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| Xiaomi MI3 (WCDMA) |
I am going to start this post by saying: My reviews aren't the standard, well known, Hands On reviews.
It's not going to be all about photos and talk about how cool the box is and theese kind of stuff.
I am just going to describe the Xiaomi MI3 as it is in MY life.
Meaning: This post is going to be updated in the next few days :)
I purchased my MI3 from a web site called:
Coolicool.
I saw a lot of reviews about this site so I decided to buy the MI3 from there.
It took 19 days from the day I ordered it until the day i've got it.
So lets get this party started:
The MI3 comes with a USB cable and a European and American adapters (for the power socket).
I had an iPhone, Samsung Galaxys, Nokia Lumia 920 and some other phones.
The MI3 is feeling a little weird in my hand, It does give you the feeling of: when it falls, it won't completly break, like the Lumia 920 gave me, but it's plastic so it will break.
The MI3 has a speaker in it's bottom and a charging socket (weird place to put the charging socket but ok).
On the right side you have 2 buttons: Power button and Volume up and down button.
The Volume button is the upper one and the Power in the second.
On top of the MI3 you have a 3.5 jack socket for headphones, then the SIM (which can be opened like in the iPhone or Nokia Lumia 920, with a clip), and then the Microphone.
The MI3 comes with Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 and a Quad-Core 2.3GHz krait 400 CPU.
GPU: Adreno 330.
Battery: 3050mAh
The Primary camera is 13MP and the front camera is 2MP.
You can check the specs here on
GSMArena
So lets continue:
Switching on the MI3: the boot time is between 5 to 10 seconds.
The MI3 comes with MIUI OS Version 5 which is the Xiaomi Operating System and its Android version is 4.4.2.
I've known the MIUI OS since its 1st version.
The OS is slick, beautiful and very fast even on older phones.
MIUI OS has it's own permissions center and my MI3 came rooted by default (The shop installed the International version of the rom)
The lockscreen:
Holding the Circle will give you the choice to open the dialer, send SMS, take a picture or just unlock it.
Nice trick: pressing the circle 2 times will change the choices to a music player style, giving you the opportunity to play, skip to next song or go back to previous song (And ofcourse unlock).
After unlock the lockscreen for the 1st time, you don't get a welcome screen like the Samsung Galaxy or the Nokia Lumia 920 or other phones that has a welcome screen, You just see the lockscreen and when you open it, you get the pre-installed apps and clean desktop.
The default for the UI language is English. You have a lot of choices for languages, it even has the Hebrew language in there (Well, International rom version).
The MI3 (Well, the one I've got) comes with Clean Master app installed.
It gives you the feeling that you've got someone that cares for you and wants your phone to be clean and tidy.
The MI3 has 3 virtual buttons: Menu button, Home button and a Go Back button.
While on the Home screen or (any other desktop screen), pressing the Menu button gives you the usual menu for the launcher containing whatever settings the launcher have (search, settings, background settings and etc')
Holding down the Home button will open up the Task Manager where you can see the opened apps.
You can press on the Brush icon and it will automatically clean your memory.
You can slide up an app and it will kill it or you can slide down an app and it will lock it so when you press on the Brush icon to clean the apps, It won't clean the ones that you locked (sliding down).
So far, the phone doesn't have any lag or delays.
I randomly opened up apps and pressed on the Home button and it sent me right to the home screen without any delays or lags.
A nice thing that I found out about is: When you are in a middle of an activity and someone calls you, you hear the ringtone, but it doesn't interrupt and it shows you a green bar that says: Press here to return to the call.
It's great for example, when you write an email and suddenly someone calls you.
I installed Facebook, Whatsapp, YouTube, Waze, Facebook Messenger and it seems like it doesn't affect on the non-lag / delays.
I played Ashphalt 8: Airborne and it runs smoothly without cleaning the ram first.
The MI3 comes with Google Play pre-installed but no other Google apps (Gmail, Google+ and etc') which I find as a good thing.
Voice calls via the microphone sounds great, everyone can hear me well and I can hear them.
The speaker sounds good. I know some phones with louder speakers but if there no group of shouting people around you that's fine.
The option to record a call built in is great (Especially in my country where you can't trust services suppliers).
For this price of 288$ (at this time of writing), you get a great phone with a good build quality (the best quality I felt so far is Nokia Lumia 920), good speaker, great camera and all of this are built on the MIUI OS which I like.
UPDATE: Using the MI3 for over a month, with all kind of apps installed on it and it feels like new.
Hope you enjoyed my review.
