Chinese phone manufacturer Xiaomi is increasing building a reputation for itself as the poor man’s Apple with affordable devices that come with impressive features you’d ordinarily expect on more-expensive rival offerings. The company’s new invitingly-priced Redmi 3 looks to rival the amazing Lenovo Lemon 3 with some exciting features, including a humongous battery and an octa-core processor.
GSMArena
Design and Display
Amazingly for a smartphone this affordable, the Xiaomi Redmi 3 parades an aluminium body. It measures 8.5 millimetres in thickness and 144 grams in weight, with the textured rear making for comfortable grip. The phone comes in gold, silver and grey colour variants. It sports a 5-inch IPS LCD display with an HD resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels – outdone by the Full HD resolution offered by the Lemon 3. The screen should still deliver enjoyable wide-angle viewing nevertheless.
Camera and Storage
The Xiaomi Redmi 3 comes with a powerful 13-megapixel snapper on the rear. This camera with an f/2.0 aperture features LED flash and phase detection autofocus for spectacular shots, at least on paper. It can shoot Full HD (1080p) videos at 30 frames per second. There is a wide-angle 5-megapixel selfie camera, which is also capable of Full HD video recording. You get generous 16 GB of onboard storage memory, extendable by up to 128 GB via the microSD card slot.
Power and Performance
On the inside, the Xiaomi Redmi 3 packs an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 processor clocked at a speed of 1.5 GHz. Although the chip is a bit dated, it should still support better performance than what can usually be expected at this price point, especially when you consider the 2 GB of RAM on board. The smartphone boots Android 5.1 Lollipop software, with Xiaomi’s MIUI 7.0 skin on top. It will be accompanied by a jaw-dropping 4,100mAh Li-Ion battery that should get it running for many hours – this unit beats the 2,750mAh juicer on the Lenovo Lemon 3 out of the water.
Sundry Features
The Xiaomi Redmi 3 is a dual-SIM device, with one of its SIM slots doubling as a microSD card slot. You will be able to enjoy blazing-fast data connection speeds on this smartphone as it is 4G LTE-enabled. Connectivity features also include microUSB 2.0, Bluetooth 4.1 with A2DP, 3G and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n with Wi-Fi Direct and hotspot. GPS with A-GPS, GLONASS and BDS are all available for finding your bearing from place to place.
Pricing and Availability
This phone delivers great value as it is reportedly priced at 699 Yuan, same as the Lemon 3, putting the price in Nigeria in the range N21,000-N30,000 after conversion, depending on the source of exchange rate. But, as is common with Chinese companies when pushing out tantalizingly-priced devices, the Xiaomi Redmi 3 currently sells only in the Asian country, but it can be bought online.
Highlights
– Metal body
– 5-inch HD IPS display
– 13MP rear and 5MP front cameras
– 1.5GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 processor
– 2GB RAM
– 16GB onboard storage with 128GB microSD card support
– Android 5.1 Lollipop with MIUI 7.0
– 4,100mAh battery
– Dual SIM
– LTE
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