When it comes to communication and social networking, smartphones have been ruling the personal space in almost everyone’s life today. With the launch of the touchscreen interfaced iPhone, Apple has changed the way we use a mobile phone. However, with Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone OS, other rival operating systems are not too far away from possibly taking over Apple’s premium OS, the iOS. Apple has been leading the race with one of the most advanced hardware and best operating system on their premium handsets. However, Android phones are not too far behind.
The open-source operating system has created a jungle of Android-based handsets in the market and presently, there is a plethora of Android smartphone manufacturers around the world. With top brands such as HTC, Samsung, Sony, LG and Nokia creating high-end hardware, the price tag on their flagship handsets is no joke. Though the very same companies are catering to the middle-class segments, their budget smartphones lack powerful internals, even though they may be feature-rich. Catering to the budget and ultra-budget segments are manufacturers in India, such as Karbonn, Spice, Micromax, and a few others, who bring out OEM handsets from China. These smartphones still don’t have a proper balance of price and performance.
China-made well-known and renowned brands such as OPPO and Gionee have stepped into the Indian market for a while now and are catering the smartphone users with powerful hardware at a lower price than well-known top brands. Though they may feature high-end hardware, the price of most of their smartphones is still not a pocket friendly.
Xiaomi is another such manufacturer from China, who made an entry into the Indian smartphone market in July. The brand is a well-known and respected brand in China and even known as the ‘Apple in China’.
Xiaomi is a company which was formed by seven Android developers who tweaked the Android smartphone platform to create a custom Android-based operating system known as MIUI (pronounced as ‘Me-You-I’). Their custom ROM, well known for tweaks, additional features and functions and beautiful themes, was welcomed around the world, which finally made them bring in their own hardware. Xiaomi has a plethora of devices ranging from smartphones, tablets, headsets, chargers, and others, under their umbrella. They recently released three smartphones and a tablet in India and announced a 4K TV, a smart router and a few more accessories for the Indian market. The Xiaomi Mi 3 is their flagship smartphone in India, and the hardware is powerful enough to stand head-to-head with the Samsung Galaxy S4.
The Xiaomi Mi 3 is a single-SIM Android smartphone with a 5-inch full HD display, sporting a resolution of 1080x1920 pixels. The display is an IPS LCD, but sadly, it is not protected by any tough or scratch-resistant material such as Gorilla glass. Update: Xiaomi has confirmed that the IPS display is protected with a Corning Gorilla Glass 3.
The display has a highly glossy surface and is a fingerprint magnet. We suggest you use a flip case and additionally spend for a matte-finished screen guard on the device.
The Mi 3 has a powerful hardware—built using t a Qualcomm MSM8274AB Snapdragon 800 chipset running a quad-core 2.3GHz Krait 400 processor, 2GB of RAM and coupled with an Adreno 330 graphics unit, the smartphone can flawlessly multi-task with heavy applications and give you a great gaming performance. The internal storage is limited to 16GB and cannot be expanded since there is no microSD card slot. However, since the Mi 3 supports USB OTG, one can expand the storage using a regular USB pen drive.
Moving on, handset needs a mini SIM card (GSM) and only supports 3G and HSDPA (up to 42 Mbps). The lack of LTE is a downer, but since LTE is expensive and not available everywhere, we would not think the missing feature should be considered highly. Other connectivity options include Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth v4.0, micro USB with MHL, (Update: The Xiaomi Mi3 does not have MHL support. We are yet to confirm this with Xiaomi) NFC, GPS and GLONASS. The device features stereo FM radio too. Sensors include proximity, accelerometer, gyro, compass and barometer.
The Mi 3 is powered using a good 3050 mAh battery, which could give you up to 25 hours of talk time, depending on your usage. Lastly, the Mi 3 runs a custom Android KitKat v4.4.2 operating system, the MIUI V5.
The Xiaomi Mi 3 looks pretty similar to the BlackBerry Z3 in terms of the form factor. The Mi 3 has a unibody design. The unit does not sport a user replaceable battery and does not have a rear panel that opens up. The front has a completely glossy and raised display unit. The sides are rounded, and rest of the chassis is a matte-finished. The chassis seems like an all-metal enclosure, but is actually made of plastic.
The front has the large 5-inch display with three dedicated touch buttons for Back, Home and Menu. Towards the top of the display is the earpiece, the front-facing camera, a proximity sensor and a tiny notification LED. The power and volume rocker takes their place on the right side of the phone while the headphone jack and micro USB is placed on the top and bottom respectively. A mini sim tray sis placed on the top while a large speaker is placed on the bottom of the handset. The rear panel sports the 13MP camera along with a twin LED flash beside it. The Mi 3 has a total of three microphones—one on the bottom for calls, one on the top for noise cancellation and one nest to the camera for audio recording during video camera mode. The handset has a premium look and does not feel cheap in any angle. Sadly, though comfortable, the large form-factor and the matte-finished rounded edges make it a bit slippery to hold. The handset measures 144mm in height, 73.6mm wide and 8.1mm thick. The Mi 3 weighs in at 145g. Bundled along with the smartphone are just a USB cable and the power adapter. Sadly, the power adapter is a US-region model with flat pins. You would have to additionally invest for a power plug converter and a pair of earphones.
The Mi 3 sports a custom Android-based operating system, the MIUI V5. The MIUI is a different flavour of Android KitKat v4.4.2 and has a heavily tweaked user interface. Xiaomi’s MIUI interface is usually Chinese, but for India, they have launched a special theme, which is localized. The device will also receive a future update with Hindi script for local language users. Though the device’s UI, for now, is mostly in English, there are a few elements that still reflect the Chinese script. However, this should not bother you since Xiaomi is known to have very regular updates and patches released every week (on Fridays). The updates are very small (usually less than 15MB) and are available OTA (over the air). You don’t need a PC to update the firmware.
