Sanket Shah
Exclusive: Xiaomi Mi3 Review
If you are planning to buy the Xiaomi Mi3 later this year then this is the review you have been waiting for! Read the complete, in-depth Nvidia Tegra 4 powered Xiaomi Mi3 review here!
To kick off the review this version of the Xiaomi Mi3 is a Nvidia Tegra 4 model which is designed to work on China Mobiles TD-SCDMA 3G network. As I am based in Spain 3G won’t work here, but GSM and Edge do. Also, this is a pre-production version of the Mi3 so I did come across a few bugs which hopefully won’t be present on the retail version.
Xiaomi Mi3 Unboxing and hands Video
For those of you who saw our Xiaomi Mi3 unboxing post a few days back you will have already seen the video below, but in case you missed it here it is again:
The first feelings are amazing, so fast and the menus and transitions work very well. There was some lag with the stock firmware, but updating to the latest weekly build system performace became much better. We did also experience some lag with the camera, but this is likely to be fixed with updates and might not even be present by the time the phone goes on sale.
Xiaomi Mi3 screen
The screen of this phone looks top quality, manufactured by Sharp, this 5 inches screen with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 allows a very clear picture. Screen brightness is intense and allows the phone to be seen in most situations without issue. Responseness is very good and follows your fingers when you touch it without any lag. Viewing angle are excellent and the screen can easily be read at almost any angle.
Xiaomi say that the display is ultra sensetive, and I can confirm it works with the tip of your finger even when wearing a glove or covered with a cloth.
The display features Corning Gorilla Glass protection so you need not worry to much when using the phone as it should survive the odd knock and drop.
Xiaomi Mi3 camera
Many people asked me to throughly test the camera, I have done so but as the firmware isn’t running as it should (being a pre-production model) it did seem laggy and some of the built-in features could not be fully used. Some of the effect filters are actually missing the filter, focus was an issue sometimes and panorama mode was slow. Again, this isn’t a production model and other Xiaomi phones we have used have not had these issues so we are going to put these issues down to it running a firmware which Xiaomi are not ready to launch with.
1080p Video Sample
720p Video Sample
The camera quality is very good and easily on par with rival phones. To avoid issues with the firmware though I took these sample photos at 10 mega-pixels rather than the full 13. Still the quality is very good and I think you will agree that the results are excellent. For the night photos I was able to use a 2 second exposure to capture even more light and create great photos.
Xiaomi Mi3 photo samples
NOTE: Photos from Mojácar (Almería in Spain) 
Below are some screen shots of the MIUI camera interface. As you can see there are plenty of options to tweak photos how you like and create the perfect photo.
