review smartphone XIAOMI REDMI NOTE 3 A budget smartphone with best-in-class features for this category — Raj Kumar Maurya iaomi with the Make in India initiative adds another budget smartphone in their Redmi series. Redmi is the widely popular Xsmartphone series known for its affordable pricing and good specs. Redmi Note 3 is different in design from its predecessors and looks more appealing with its solid metallic body. Look and feel: The back panel of the phone is completely built with metal, sandwiched between two plastic pieces. The top plastic piece is replete with a 3.5mm headphone jack, noise cancellation and infrared (IR) emitter whereas bottom has the standard Micro- USB connector for charging and mic. The body has a smooth matte Price: `9,999 finish that doesn’t attract fingerprints. You can easily clean dust and grime off from the body with a simple wipe. The front has a 5.5-inch Full HD IPS display with narrow bezels and a glossy rim running along the edges. The IPS panel of the phone has very good color reproduction and is easily visible under direct sunlight. The top of the screen has the standard ear speaker, sensor, 5 Megapixel camera along with a notification LED for alerts. The capacitive buttons at the bottom of the screen are backlit which is different from the previous Redmi models. The volume rocker and power button are placed on the right, while the left side houses the hybrid SCORE Dual-SIM tray. The phone feels quite comfortable in hands; however, Price: 8/10 it might be a little bit tricky for small hands to use it one handed. Performance: 8/10 Overall: Decent camera: Redmi Note 3 provides 16-megapixel Features: 9/10 9/10 f/2.0 camera with PDAF. The photos clicked outdoors in good lighting conditions come with good details, sharpness and color reproduction. The autofocus is pretty fast even in the low light, the KEY SPECS: 5.5 inch HD Display, 1.4GHz Processor, 2GB RAM, images captured in low light are also decent and clearly visible. 16GB ROM, Front Camera 5-MP front and 16 MP rear camera, The front camera captures good selfies in daylight, thanks to the Android 5.1, Battery: 4050mAh, Fingerprint sensor same wide f/2.0 aperture. The camera app is simple to use and PROS: Great looks and build quality, vivid display, good battery life comes with plenty of shooting modes like Manual, Paranoma, Fish CONS: No screen protection Eye and more. Apart from different shooting modes, the app also WRITE TO: Xiaomi provides different filters. In shooting mode option the Manual mode Ph: 1800 103 6286, Email: [email protected] allows you to set white balance and ISO settings as per requirement but there aren’t any options for aperture or shutter speed. Performance: The Redmi Note 3 is certainly not packed with low quality hardware. It has a Hexa-Core Snapdragon 650 processor carousel, which displays random wallpapers on the lock screen. running at 1.4 GHz alongwith Adreno 510 GPU and 2 GB RAM, This feature selects the wallpaper from the collection provided by which is a great combination. If we talk about storage, then it Xiaomi which updates daily using the internet. provides 16 GB onboard storage that can expand up to 128 GB by In terms of preloaded apps, you get all basic productivity apps using SIM card slot 2 (which is a hybrid slot). The Snapdragon 650 you need for day to day work. In addition, it also comes with an doesn’t disappoint us much; we played multiple games including app called Mi Remote to support IR emitter functionality. This app Asphalt 8 and didn’t find any heating and glitching issues while lets you control infrared-capable devices such as TV, set-top box, playing it. For security, it has a fingerprint sensor which works AC, DVD player, projector and DSLR cameras. We have tested this fine and quite fast at unlocking the phone. It has an option to add app to control Philips LED TV and it worked perfectly. For power, multiple fingerprints and the sensor recognized our finger prints this device it has a non-removable Li-Po 4000mAh battery which almost every time to unlock the device. You can also lock your apps gives 7 hours and 25 minutes’ backup in continuous HD video using the fingerprint sensor. The phone ships with MIUI 7 based playback test at full brightness and volume. We easily managed on an Android Lollipop which is quite stable and intuitive. It is a more than a day of normal usage with a single charge of battery. single layered interface and user can easily customize it using the Bottomline: Redmi Note 3 at Rs 9,999 with 2GB RAM and 16GB theme and transition effects provided by Xiaomi’s theme store. storage along with fingerprint sensor is a good choice if you are After updating this phone, we get a new feature called Wallpapers looking for a budget smartphone with quality features. 74 PCQUEST JUNE 2016 pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected].