is more than the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, Sony Xperia Z Ultra, LG G2 and other phones. The phone scored pretty high in other several benchmarks too, and you won’t worry about the phone to lag or anything, however high and huge applications you install and load. The phone will run all the high-end games out there. All these will be handled by the 2 GB RAM, of which around 1.8 GB is usable. For the storage operations, the Xiaomi MI3 has 16 GB and 64 GB internal storage versions, and it doesn’t have a microSD card slot (it wouldn’t even matter that much, since if you need a higher memory, 64 GB will be more than enough).
Camera
The Xiaomi MI3 has a 13 MP rear camera with autofocus Dual LED Flash, which can take images upto 4128 x 3096 pixels, and videos upto 1080p @ 30 fps. Other features of the camera include Geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection and image stabilization. The camera quality is really great in the daylight, producing sharp and fine images, which look almost natural; but in low light, the images produced are not that great and are blurry and not upto the mark. For the video call and selfies, it has a 2 MP front facing camera, which can also record HD videos upto 1080 pixels @ 30 fps. The phone will not replace your point and shoot, clearly to say!
Connectivity
The phone supports GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 2G Network, and HSDPA 850 / 900 / 1900 / 2100 3G Network. It’s really bad that the phone doesn’t support LTE, but it will be fine for non-LTE users, since it can have the internet speed upto DC-HSDPA, 42 Mbps; HSDPA, 21 Mbps and HSUPA, 5.76 Mbps. For Wi-Fi, it has Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi hotspot. Other connectivity features include Bluetooth v4.0 and NFC. The phone supports microUSB v2.0, and also has USB OTG support, which will be of a great use when we will be out of storage at some points of time.
Software and other features
The phone runs Android OS, v4.2.1 (Jelly Bean) out of the box which is not that good, since KitKat had already launched during its release, but Xiaomi is not that much late in providing the latest update to its users, since according to the latest news circulating, it has already provided the 4.4.2 KitKat via OTA update. The phone has its own UI, which is known as Xiaomi UI and is heavily customized. The phone has a lot of censors- Light, Proximity, Pressure, Distance, Linear Accelerometer, gyro, compass Rotation Vector, Temperature and barometer sensors. It has a built-in HTML5 browser, supports Java via Java MIDP emulator, and has a FM Radio too (which is missed by most flagships nowadays)! The sound quality is great- loud and clear, produced by the main speaker.
Battery
Having a non-removable and non user replaceable Li-ion 3050 mAh battery, it is obviously expected to give an excellent battery performance for its 5″ screen, but it was not upto the mark whatsoever. Xiaomi says the Mi 3′s 3050mAh battery has 30 percent more capacity than its predecessor, and will give you 21 hours Internet use on 3G, or 25 hours talk-time on 2G. The Battery doesn’t really lasts as much as Xiaomi says, if you are a heavy user. For intermediate and light users, it is quite fine though! You’ll require to install some background task killers, so that you may get the good battery life optimization and run only those apps which you need.
Availability
The phone was initially released in MainLand China from November 2013, and was later made available in other Asian countries- namely Singapore from March 2014, Malaysia from May 2014. The phone is also said to be available in Taiwan and India. By the end of 2014, you should be able to buy the phone in India, Brazil, and Russia as well as Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam. It is really annoying for those restlessly waiting to get this phone that much late.
Price
The strongest point of the phone was its price, since it was released at an amazing price of $327 for the 16 GB version and $408 for the 64 GB version. This is almost half (even less than half in some cases) of the most flagships out there. The price point became more stronger when Xiaomi announced a price cut in the MI3 smartphone in April 2014, dropping the price to $270 for the 16 GB version, and $320 for the 64 GB. The price cut may be to compete further with the gorgeous OnePlus One, and it was the fastest selling smartphone in Xiaomi’s history.
