New Delhi: Making its India debut, the fast-rising Chinese handset maker Xiaomi - which is often referred to as Apple of China - announced the launch of its three new handsets, including its flagship smartphone Mi 3, at its event in New Delhi. The Xiaomi Mi 3 is priced at Rs 13,999, while the other two phones launched under the Redmi series are priced under Rs 10,000.
We got our hands on the Mi 3 smartphone at the launch event and here's what we thought of the phone, which the company claims is even faster than the Samsung Galaxy S5.
At first look, the Xiaomi Mi 3 reminded me of the Lumia 800 as it borrows a lot of design elements from Microsoft-owned Nokia's early warriors. The Mi 3 looks good and has an elegant appeal to it. The phone's lightweight and its curved sides make it comfortable to grip. The matte-finished back adds to its beauty. Unlike the Rs 9,999 Redmi Note, the Mi 3's back panel is not removable and the phone supports only one SIM.
The phone's 5-inch 1080p IPS display has a good colour reproduction and great viewing angles. The touchscreen on the phone is very responsive and was smooth to navigate.
What I didn't like on the phone was Xiaomi's India-specific theme. The icons used in the India theme are too gaudy for most smartphones users. But soon I discovered the way to switch the default theme and the looks improved.
The user interface is more like the one you find on other Android phones, but on exploring the apps, you see how different the interface is. For instance, the keyboard in the messaging app has all the numbers on the right - unlike their usual horizontal placement. I liked its calculator app as it looks a lot like the common Casio calculators.
Xiaomi places a high focus on themes for the phone. While I wasn't amused to see the different themes available, you might think different about it. The phone runs Android 4.4 with MIUI version 5.
The 13 megapixel camera with a dual-LED flash on the phone captures quality photographs, but don't expect them to be detailed. Its camera captures a good amount of light that makes the results impressive, but how well it fares in low-light conditions is yet to be tested. The 2-megapixel front camera is streets ahead of others phones in this price bracket; it won't disappoint selfie lovers. The phone is capable of recording 1080p videos.
The phone's 16GB of internal storage offers around 13.4GB of user-accessible storage space. There is no microSD card slot for additional storage. Beating under the hood is Qualcomm's 2.3GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor along with 2GB of RAM. It's too early to comment on its performance, so we are leaving it for the exhaustive review of the Xiaomi Mi 3 that would follow soon. The phone's speakers also appeared to produce loud and quality sound.
Altogether, the phone seems to be a good deal for its price but we are still holding our horses.
Xiaomi's new smartphones seem to be strong contenders to Asus' recently launched ZenFone smartphones that has garnered positive reviews, including one from us.
Comments
0 comment