Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 review: The real flagship killer?

Note: This article was first published on Apr 5, 2016.

Overview

Despite only coming into the market barely two years ago, the Redmi Note family has come a long way. Starting with the Mi Note, Xiaomi has proven itself to be a company which is capable of coming up with great design and build quality. The Redmi Note 3 is no different; the budget-centric smartphone did surprised us with its array of flagship and premium features such as a fingerprint sensor, a metallic design and great build quality. Below is a brief look at how far the Redmi Note family has progressed:

Design & Handling 

Note: We've done a dedicated photo gallery for the Redmi Note 3. You can refer to that album if you want to see the phone in various angles. 

With most phone makers now using metal builds for their smartphones, Xiaomi is also taking the plunge with its Redmi Note series. The Redmi Note 3 is the first Xiaomi phone to have a full-metal body although there are still two plastic bands at the top and bottom of the phone for the antennas. In case you don't know yet, metal materials will interfere with the signal and that is the last thing any phone maker wants.

Holding the Redmi Note 3 in the hands will make you question how Xiaomi managed to include an aluminium body in a phone that costs below S$300. The premium feel and build quality are unseen for a device in this price category. The textured finish on the rear also helps provide a better grip on the device.

Despite Google encouraging Android vendors to adopt on-screen navigation keys, Xiaomi has stuck to capacitive keys at the bottom of the display. Right-handed users will like the layout of the keys where the Back button is conveniently located closer to the right thumb. One thing we appreciated is the inclusion of backlighting for the capacitive buttons that will light up whenever you touch the fingerprint sensor or power button. 

Even though the Redmi Note 3 is shorter and narrower than the Apple iPhone 6s Plus - which in itself is considered a great feat for the design team at Xiaomi - the Redmi Note 3 can be a handful for some consumers with smaller hands. 

The left side of the phone houses the SIM card tray which can accommodate a micro-SIM card and a nano-SIM card or a microSD memory card (of up to 32GB). Both slots are capable of supporting 4G connectivity.

Display

While the Redmi Note 3 has the same screen size (5.5-inches) and resolution (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) and pixel density (401ppi), it boasts new technologies that will certainly entice Note 2 owners to upgrade. Like the recently announced Night Shift on Apple's iOS 9.3, Xiaomi also has a similar display setting, Reading Mode on the Redmi Note 3.

Accessed via Settings > Display > Reading mode, this feature essentially reduces the display's background glare to minimize eye strain. You can adjust the strength of the feature via a scroll bar or pre-select apps to use reading mode. Reading mode has to be enabled manually, unlike Night Shift where you can set a schedule for it to be activated and deactivated. 

On a similar note, the display on the Redmi Note 3 can detect ambient light in real time and dynamically adjusts the contrast of the whole screen for optimal viewing experience. This allows you to use the Redmi Note 3 even under bright sunlight. This can be enabled via Settings > Display > Colors & Contrast > Automatic contrast. 

Overall, the display is sharp and bright with vibrant colors. Under actual usage conditions in bright light, sunlight legibility is still decent though not great. There is nothing to nitpick here, especially when considering you are looking at a S$299 phone.

Fingerprint Sensor

It's rather surprising to see Xiaomi incorporate a fingerprint sensor for the Redmi series and the Redmi Note 3 is proud to be the first one to have one. Xiaomi states that it uses Trustonic's TEE chip-level fingerprint security. To put it simply, the Redmi Note 3 should have the same level of security as Apple's Touch ID; fingerprint data is stored in a dedicated space within the hardware. For the Redmi Note 3, this security enclave is created with the help of Qualcomm Secure Execution Environment. 

Xiaomi claims that the fingerprint sensor unlocks in just 0.3 seconds and in our testing, it really is that fast. You can even touch the fingerprint sensor with your finger and it will automatically unlock the phone and display. As the fingerprint sensor is located at the rear below the camera, you cannot unlock the phone if it is lying with the display facing up. 

Besides using it to unlock the phone, the fingerprint sensor can be enabled for Child mode and File Explorer. Setting it up is pretty easy; you have to setup a backup password before placing your finger on the sensor. It will take about 12 scans to register a fingerprint and you can register up to five fingerprints on the Redmi Note 3. 

Features

Like the Redmi Note 2, the Redmi Note 3 runs on MIUI 7 interface based on Android 5.1.1 Lollipop. In a nutshell, the MIUI 7 interface has been optimized to run 30% faster. You can find out more about the new features of MIUI 7 in the review of the Redmi Note 2, but there's one new feature on the Redmi Note 3 - four individualized UI themes which will offer different characters to the phone. They are High Lief, Rose, Pink Blush and Ocean Breeze. These four themes are in addition to the thousands of themes available.

After updating all the preloaded apps, the Redmi Note 3 comes with about 22.70GB of available storage space. The model sold in Singapore comes with 32GB onboard storage space, which you can increase up to 32GB via the SIM and memory card slot. 

Benchmark Performance

The Redmi Note 3 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 hexa-core 1.8GHz processor and 3GB RAM. Like its predecessor, the Redmi Note 3 delivers more performance than its price tag would suggest. Navigation was smooth and there was hardly any lag, something which plagued Xiaomi devices before the release of MIUI 7.