The MIUI V5 user interface is closely matched to an iOS platform. In short, the MIUI V5 OS is a mix of both worlds—Android OS with an iOS interface. There is no app drawer—just as you see on an iPhone, the user interface comprises of just the home screen with multiple desktops having the app icons and a bottom tray with four frequently, user-preferred applications.
The MIUI V5 boasts about plenty of features—and why not? The operating system integrates third-party applications such as a cleaning agent, from Clean Master, to clear junk files, cache, and unused apps and also kill apps running in the background. Features for app and data security are also integrated. An in-built virus scanner takes care of malware before installing it on the device. A data monitoring app to take care of data bandwidth and control usage on your 2G/3G plans. The OS also features options choosing which application can use mobile data or Wi-Fi or both. Using this feature, one can route heavy data traffic (such as updates and downloads) through Wi-Fi only and use the mobile data connection only for low traffic needs, such as email and social networking. Additional features include call recording, network data speed information on the notification bar, built-in screenshot, Mi Cloud (for online cloud data storage), apps and data backup, and a few others.
The main highlight of the MIUI operating system is its themes. Highly customisable and the database includes thousands of themes built through a large community of fans and developers around the world. Themes can be downloaded for free (there are paid ones too) and applied on-the-go. Themes are available in various genres, ranging from simple to cool ones. Each theme contains loads of segments that change the look of everything in the phone. This includes the lock screen the lock style, home screen, icons, notification bar, alarm style, fonts, status bar, favourites tray, messaging, dialer, boot animation, boot audio and a few others. The themes available on other smartphone brands such as HTC, Sony or Samsung only include a skin, while the ones on MIUI are integrated into the operating system. And it gets even better—you can customize your own theme using multiple themes you downloaded. What it means is that you can use components from different themes to make one of your own. Use the lock style from one, the lock screen from another, the font from a third one and keep tweaking it to your preference. You can save the theme and share it too.
We did find something we did not like, from Xiaomi. When you connect the handset to your Windows PC, the device drivers don’t get installed automatically. However, the drivers are available in the handset itself. The moment you connect it to your PC, you will find a CD drive available in the ‘My Computer’ section which contains software for the drivers. Once installed, the Xiaomi software opens up the smartphone’s internal storage for data retrieval. The software also installs a utility which allows for data transfer and firmware updates. But sadly, the software is in Chinese and Indian users will find is difficult to understand what the software is giving or demanding.
On the performance front, the Mi 3 is surprisingly good. The hardware within is at par with a Samsung Galaxy S4, and the AnTuTu scores prove it too. Gaming is almost flawless. The user interface is well adapted by the hardware, and you shall see a smooth transition with absolutely no jitter or halts. Multi-tasking great and we did not witness any issues while it was with us.
The camera’s performance is pretty impressive. Unlike local brands that boast about their cameras, the Xiaomi Mi 3’s 13MP rear camera performs pretty well. Images shot in broad daylight are pretty sharp with a good balance of colour, brightness and contrast. However, images have an extra vibrant colour effect for close-up images of colourful subjects. Video is also good enough, but we did find a slight jitter in fast moving objects while shooting in full HD 1080p
Camera:
Images shot in the shade, and in low light are also excellent. Using the flash ensure a better image output since it does not tend to overexpose the subject. Using HDR modes is the best option for low light, but you may find the colours getting a bit too vibrant. These issues can be fixed by tweaking a few settings internally. Additional features include macro mode, 99-picture burst mode, HDR, panorama, picture capture with smile or sound, self-shots with auto skin correction, auto and manual focus, filters, manual ISO and shutter speeds and a few more. The camera is the best in class, and we were not disappointed.
But yes, there was one area of concern—the focusing did play up with the test shoots. When focusing on a subject in macro mode, the subject was a bit blurred out as the focusing point seemed to be a bit off. Another issue with the focusing mechanism we witness is that when you are done with focusing on a particular zone in the frame, the focus resets to the center after taking the previous image. You have to continuously refocus on the subject for multiple shots. Lastly, when in macro mode, the focus plays spoil sport—even though the subject is not in focus, the camera displays a green box stating that the focus is complete and allows you to shoot the blurred image. I hope the Xiaomi engineers, and developers release a camera patch to fix the focusing issues reported here. However, the overall focusing is pretty fast as compared to other handsets in the same bracket. The experience with the image quality of the camera was great. Take a look at some pictures we shot using this camera.
Playback of audio and video is flawless. We did not find any issues or abnormalities here. The display being an IPS variant does not have any viewing angle issues. Colors are bright and vibrant and watching movies and photos on the 5-incher full HD display is a pleasant experience. The audio quality from the bottom built-in speaker is decent and loud. Though it lacks proper bass, the audio quality is good enough for casual videos and music. Sadly, the Mi3 does not bundle a pair of earphones with the product. Though you could use your own set of earphones for a better audio experience, Xiaomi should have included a pair from their side. A possibility to lower the price of the handset could be a cited reason behind this.
The Xiaomi Mi 3 is a great handset for those who are hunting for a powerful, yet affordable large-screen Android handset. The Mi 3 sports a premium look with a full HD display screen and a beautiful custom-built Android operating system. Frequent updates and patches are a boon to those using this handset since every issue and bug with the handset are automatically reported back to the Xiaomi developer’s team to resolve issues. We recommend opting for the Xiaomi Mi3, which is presently priced at Rs 13,999. In the same price bracket, you will not find a performance handset. The Mi3 is sure to give the other brands in the market a tough competition forcing them to get back to their drawing board and churn out a better smartphone for a cheaper price.
