Here’s our unboxing and initial review of Mi’s flagship smartphone, the Mi3. The Mi3 will finally be available in Lazada next week.
Mi Philippines will also be launching the Redmi 1s, Redmi Note and other Mi devices and will start opening its service centers and pick up points starting next month.
Currently, Mi3 is the world’s fastest smartphone having an Antutu ranking of over 36,000.
Now, for the unboxing.
The Mi3’s packaging is very basic. Just plain, light brown box (probably made of recycled paper). In front is the Mi logo and at the back, you can find Mi3’s specs in Chinese. During our meeting with Hugo, we learned that the Mi3’s box was made really durable that you can even step on it.
Inside the box is the Mi3 smartphone, SIM card eject pin, user manuals (in Chinese) and the charger.
Design and Construction
The Mi3 is only available in Metallic Gray but you can find a lot of cases and accessories in the Mi3 website.
The Mi3’s body is made of plastic with an aluminum-look coating. Inside is a magnesium alloy frame coated with three layers of thermal graphite. It’s 8.1mm thin and weights 145 grams. The overall design reminds me of the Nokia Lumia 920 at first glance. The Mi3’s frame is sturdy and the design (with the rounded corner) provided a comfortable grip to the smartphone.
On top is the 3.5mm audio/headphone jack
On the right is the volume and power keys
At the bottom is the micro USB port and speakers
Mi logo on the top left of the screen
The navigation buttons below the screen
The wide bezel on top and below the screen.
Display
The Mi3 has a gorgeous 5 inch Full HD HD (1920×1080) IPS display at 441ppi. It has great viewing angles and you can see the colors popping out. The Mi3’s display could compete with the display of high end smartphones of known brands.
Camera
The Mi3 has a 13MP rear camera with 28mm wide angle, 5-piece lens capable of taking photos at low lit areas with its f/2.2 aperture. The camera also has a built in Phillips dual LED flash. The front is a 2MP camera. Both cameras support 1080p HD video recording.
The Mi3’s camera is one of Mi3’s assets. The camera is fast and can take beautiful images. I am really impressed with the camera’s performance especially with the HDR.
Performance
The Mi3 is powered by a 2.3 GHz Quad Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 8274AB processor with an Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB RAM. It isn’t the world’s fastest smartphone for nothing. I tried loading the usual apps such as Plants vs Zombies 2, Temple Run 2, Angry Birds Star Wards and graphic-heavy games such as Dead Trigger 2 and Modern Combat 4 and I didn’t experience any lags when playing a game. The Mi3 smartphone I am using scored 31,622 in Antutu.
The UI is snappy and every object in the game (such as the smokes and bullet trails in MC4) is displayed in details.
The Mi3 uses an Android 4.4.2 KitKat with MIUI ver 5 on top. The MIUI is fast and responsive provided a number of Themes which further made the Mi3 experience more fun and interesting.
The Mi3 doesn’t have and LTE and also the 16 GB internal storage maybe not enough for some. Hopefully, we’ll see a 32GB or 64GB Mi3 version released soon.
Wrap Up
The Mi3 poses a serious challenge to other smartphones within its price range. At Php 10,599, one could not ignore the features (you can only find on high-end smartphones) that Mi3 could offer. The Mi3 is definitely worth every penny. 🙂
Watch out for our complete review of the Mi3 in the coming days.
Meanwhile, (because you asked for it) here’s a video unboxing of the Mi3. Sorry for the quality guys, promise, I’ll do better next time. Cheers!
Mi3 Sample Photos in Standard Mode, HDR (there’s Low, Standard and High photo quality settings)
