Review of MI Redmi Note 3 : The best budget phone under 15K

Redmi Note 3 : The Game Changer

1. LOOK N FEEL 

Xiaomi is no newbie in the smartphone making game, and the Redmi Note 3 is a tribute to the expertise the company has acquired over the years. Moving over the plastic builds from the Redmi Note 2, the Note 3 features a metallic build that grants it a nice heft and leaves no stone unturned in hiding away the true price of the device. No way you can say this is a cheap device, because it certainly does not look cheap.
On the face of it, the Redmi Note 3 would appear as a device sporting a metallic unibody build. The marketing materials sure do point to this as they smoothen out and make the back appear to be made of one material. But, the phone is not all metal and glass. The top and bottom ends of the Note 3 are definitely plastic, but the combination of plastic bits to the metallic back that Xiaomi went for does not easily give it away. The main metal body bears a cool, smooth finish; while the plastic has a glossy finish which is less slippery. This works in the device’s favor in two ways: one, Xiaomi has a way to incorporate the antennae needed for radio communication without resorting to plastic band lines; and two, this texture difference makes the device less slippery than an entirely flat, metallic phone would be.

2. PERFORMANCE

Redmi Note 3 encores a hexacore Snapdragon 650 processor with two Cortex A72 cores and four Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.8 GHz. It sports the newer and better Adreno 510. and the combination blows everything away. In benchmarks, the Redmi Note 3 easily takes on smartphones like the Nexus 6P powered by a Snapdragon 810 processor and the Moto X Style, which runs on Snapdragon 808. It destroys the Helio X10 too.

  As in real time , I played Asphalt 8 and Modern Combat 5 for about 20-20 minutes and the phone did not heat up, the game didn’t stutter , didn't glitched and I couldn’t notice any significant frame drops either. I played video content for about 40 minutes, again nothing. Everything worked great. This is not the Qualcomm silicon from 2015 and has showed significant changes.

Here are some benchmark results:

Note: Pro version is the one with SnapDragon 650 (about which we are talking now ) and Redmi Note 3 is the one with Helio X10 processor.

i. Antutu

ii. Geekbench 3

iii. Vellamo 3.1 Browser – Chrome

3. DISPLAY

 The 5.5-inch 1080p display , with a PPI of 403  , has good sunlight legibility and the colors are bright and vivid too. Like the Mi 4i, the phone has what Xiaomi calls Sunlight display, which automatically increases the contrast under harsh light. But the display lacks Gorilla Glass protection. Xiaomi says it has the equivalent of the protection Corning provides from multiple suppliers and ensures it will be uniform across batches.

4. CAMERA

Redmi Note 3 bears a decent 16 MP rear camera with a f/2.0 aperture which is complemented with PDAF for focussing. The camera performance of the device is decent for a 15k device. But its not very impressive.

5.BATTERY

The Redmi Note 3 is an absolute beast when it comes to battery life. It packs in a non-removable 4,000 mAh battery. Even after 1 hour of hardcore gaming and 5 hours of playback , I still have 65% battery left. After a normal usage for a day , I still have more than enough battery for next day. And if its light usage ,the battery can bear it for almost 2 days.

The Redmi Note 3 is the best smartphone a road warrior could ask for, especially a heavy user like me.

6.SOFTWARE & UI 

The Redmi Note 3 runs MIUI 7 on top of Android Lollipop 5.1

MIUI is one of the best UI iterations on top of Android with some thoughtful feature additions, many of which are a result of demands made by its users. There is a reading mode that bathes the display in a yellow hue for night time to help users go to sleep — a feature that is coming to iOS 9.3. You can create hidden folders. You can set a child lock and select which apps would be visible. Similarly you can even lock individual apps which can be opened by a pattern or by placing your registered finger on the fingerprint sensor. 

You can read everything about MIUI here : LINK  .