Xiaomi Mi3 Review – More than you could ask for (Updated)

Xiaomi Mi3 comes with Snapdragon 800 chipset, 2GB RAM, 5 inches full HD display, 13MP camera with full HD recording, 3050 mAh battery. If you are wondering why i am telling you all this? then get this. Even with all those top of the line specs Xiaomi Mi3 does not cost 30,000 or 40,000 Rupees. You all know that it costs only 14,000 Rupees. And that is the reason why i wrote “more than you could ask for”. Don’t get spoiled though, its not like all the companies suddenly going to lower the prices of their high end devices. Xiaomi is on a mission here, mission to gather as much market share as possible.

Design & Build Quality

Design wise it has one flaw(whether it’s a flaw or not that’s subjective but i am telling what i think here). The bezels of the phone surrounding the screen are unnecessarily big, reason? its rounded edges. If the phone had straight edges rather than rounded, that could have decreased the width of the phone marginally. Now about build quality, it is pretty well built, if you snap it at the back with your finger, you will feel the metal casing vibrate in the inside. It’s only 8.1mm thick and weighs 145 grams.

The outer plastic casing of the phone though is very soft, i would advice you to never drop it, from the front it might survive from cracks or dents because its got Gorilla Glass 3 there. But, if it falls on it sides, you are definitely going to end up with dents on your phone. Its outer plastic casing is really very delicate. It does comes with LED notification and you can even change colour of it. How? you can see in the review video below. Oh, and its got two pair of noise cancellation mics one on the back and other on the top.

Display

The 5 inches IPS LCD display of Xiaomi Mi3 is very good. It’s of full HD 1080p resolution. The viewing angles are obviously great because of the IPS technology. Colour saturation is good in fact it even has settings through which you can control the colour temperature and colour saturation of the screen, you can see more about that in the review video below. And the display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3.

Multimedia

The speaker of Mi3 could have been a little louder. It’s decent in quality but it is pretty weak even at full volume. With that out of the way. Now i can tell you about all the good things. First good thing is its music quality in headphones/earphones. But to experience it you have to enable something called Mi3 sound enhancements in the music settings. You can see how in the video below. What it will do is that it will enable the actual Dirac chip which is a dedicated music enhancement chip inside the phone. Without enabling it the music will sound pretty empty and boring without any surround effects. In short it will sound very bad. Having it on really makes a big difference.

It supports full HD video playback obviously, you can expect at least that much from Snapdragon 800. But did you know that it can play 2K and 4K resolution video too? And that too smoothly? Now, i am not sure its because of sheer raw power of Snapdragon 800 or MiUi’s software optimizations or maybe because of both. Whatever the reason is, the fact remmains that it can play those videos without any issues. All the phones with octa-core processors refused to play the video by default even after using MXPlayer the video was still not watchable because of constant freezing and loss of sound. Xiaomi Mi3 doesn’t even need MXPlayer to play those videos it can play them its default video player without a hitch. Its a multimedia juggernaut.

Camera

Xiaomi Mi3 consists of a 13MP rear facing with dual LED flash and 2MP front facing camera. Both supports full HD recording. And it records the video in MP4 format unlike most phones that does shoot 1080p video but in 3GP format so, that’s another win for Xiaomi Mi3. The quality is great but MP4 format takes more space and since it comes with limited storage you might not be able to store many videos. It does support USB OTG so that might help a little.

The still image quality of Mi3 is decent. It picks up a lot of details. The colour quality is very good. Low light photos are not that good. All i could say is that the overall image quality could have been better. You can also take photos which shooting video. You have to enable that feature in camera’s settings though. It doesn’t come with the setting ‘on’ by default.

