The Review of Xiaomi Redmi Note 3: The Goldbar
All Mi Fans looking at the Explorers post on the redmi Note 3 be like:
“JUST POST THE REVIEW ALREADY”
Hahahah… I know. I understand your feel. Been there, done that. xD
Good Morning / Afternoon / Evening (Depending when you are reading) to all the technophiles, nerds around Malaysia. Oh and to all the fans who are reading from the other side of the world. Thank you guys.. For the support you guys have given me so far. And this is my review on the one and only Xiaomi Redmi Note 3.
I covered the unboxing and a quick look on the Redmi Note 3 on my first blog post, to which I’ll be linking it here. Just click the link below and voila.
Read that first and come back here. Done?
Good Boy / girl. Haha.
Before I got my hands on the Redmi Note 3, my daily driver was a Mi4i which was from Mi as well. And the first thing I did when the Redmi Note 3 arrived was taking off the SIM card off my phone and inserting into the Redmi Note 3. Oh and to make the review interesting, I actually used the Redmi Note 3 as my daily driver to give my full opinion and how it survives in the real world.
This are some area I am going to cover in my Review.
- Design, Aesthetics & Ergonomics
- Specs
- Display
- Camera
- Performance (Not your average testing)
- Eye Catching Feature: Fingerprint Sensor
- UI / ROM
- Call Quality
- Battery Life
- Overall Thoughts
Excited? Okay. Let’s go.
Design, Aesthetics & Ergonomics:
As you unbox the phone from the phone, the first you’ll notice the build of the phone. It’s a unibody. Battery is sealed in. It’s unremovable. Aluminium build. It actually feels nice in the hand. But if your hand is wet or sweaty, you can see smudges on the back of the phone. Which is kinda expected. Anyways, the Redmi Note 3 I got was actually gold color. I was expecting a grey/black but not gold. The thing with this gold color is it’s mild and beautiful. Just the way I like it. Best part about having a phone with a metal unibody is when placing the phone in a cold room. Like after 10 minutes, when you take the phone under the air cond, its even nice to hold. Hehehe. Sorry. Had to. The weight is distributed equally around the phone. As the back is curved, reaching not only the screen is easy but also placing the index finger on the fingerprint sensor is perfect. Here are the stuff located in the phone. At the front we have our 5MP Selfie shooter, earpiece and proximity sensor on top. A 5.5” Screen and the 3 capacitive / Physical buttons with the taptic feedback located below the screen. Behind we have the camera, flash and the fingerprint sensor. To the left side of the phone we have
Specs:
You guys would have heard this like a million times by now. If you didn’t, I’ll just list it for you again.
- 5.5” 1080p Screen
- 16MP Sony Rear facing Camera
- 5MP Front facing camera
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 - Hexa Core - Clocked in at 1.8 Ghz
- Adreno 510
- 2/3 GB RAM
- 16/32 GB Internal Storage
- 1 SIM Slot & 1 Hybrid SIM Slot
- Dual 4G Standby
- Dual WiFi band.
- Bluetooth 4.1
Display:
Let’s start off with the display. Redmi Note 3 has a 5.5” inch 1080p Display with 401 ppi. 1 ppi higher than the Redmi Note 2. Haha. To be honest about the display, it actually does produce vivid and crisp color. It’s a very nice pleasure to actually look at the screen from far, but also using this phone in VR is dope. I barely had eye discomfort. Unlike the Redmi Note 2, it actually produces complete white whereas the Note 2 had some issue and ended up producing a washed off white. A bit dull for some reason. Well, thank god it’s been corrected.
Second thing about the display is its actually sharper than its predecessor. Yeap. As you keep the Note 2 and 3 beside each other, you’ll actually see the difference clearly. I presume this phone is the same fully laminated LCD panel with a 178 degree viewing angle. Which actually gives a better viewing angle without any washed off colors.
They have two features that take use of its display. One is the Read Mode where it eliminates the blue light and give a nice dim color for a better reading experience and they have something called the sunlight display. One of my personal favorite feature, since the mi4i. It actually brightens up the contrast and gives a better viewability under the sun. So, now you can see under the sun. Navigate your way to your friend’s house.
My Rating for the display, 4 out of 5.
Camera:
As I have mentioned earlier. This phone has a 16 MP Rear Facing Camera which is a huge step up when comparing to its predecessors. It’s a Sony sensor. Has 5 - element lens with an f/2.0 aperture. Oh and it has a 78 degree wide angle. The other noticeable feature is, instead of a single tone flash, the phone actually features a dual tone flash. Which you can’t find in some other phone with this price tag. (I swear to god I don’t know the price. It’s just a hunch). The rear facing camera has an interesting feature. It’s called PDAF. Phase Detection Auto Focus. It’s a technology which is found in DSLRs and Hi End Smartphones. What it does is, it quickly focus the object that comes in the middle and when you remove the object, it focuses back to normal. And it’s fast. It’s stupid fast. It takes really good shots. There are some odd times when the phone exposure kinda goes off. It gets irritating when that thing happens often. After taking few shots on HDR On, there is a point where when you want to take the next pic on HDR, the camera app just crashes. I am pretty sure its the software glitch, so I hope they’ll correct it in their next software update.
Now, about the front facing camera. It’s a 5 MP Selfie shooter. With f/2.0 aperture as well. It’s like a bomb. Wanna know why? All of my friends, especially girls love the front facing camera on my phone. It captures the precise detail as the rear facing camera. There is actually a beautify mode on this phone, but I am a fan of my natural self. So, I am not gonna comment on it. :)
Oh a cool trick. You can shoot selfies by just tapping the Fingerprint sensor located behind the phone. And You can even use it for the front facing camera. You must be wondering why you would wanna use the fingerprint sensor for the front facing camera.
