Xiaomi Mi3

If the Mi 3 is just handed to you without divulging the price, we bet that you’ll consider it as a super-premium handset. Yes, it’s that good. It’s to the designers credit that they have chiseled the Xiaomi Mi 3 in such a way that it looks extremely plush. The unibody design adds to its mystique since it features zero-gap construction, which helps in keeping the device lightweight as well as slim. Tipping the scales at 145g and sporting an frame 8.1mm frame, you could argue that it’s not the lightest or thinnest smartphone around (which we agree upon, by the way), but hold it in your hands, and it feels just about the right size.

Cashing on the ‘bigger the better’ trend of mobile devices these days, the Xiaomi Mi 3 sports a 5-inch display. This display size has become a standard these days as it falls on the borderline of phablets, yet doesn’t hamper the phone’s usability and handling. The 5-inch display panel of the smartphone features a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels resulting in a dense pixel density of 441ppi. In simple words, the display is simply stunning – you’d fall in love with it, be it for reading long pages of text, web browsing or viewing videos. The colours are crisp and brightness is also adequate. You’ll also not face any issue in viewing the screen under direct sunlight. The settings also allow you to select the colour temperature between warm, standard and cool as well as colour saturation between brilliant and standard for the display.

The Xiaomi Mi 3 comes equipped with a 13-megapixel camera featuring a backside illuminated sensor from Sony with f2.2 aperture, assisted by a dual-LED flash from Philips. The interface of the camera app is fairly minimal giving easy access to flash settings, toggling between stills and video, and another toggle for switching on the  front camera. The image preview, options and circular capture button are at the bottom. But that’s the simple mode – if you want to get more options, then hit the settings menu and turn it off. The good part is that the advanced mode also provides all the modes in a single menu only, but adds more options.

We aren't big fans of customisations on top of Android in general, and believe that most third-party skins don’t add much value. Some them even affect battery left and hog precious hardware resources, especially when compared to simplicity of stock Android. The Xiaomi Mi 3 sits at the extreme end, since it goes beyond an overlay, and uses a custom firmware built upon AOSP (Android open source project), in the same vein as Amazon Fire devices and Nokia X (review | FAQs). However, if you ask for our experience of using the UI for about a week, then we’d say that the device challenges our perception, and we mean that in a good way.

The Apple of China has left no stones unturned in making the Mi 3 a class-leading smartphone and that's evident from its hardware department as well. The device is loaded with a chipset from the leading manufacturer Qualcomm. Xiaomi has gone a step ahead of others by using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 MSM8974AB, which is among the brand’s top-of-the-line chips, which is clocked at 2.3GHz for four cores. Most others, including the Google Nexus 5 (review in pictures) use the processor in its 2.26GHz clock speed configuration only. Along with the Krait 400 CPU, the SoC also offers the Adreno 330 graphics processor, which handles the graphics aspect of the device. Complementing the SoC is a generous 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM. The combo results in a smooth performance, and there was nary a hiccup while performing basic tasks or running processor-intensive apps or games. Playing heavy games like Asphalt 8: Airborne was an enjoyful experience even for long periods of time. The smartphone tends to become hot after a few minutes of playing the game. However, it didn’t impact the performance and cools off pretty quickly.

Battery life is the Achilles’ heel of most smartphones these days. What’s the point of having a powerful mobile device that dies in the middle of the day? Well, we’re glad to tell that the Xiaomi Mi 3 scores well in this regard. The phone is supplied with a beefy 3,050mAh Li-ion battery, a capacity which even premium flagships don’t offer, including the HTC One M8 (review), Samsung Galaxy S5, etcetera.

In the end, everything boils down to the price being asked for, and that’s where Xiaomi has nailed it (or should we say killed it?). At the superb pricing of Rs 13,999, there’s no smartphone that comes close to the Mi 3. It comes equipped with class-leading specs that not only blow the competition in its segment out of the water, but also gives a tough fight to others costing almost thrice its asking price. After using the Mi 3 for a week, buying a Rs 40,000 (or above) smartphone doesn't really make sense anymore (something on which we opinionated a while ago).