After strong components and low price, now manufacturers have started focusing on the design, look and premiumness of the device to attract customers. Now companies are using metal body instead of plastic in smartphones. Recently launched Honor 5X and LE Eco LE OneS also had metal body. Along with 3GB RAM given in Coolpad Note 3, fingerprint sensor is also being given as a special feature in these budget smartphones.
The special thing is that after the Redmi 2 series, Xiaomi has now launched the Redmi Note 3 at the right time. The first glimpse of this smartphone was seen in December, however, the original variant of the phone had a MediaTek processor while the Redmi Note 3 launched in India has a Qualcomm chipset. Like the Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 Prime, the Redmi Note 3 will also be a Made in India smartphone.
The two biggest competitors of the Redmi Note 3 are Lenovo Vibe K4 Note and LeEco’s Le OneS. Will this smartphone from Xiaomi be able to make its presence felt in the smartphones under 15,000 category? Let’s see what we saw in our review of this phone.
Look and Design
Redmi Note 3 looks very beautiful and in gold color, it gives you the feel of a premium smartphone. Made of a completely metal body, this phone has a matte finish. It is also easy to keep this smartphone clean as it easily removes dust and dirt.
The front of the smartphone has a 5.5-inch full HD IPS display. The design touch of the display is good but it feels a bit awkward on the ear while making calls. The display is equipped with a scratch resistant layer. There is a 5-megapixel camera with notification LED for alerts on the top. The capacitive buttons given at the bottom have a good backlight. There are volume and power buttons on the right side while the hybrid dual-SIM tray is given on the left side. There is also an infrared (IR) emitter along with a headphone socket on the top. For data transfer and charging, you can use the standard micro-USB connector in the smartphone.
There is a fingerprint sensor, dual LED flash and a 16MP camera at the back along with a speaker grille at the bottom. You will get the Redmi Note 3 with a 10 watt charger, data cable, SIM projector tool and instruction leaflet. During the review, we found the quality of the accessories to be good and hope they will serve you well.
We think Xiaomi has done a great job with the design of this phone. The finish of the phone is excellent and the display is also very clear and bright. The colors come out very clearly on the IPS panel. Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 has Xiaomi’s Sunlight Display hardware feature, which makes it easy to see the screen even in sunlight.
The phone is comfortable to hold in the hand. Although it may be a bit difficult to use the phone with one hand, it is only 8.7 mm thin and extremely light.
Specification
Even though the price of Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 budget smartphone is low, the hardware provided in this phone is no less than any premium smartphone. This is the first phone with Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 processor. Like Snapdragon 808, Moto X Style was given a hexa-core processor but instead of Cortex-A57, it has Cortex-A72 running at 1.8 GHz. The other four cores are Cortex A-53 with 1.4 GHz. However, the phone has a new Adreno 510 GPU for graphics.
Redmi Note 3 will be available in two variants. We have the variant with 3GB RAM and 32GB storage for review but if you have a low budget then you can choose the 2GB RAM and 16GB storage variant for Rs 9,999. The storage of this variant can be increased up to 32GB by using a microSD card instead of the second SIM card in the hybrid SIM slot. Nowadays, where most phones are supporting storage up to 128GB or more, Redmi Note 3 lags behind a bit.
Equipped with Qualcomm chipset, this phone has Category 7 LTE feature for bands 3, 5, 40 and 41 with VoLTE support. Along with this, there is also dual-band Wi-Fi B / G / N / AC, Bluetooth 4.1, USB OTG, FM radio, Miracast, GLONASS. NFC feature is not provided in this phone.
Software
The phone comes with a fork of Android Lollipop called MIUI 7. MIUI 7 is definitely an improvement over the older version of MIUI 4. It has a single layer interface but users can customize it with transition effects and themes as per their choice.
The phone’s lock screen has a wallpaper crawl feature that shows different wallpapers from a collection selected by the user. There is also a light mode for an easy and simple interface. Along with this, there is also a child mode to control children on the application.
The fingerprint sensor can recognize up to 5 fingerprints. Xiaomi’s Vice President Hugo Barra said during the phone launch that you can also record your lip pattern in the phone, but while trying to do so, we failed.
Apart from this, by signing up for Mi Account, you can get up to 5 GB of cloud storage for your contacts, messages, photos etc. Using the Explorer app, you can also take the help of fingerprint sensor authentication to hide your private chats and messages.
The phone comes pre-installed with the Mi Mover application, which lets you transfer apps and data from another Android device. MIUI 7 supports 13 Indic languages.
Performance
The hardware and software of Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 combine to give you a great experience. We did not face any problem in the interface during multitasking. The call quality of the phone is good.
The phone remained stable during our review except that it rebooted a few times during benchmark tests. The phone does not heat up or feel uncomfortably hot during continuous video playback or video recording.
The bad thing we noticed is that it takes a lot of time to detect two SIMs at the same time. We did not face this problem when we were using a single SIM but when we inserted a second SIM card in the phone, it took a lot of time to detect it. We got to see the ‘No Service’ message for more than 10 minutes. Rebooting the phone did not help either. This might be a problem if you change SIM cards frequently, otherwise it won’t make much of a difference. The fingerprint sensor works well and works quickly even when you unlock the phone.
The Redmi Note 3 is a great phone for multimedia thanks to its crisp display. The audio quality is good. The music player works well and you can switch between two different audio profiles using two different earphones. Mi Drop lets you quickly share media to other Xiaomi devices. In the 32GB version, users will be able to use only 26.2GB.
Camera
The Redmi Note 3 smartphone has a 16-megapixel sensor camera with a wide f/2.0 aperture. We were able to capture good detail in landscape and macro shots in daylight. Color reproduction is also good. However, there was not much sharpness when zooming too much on the object in focus. The pictures looked very good on the phone’s display.
Even in artificial lighting, there was some problem with sharpness and depth in the pictures taken with the camera. Even in low light, the pictures are not too bad. The dual tone LED flare works well for nearby objects but you should not expect too much from it. 1080p video recording is good but due to the absence of any stabilization software in the video recording, stability was not seen. With a wide f / 2.0 aperture, the front camera takes good selfies in daylight.
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battery life
With the 4050 mAh battery given in the phone, we were able to play videos continuously for 12 hours and 21 minutes. Without turning on the battery saving mode, the phone’s battery lasted for more than a day. The phone is equipped with Qualcomm’s quick charge feature but we were able to charge the Redmi Note 3 only 20 percent in half an hour. We will not call it a super quick charge but something is better than nothing.
Our verdict
The price of 2GB RAM and 16GB storage variant of Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 is Rs 9,999 and the price of 3GB RAM and 32GB storage variant is Rs 11,999. Having all these specifications at this price makes it very special. Xiaomi has partnered with ‘Hungama’ to offer 2 months of free subscription to the streaming service to the users.
It is very difficult to find fault with the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3. Launched in 2016, the Redmi Note 3 has a metal body and fingerprint sensor for the first time in a Xiaomi device. The phone has a good display, powerful battery and processor. The camera is also not bad, although the sharpness of its pictures and HD quality videos could have been better. We could have expected more than 32 GB of storage in the phone and NFC support could have made it a complete package phone.
A few things aside, we think the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 can easily fit in the list of the best smartphones under Rs 15,000 available in the market today. If you have to choose between the Redmi Note 3 and the Le OneS, our vote definitely goes to the Redmi Note 3.
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