In case you want a 16MP Selfie. Haha. You’re welcome.
For the camera, I’d give a solid 4.3 out of 5.
Oh for some sample shots taken using this camera, click the link below.
Performance:
I know you guys are curious about this. The question I always get from people is does it lag, how fast is it and so on. As I’ve told you earlier, this phone features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 Clocked in at 1.8 Ghz. It’s a Hexa core. Not octa Core. Here are some stuff this phone where it actually outshines the other devices. The gaming in this phone is Phenomenal. I have tried heavy games like Mortal Combat X, Arkham Origins, The Dark Knight, Leo’s Fortune, Riptide GP2, Vainglory, Ingress, Dark Echo and many more.
One word, this phone can handle gaming better than I thought. So, I thought why not step up my Gaming / Entertainment to see the full potential of the phone. And VR is the answer. In case you guys don’t know, I am a huge fan of VR. And I spent most of my time on VR with my Mi4i which is a mindblowing experience. But I did have some eye discomfort with my mi4i cuz it’s 5” screen.
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| My Friend having a great time on VR + Redmi Note 3 |
So, I threw my Redmi Note 3 into the VR and wow. It was snappy, quick and the animations were dope as heck. Here are some of the games / Apps I tried on the VR. Vrse, Insidious: Chapter 3, 11:57, Chair in a Room, Watching series on FullDive, Deep Space VR and many more.
One good thing is I was able to go home and continue the game from where I left. Thanks to its 3GB RAM. Games (Mid to High end graphics and VR involving the Gyroscope and other sensors) performed insanely good. Well, one or two games did crash but it was like Once in a blue moon kinda thingy. So I barely cared about it.
The bluetooth pairs with my Car, speakers perfectly. And there is no audio distortion. Streaming was smooth. Miracasting to my Mi box worked really well. I got to watch my Favorite youtube videos on the big screen because of the phone supporting Miracast / Screen Sharing. Noob apps like social networking worked good as expected. Photo editing apps like Photoshop opened up quicker than I thought. Which is a good thing. The phone gets warm, but not hot. Unless, I hook my phone to the VR for more than a hour, it does get hot. Other than that, playing games I mentioned above is fun and was a wonderful experience.
Oh and the speaker on the phone. I wonder if anyone actually compared with its predecessors. According to my test, The redmi note 3 speaker is the best rear facing speaker. Mid and Lows were really good as heck. And it was loud!
Now you would be thinking, why do you even need a bench mark score? :) Haha. I did do a benchmark score and the score was 74k. But are you aware of the fact that, the more apps you load in your phone, the score decreases? And that’s why I didn’t really rely just on Benchmarks.
My Score on the Performace, 4.8 out of 5.
Eye Catching Feature: Fingerprint Sensor & IR Blaster
About the fingerprint sensor, you can read my blog post on this that I posted a while ago.
As I told you earlier, this phone gets quite a few smudges because of our hand. So, at time the fingerprint sensor doesn’t read properly. So, you have to wipe the dirt or any smudge of the fingerprint sensor and voila. Works like a charm.
Fingerprint sensor, A solid 5.
This phone sports an IR Blaster on top on the phone beside the 3.5 mm Headphone jack. And it works perfectly fine. Never have I thought the day of controlling my Air Conditioner using my phone would come this soon. But Please include other brands of air conditioning, cuz I wasn't able to find some of em.
UI / ROM:
The Redmi Note 3 is actually running Android 5.1.1, Lollipop on top of their custom UI called MIUI. It’s one of the most customizable UI I’ve ever encountered in my life. They have cool themes in their theme store. On top of that, it has some serious security and features built into the phone.
Native call blocking, DND and many more.
Oh and I covered 3 of my favorite MIUI features on the Redmi Note 3 earlier. Here’s the link to it.
MIUI is heavy but not laggy. The lag only persist when some of our apps we use misbehave in the background process. So, nothing much to worry. I loved it. And you and check it out too. Haha.
Call Quality:
I gotta say, connecting to my network is easy. I barely lost signal. Well other than my class. But most of the time, the phone actually managed to stay on 4G / LTE. And there are times where the phone goes H+ / 3G. But it’s not a big of a deal anyway. Call quality is clear and sharp. I can even hear my brother screaming from the other side. So, ya know.
Battery Life:
Earlier, I did a daily routine kinda test. Testing how the phone actually performed in my day to day routine. You can check it out by clicking the link below.
Overall Thoughts:
To be honest, I am not a big fan of huge phones. For me, I love the ideal 5” screen size. But now, I don’t want to go back to my mi4i because of the screen. Redmi Note 3 is a big device with a promising future. I doubt that you can go wrong with this phone. Cuz all I see is more and more pros than cons. And these cons can be solved by a software update. I’ll ask you a question, which phone in the market gives you a 1080p 5.5” Display, Hexa Core Processor (Not some random cheap company processor. Its Snapdragon.), Fingerprint sensor which actually unlocks in 0.3s (No gimmick), all metal build, 16MP Sony camera, dual LED Flash, 4000 mAh Battery and more.
As I said, this phone is the best bang for the buck. And if there’s anyone who’s out there that wants to get this phone. Don’t think twice, just go for it.
In one Sentence:
“Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 is everything you wanted to see in a mid range flagship. It’s phenomenal.”
And Now, let me go enjoy my day with this Gold Bar. :)
Once again, Thanks to Mi Malaysia for choosing me as one of the 15 Mi Explorers from Malaysia. I really appreciate it and I am really happy to do a review and share my experience with this goldbar.
Haha. And I really hope that I can do another review for Mi in the future soon.
This is Vesper,
Signing off.
Here's an interesting stuff I did with the Redmi Note 3:
3D Hologram with Redmi Note 3