RAM usage by the OS was relatively heavy; 1.7GB was available when we closed all apps in the background. Below are the benchmark scores, relative to other affordable contenders. The Redmi Note 2 is also here, for comparison between both releases.

Quadrant

Quadrant evaluates a device's CPU, memory, I/O, and 3D graphics performance. The Snapdragon 650 processor of the Redmi Note 3 clearly took the lead in the Quadrant benchmark, even besting its Helio X10 octa-core counterpart in the Redmi Note 2. 

3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited

Originally developed as a PC gaming benchmarking tool, 3DMark now supports multiple platforms including Android. The Ice Storm benchmark is designed for smartphones, mobile devices and ARM architecture computers.

For an in-depth understanding of 3DMark for Android, do head over to our article, "3DMark - Android Device GPU Performance Review." In a nutshell, it is an OpenGL ES 2.0 benchmark test that uses fixed off-screen rendering to run two graphics tests designed to stress the GPU performance of your device and a physics test to stress its CPU performance. The benchmark consists of three test portfolios: Standard (720p resolution rendering), Extreme (1080p resolution rendering with higher quality textures and post-processing effects), and Unlimited (disabled v-sync, display scaling and other OS factors that make it ideal for chipset comparison). 

Since all the recent flagship smartphones max out the scores for the Standard and Extreme tests, we will only be looking at the scores for Ice Storm Unlimited. The Redmi Note 3 is almost on-par with the Desire Eye which runs on the Snapdragon 801 chipset. Nonetheless, the Redmi Note 3 fared 22% better than the Helio X10 processor in the Redmi Note 2. 

Sunspider Javascript

SunSpider JavaScript helps measure the browsing performance of a device when processing Javascript. It not only takes into consideration the underlying hardware performance, but also assesses how optimized a particular platform is at delivering a high-speed web browsing experience. The Redmi Note 3 easily outclassed the competition in the SunSpider Javascript benchmark with a significant lead over the other phones.

Camera Performance

The rear camera received a huge upgrade for the Redmi Note 3. You now get a 16-megapixel rear camera with f/2.0 aperture, 5-element lens, phase detection autofocus (PDAF) and a dual image signal processor. With the exception of optical image stabilization, these specs are typically found in higher-end smartphones which cost twice as much.

However, image quality is more than just specs on paper. It requires a fine balance of software image processing and hardware optimizations to deliver a good photo. Can the Redmi Note 3 deliver on this? Check out the two photos below:

The photo-taking experience on the Redmi Note 3 was a pleasant one; the user interface is simple and straightforward to use. We like how Xiaomi did not try to clutter the interface with too many options. What you see on the viewfinder are just five options - the video shutter, the camera shutter, the preview of the image captured, an option to switch to the front-facing 5-megapixel camera and a toggle to enable or disable the flash.

The Redmi Note 3 boasts Manual Mode although the options are limited to white balance and ISO levels. There are also several camera modes such as HHT (low light mode), fish-eye effect, Beautify, Tilt-Shift and Panorama. These options can be accessed from the camera viewfinder by swiping upwards. Swiping the opposite direction will bring you a selection of 12 filters from yesteryear, Japanese to Indigo. 

Battery Life

Our standard battery test for mobile phones includes the following parameters:

• Looping a 800 x 480-pixel video with screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
• Constant data streaming through email and Twitter

Armed with a huge 4,000mAh battery, the Redmi Note 3 lasted the longest at 10 hours and 23 minutes. That's about 48 mins longer than the ZenFone Selfie and close to four hours longer than the Redmi Note 2. Perhaps the use of a more power-efficient processor helped the Redmi Note 3 last much longer than its predecessor considering that they have the same screen size, resolution and run on the same software version.

This is evident in the Power Consumption chart where the Redmi Note 3 has a lower power draw compared to the Redmi Note 2. As noted in the ZenFone Selfie review, the ASUS smartphone should have better optimized software and hardware to deliver higher power efficiency.

Conclusion

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 (32GB, 3GB RAM) will go on sale tomorrow at S$299 via its website and the three telcos. For that price, is it worth buying? We think so. 

Aside from the attractive price tag, the Redmi Note 3 offers a premium and beautiful design that is a first for a product in its category. The 5.5-inch display provides ample screen estate for all your needs from gaming to reading, while offering a comfortable grip thanks to its curved edges and textured metal.

MIUI 7 OS is a huge improvement from previous versions. Even if you've been turned off by laggy past experiences, do give the Redmi Note 3 a chance and you won't regret it. The Snapdragon 650 processor with 3GB RAM provides enough horsepower to keep the phone running without any hiccups. Moreover, the 4,000mAh battery is one of the largest ever on a smartphone and its excellent performance in our battery test won't have you running to a power socket at the end of the day.

However, there are some drawbacks we observed about the Redmi Note 3 such as the fingerprint sensor. It may offer one of the quickest unlock experiences, but its location on the rear makes it inconvenient for anyone to unlock the phone when it is sitting on the desk. While the rear camera delivers good images in normal lighting conditions, its performance in low light leaves much to be desired. However, considering its price tag, we ought to cut it some slack. 

Overall, the Redmi Note 3 performs within or above expectations in most areas and you are unlikely to find a compelling alternative for what it has to offer. Looking ahead, we have high hopes for what Xiaomi plans to bring in the Redmi Note series.

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