Xiaomi Redmi 3S Plus

That just about sums it up as far as the design of the Redmi 3S duo is concerned. If you’ve seen a Redmi Note 3, the new 3S pair is nearly the same in terms of looks, only smaller. The same metal body, the same curvy edges and rounded corners, the same solid build – the same design philosophy in essence. The capacitive navigation keys on the 3S’ fascia aren’t backlit, and a tiny notification LED is present below the home button. The placement of the primary camera and flash is also a little different – top left on the rear of the 3S vs in the centre as in the case of the Redmi Note 3.

While we’d always prefer full HD resolution in our quest for value for money, we can’t really complain about the 720p display the Redmi 3S offers. It’s plenty sharp and serves up crisp visuals. And as usual, you get settings to tweak the display output, including a customisable reading mode, customisable colour temperature and choice of contrast levels.

The Redmi 3S’ camera app presents the same options and shooting modes as we’ve seen before, with the latter covering manual, beautify, handheld twilight and a bunch of scene presets. HDR and a range of colour filters are offered too. Video recording is limited to 1080p, which is acceptable at this price point.

The new Redmi 3S models come powered by the new Snapdragon 430 SoC, and are the first smartphones in India to boast this chipset. The octa-core processor utilises four Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.4GHz and another four clocked at 1.1GHz. Since we’re reviewing the Redmi 3S Prime model here, that chipset is joined in by 3 gigs of RAM and 32GB storage. Just to highlight the differences, the regular Redmi 3S model comes with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage, and can’t boast of a fingerprint scanner unlike its Prime cousin. The Xiaomi Redmi 3S Prime turns in very smooth performance, and everything from regular productivity / social apps to intensive games work well. We played Asphalt 8 extensively on it, and the gameplay was smooth on default graphics settings. A few hiccups are noticeable when graphics settings for the game are bumped up to high, but we’ll not hold that against this device. Heat dissipation is handled pretty well too, and the phone barely got warm when stressed.