Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 Review : A Budget Smartphone, which Possibly has Everything 

Xiaomi with the Make in India initiative adds another budget smartphone in their Redmi series. Redmi is the widely popular smartphone series for its affordable pricing and good specs. One thing that we have been finding almost similar is their design, but Redmi Note 3 is different. This looks appealing its solid metal body, as like other smartphones such as Honor 5x and Le Eco 1S.

Redmi Note 3: Look and feel

In the first place when you grab this phone in your hand, it gives you a premium feel. The back panel of the phone is completely built with metal, sandwich between two plastic pieces. The top plastic piece accomplished with 3.5mm headphone jack, noise cancellation and infrared (IR) emitter whereas bottom ones has standard Micro-USB connector for charging and mic.

The body has a smooth matte finish that doesn’t attract fingerprints. You can easily clean dust and grime come off on the body with a simple wipe.

Now let’s see its face, it has 5.5-inch Full HD IPS display with narrow bezels and a glossy rim running along the edges. The IPS panel of the phone has very good color reproduction and easily visible under direct sunlight. The top of the screen is accomplished with ear speaker, sensor, 5 Megapixel camera along with a notification LED for alerts. Great thing is that the capacitive buttons at the bottom of the screen are backlit which is something different than previous Redmi models. The volume rocker and power button placed on the right, while the left side houses the hybrid Dual-SIM tray. The phone feels quite comfortable in the hands; however, it might be a little bit tricky for small hands to use it one handed.

Redmi Note 3: Camera

In this photogenic world, everyone wants a good camera in their smartphone. So, if you want a good camera under budget then Redmi Note 3 provides you 16 megapixels f/2.0 camera with PDAF. The photos clicked outdoors in good lighting conditions comes with good details, sharpness and color reproduction. The autofocus is pretty fast even in the low light, the images capture in low light are also decent and clearly visible.  About the front camera, it captures good selfies in daylight, thanks to the same wide f/2.0 aperture.

Outdoor shoot in daylight

Outdoor shoot in Dark

The camera app is simple to use and comes with plenty of shooting modes like Manual, Paranoma, fish eye and more.  Beside different mode the app also provides different filters which can use according to photo demand. In shooting mode option the Manual mode allows to set white balance and ISO setting as per your requirement but there aren't any options for aperture or shutter speed.

Redmi Note 3: Performance

In spite of budget smartphone, it does not mean that the Redmi Note 3 is packed with low hardware. The model we get to review has Hexa-Core Snapdragon 650 processor running at 1.4 GHz along Adreno 510 GPU and 2 GB RAM, which is a great combination. If we talk about storage, then it provides 16 GB onboard storage that can expand up to 128 GB by using SIM card slot 2(hybrid).

The Snapdragon 650 doesn’t disappoint us much; we played multiple games including Asphalt 8 and didn’t find any heating and glitching issues while playing it.  For security, it has fingerprint sensor which works fine and quite fast at unlocking the phone. It has an option to add multiple fingerprints and the sensor recognized our finger prints almost every time to unlock the device. You can also lock your apps using fingerprint sensor.

The phone ships with MIUI 7 based on an Android Lollipop which quite stable and intuitive. It is a single layered interface and user can easily customize it by using the theme and transition effects provided Xiaomi’s theme store. After updating this phone, we get a new feature called Wallpapers carousel, which displays random wallpapers on the lock screen. This feature selects the wallpaper from the collection provided by Xiaomi which updates daily using the internet.

In terms of preloaded apps, you get all basic productivity apps you need for day to day work. In additional it also comes with an app called Mi Remote to support IR emitter functionality. This app lets you control infrared-capable devices such as TV, set-top box, AC, DVD player, projector and more including DSLR cameras. We have tested this app to control Philips LED TV and it worked perfectly.

For power, this device it has non-removable Li-Po 4000mAh battery which gives 7 hours and 25 minutes’ backup in our continuous HD video playback test at full brightness and volume. If we talk about actual day to day usage then we easily managed to go more than a day.