Storage/RAM/OS

Xiaomi Mi3 comes with 16GB of internal storage out of which you’ll get around 13GB to use, did i tell you that it’s not expandable? well, just now i did. It also comes with 2GB of Low-power or Low-voltage DDR3 RAM out of which you will get around 1GB free. The rest is taken by the OS/UI. For some reason its RAM gets filled very quickly as a result the device might restart on you randomly. Happened to me, only once though. Since then i keep the RAM in check. Core OS is Android 4.4.2 but as we all know Mi3 runs on a very heavily customized version of Android called MiUi. It’s a very robust UI. Pretty smooth and sleek, hardly ever lags. It’s got a lot of settings, from the three touch capacitive buttons to the actual hardware buttons(volume and power) you can customize everything.

You can select, what does pressing and holding the home button or any of the three buttons will do. Its pretty hard to explain in writing, you’ve gotta see the review video below to know what i am talking about here. You can select which quick toggles you want to keep in the notification area. You can give your phone a new look by downloading and applying themes from its themes apps and all the themes will work because they are specifically made for Mi3/MiUi. Ultimately its got way more settings than an usual android device. When they said MiUi is highly customizable they weren’t joking around.

Performance

Lets get technical for a second, Xiaomi Mi3 runs on Snapdragon 800 or to be exact Qualcomm MSM8274AB Snapdragon 800 Chipset which is consists of quad-core krait 400 CPU clocked at 2.3GHz and Adreno 330GHz. Funny thing is despite of being clocked at 2.3GHz and having a beastly Adreno 330GPU. This phone hardly ever gets warm let alone hot. After using so many octa-core smartphones that were getting hot because of the 2GHz CPU, this came as surprise for me.

Anyway, lets get back to the performance now. This chipset seriously does not belong in this price range because after people would taste this kind of performance from such an high end chipset at a throw away price. They will start expecting even more. And it will become hard to go back to those usual quad-core or hexa-core smartphones that are usually available for this price in India. Thanks for spoiling us even more Xiaomi.

Call quality/Connectivity

You can hear how much its ear piece could get loud in review video below. For an ear piece i must say its very loud. The call quality in general is very loud and clear. Connectivity wise, it supports only one regular size sim. The Wifi connectivity is very fast. No, i mean literally. It connects very fast to the nearest WiFi hotspot its like you click on the Wifi toggle in the notification area and the next second you look at the notification bar its connected. Pretty fast for an android. It doesn’t loose signal that easily and speed remains constant most of the times, thanks to its dual band Wifi. It’s also got Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC/Android beam.

Battery

It’s got three options one to save battery and one to lose battery fast and obviously a balanced one ’cause everything needs a peace keeper after all. Three settings are called performance mode, balanced and power saver they are available in the quick settings. Xiaomi Mi3 comes with more than enough 3050mAh battery. Even if you leave it at performance mode, it will still easily last you one day. Although by the end you’ll have only have around 10% of battery left. Best choice would be the balanced option.

Verdict/Choice

My verdict is really not necessary in this one. It’s really a no-brainer for people whom knows what they want. Still if you want my verdict then its a sure shot yes. For 14,000 Rupees screw everything else and just buy it. You’d have to make some compromises though. Like the dual-sim and memory card slot. If you can do that then this is definitely the phone for you. Choices could be hard sometimes. So, if you have any questions regarding Xiaomi Mi3, just ask me in the comments section below and i will try my best to help you make your choice.

Why you should buy Xiaomi Mi3?

Powerful processor, 2GB RAM, 3000mAh battery, Gorilla Glass 3, 5 inches full HD IPS display, Price.

Why you should not buy Xiaomi Mi3?

Lack of dual sim and micro SD card slot.

Why you should listen to me?

That’s something for you to decide.

Update

Well there’s not much to write about what i did, it’s just i took a Xiaomi Mi3 and put it under a bus, to see if it’s ‘Magnesium alloy frame’ and Gorilla Glass 3 could surive being run over by a bus. The frame did pretty well, but unfortunately the glass didn’t. The LCD and front glass got completely shattered. The phone is still working but useless because what’s there in a touch screen phone without the touch screen itself?