The Xiaomi Mi3 was sold out in India, 38 minutes and 50 seconds after its launch on July 22. The smartphone, which has been giving Samsung sleepless nights in China, has been touted to be a game changer for the Indian market. It has premium build quality and specifications, but comes at a very affordable price.
While we have reviewed the Xiaomi Mi3 and the MiUI, here are 13 things that you perhaps don't know about the phone and its UI.
The Xiaomi Mi3 is a relatively low-cost smartphone, it uses high quality core components. It has a display made by Japan Display or Sharp, flash storage from SanDisk, camera sensor from Sony and batteries from LG or Sony and camera flash from Philips. While Sony is known for its camera sensors, JDI and Sharp both make displays for Apple. Also, Qualcomm is an investor in Xiaomi, which perhaps makes it easy for them to acquire the Snapdragon chipsets.
Xiaomi saves about 20-30% expenses by not spending on advertising, which is why their products are priced so low. Also, the company brings a pre-determined number of devices to the market, which is why they sell out so fast. Xiaomi makes its money from selling content and accessories. It has a strong backing from its community and developers and sells only through e-commerce portals.
There are two noise cancelling mics on the Mi3 (one on the top and one next to the camera). You can choose to use one or both the mics to cancel noise during calls.
The Mi3 ships with only the device, charger and the documentation. Xiaomi doesn’t include earphones with the Mi3 in any country.
The Xiaomi Mi3 does heat up quite easily. The good thing though is that while it does get warm, it doesn’t go beyond that. This means that you will never be uncomfortable with how hot it gets.
The Xiaomi Mi3 gives you almost a full day's battery under normal usage. But, if you do end up draining the battery, then the phone takes a very long time to charge. A full charge, from zero to 100%, takes almost 4 hours.
One of the major issues with the Mi3 is in the screen brightness and sunlight legibility. Since the screen is quite glossy and somewhat of a fingerprint magnet, the sunlight legibility is very low, even when the brightness is turned up to maximum. You can easily discern the lack of brightness by placing it next to an iPhone 4S, Moto X etc.
The MiUI lets you customise what long pressing the capacitive buttons would do. So, you can access the camera by long pressing the back button, or set other options for it. The same can be done with the home and settings buttons.
Tons of tweaks and settings options for sound. You can go to Settings → Sound → Optimise audio quality to access Mi Sound. This comes alive only when headphones are connected and you can choose from certain presets or tweak the equaliser yourself.
The MiUI does take up a lot of memory. In the Mi3, you will have maximum 950 MB of RAM free on your device. Thankfully, Android KitKat's garbage collection mechanism allows for the phone to hold up without crashing.
You can drag an app to the top of the screen to uninstall it. This is especially useful when uninstalling multiple apps. Pinch on the screen to enter edit mode, then select the apps that you want to delete by tapping on them. This will bring the apps to the bottom of the screen. Now swipe from right to left to group them and then drag them to the top of the screen, uninstalling all of them together.
The camera app is exhaustive and allows a lot of control. It allows you to switch between simple and advanced modes. In the advanced modes, you can manually set focus, exposure etc. and add filters and other things to tweak your images manually.
We have all used websites to test our network speeds. With the MiUI, you can do this from the phone itself. Go to Settings → Notifications → Show Connection Speeds.
The display on the Xiaomi Mi3 is a 5-inch Full HD IPS LCD, which is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3. The presence of the Gorilla Glass is something that the company doesn't market much, but it adds a great deal to the phone's feel.
Also, Xiaomi says that the Mi3 can be operated while wearing gloves. You can turn on 'Glove Mode' from the Settings.