I was pretty excited when Xiaomi officially came to Malaysia and I have written on a previous post why this company deserves our attention.
When they officially started sales, the stock finished in minutes and I was lucky enough to get both the Mi 3 phone and the Mi Power Bank. I will do a small review on the power bank after I have had enough tries on it, since testing battery performance takes time. For now, let's get back to Mi3!
Mi3 is priced at RM769 (After RM120 price cut this round) and the specifications are great that it can almost rival other flagship phones at less than half their price which is why it's got people setting their sights on it. This is just the unboxing and hands on review. Watch out for the full review coming soon!
Buying Experience
If you have bought things from Xiaomi before, you can skip this part. Officially Xiaomi only sells their products through their own websites as they do not have any retail stores at all. If you are buying from other sources, you might have problems with warranty or pay more for it so I would advise you to buy everything from www.mi.com/my only.
However, the problem here is that Xiaomi releases their products in batches so you have to be fast. Based on my experience, getting the phone is much easier than getting the power bank. Despite the fact that their stock is very limited, the whole process is hassle-free: Select the product and add it to the cart, choose the number of the product and checkout. After which, you will have to fill in your particulars to confirm your order and proceed with payment.
After your order is confirmed, you will have to make the payment within 24 hours. This means that after you finish checking out you don't have to pay immediately to confirm your order. The payment needs to be done through credit card or Paypal. Some debit cards are accepted too but it's best if you link and pay via Paypal.
If your payment is not accepted, don't be too disappointed and try again the following week. I found this to be actually quite fun when I was trying to make a purchase together with my group of friends. Quite a special experience for me as you have to put in effort to spend your money.
Once you succeed in placing your order from Xiaomi, all you have to do is wait for it to reach your doorstep. When it reached my place, I felt really happy to receive it, as if it was a trophy won through a fight! You won't get this experience if you are buying from other brands and this is one of the special things about Xiaomi.
Unboxing
The shipping box is covered by shipping labels so there's nothing special about it. Opening it up will reveal the things you bought. For my case, I got the phone, screen protector and power bank in very simple, cardboard boxes with the dark brown logo printed nicely on them. The fact that Xiaomi does not sell its products in a brick-and-mortar store means that they can save cost on the packaging, so there is no need to make it very eye-catching. However, I like the simplicity of the design.
The adapter comes in a separate box and I guess it is because different places have different standards so it would be easier for them to separate it out. The adapter is a 1A charger, which is quite disappointing. Since Mi3 has a big battery, the charging might take a long time. A micro-sim card tray is provided too along with the normal-sized sim card tray inside the phone. This is very thoughtful from Xiaomi which means that there's a big chance you don't have to worry about your sim card size. (Sorry, nano sim card user, your size is not supported.)
Opening up the box with the phone will reveal our leading actor: the Mi3 smartphone. There's a matte screen protector with printing that shows the button position and for me to peel it off. (My favourite!) The screen is quite glossy here and we will see whether that will affect the viewing experience or not. Under the phone is the folded envelope housing the sim card tray ejecting pin and some paperwork.
Pulling the smaller box out will reveal two openings at each end. Only one of them contains the micro USB cable, which is quite long, while the other one is empty. By now you should have noticed that no headphones have been provided with the phone, which is quite surprising; I thought providing headphones with phones was standard practice now? This is probably where the cost-cutting comes in so we can have such great specifications at such a low price.
So these are what we have in the box!
The Phone
Let's find out more about the phone itself. The one I got was the Metallic Gray 16GB GSM/WCDMA model, which is the only option available in Malaysia.
With the screen off, the front is all black save for a silver Mi logo in the top left corner. We have a speaker at the top. To the left of the speaker are ambient and proximity sensors (which can't be seen clearly in the picture below) and on the right is the frontview 2MP camera and the notification light. At the bottom there are 3 backlit capacitive keys which are invisible when it's not turned on.
I like the clean look here but I don't really like the placement of the logo on the left. I am a fan of symmetry and I would like it in the middle rather than the side.
The front is covered by Gorilla Glass 3 and under the glass is the 5″ IPS Full HD 1080p display. (We will come back to the screen later once the phone is fired up.)
Let's have a look at the body of the phone: The phone has a dimension of 144×73.6×8.1mm and it weighs 145g only. The phone is quite thin but quite long. The body is made of magnesium alloy frame covered by graphite film and I love the feel of the material. The cold touch and metallic texture give a very premium feeling. Holding it feels great and substantial. That being said, the phone is bigger than I like. The side of the phone is curved but the corners and the back are not, making the experience of holding it much less pleasant than phones like HTC One M8. Time will tell if the corners will hurt my hand or not.
Flipping to the back will show the nice silver back. There is a label on the back of the phone with your IMEI and serial number. You should keep this protected in case you need to send your phone for repair.
As you can see, the back of the phone looks clean too and it somehow reminds me of the iPhone. The 13MP camera and the flash is on the top left corner. On the bottom is the shiny, reflective logo and also some labels below it. Very similar to the iPhone isn't it?
Again, I like the simple aluminium back but dislike the position of the camera due to its asymmetry. In addition, a camera on the corner will make taking photos awkward as there is a large chance of my hand covering up the camera, like what I did with the iPhone and iPad all the time. That being said, I tried a few shots with the phone and the pictures are quite promising. We shall see how it performs in several different conditions in the full review.
The side of the phone has a nice curve to improve the feel in hand. The left side is clean while the right side has the volume rockers and the power button, which are in the right place for my thumb to press easily.
The top of the phone has a 3.5mm audio jack, a microphone and the sim tray. The bottom houses the speaker and the USB port. The speaker holes are nicely grilled. The top and bottom of the phone are flat so it feels a bit unwieldy due to the lack of curves at the bottom.
Let's turn on the phone now! A white logo is shown in the center of the screen and it turns orange later as shown above. Then a set up tour is prompted. The end of the set up tour will bring us to the homescreen. The display is gorgeous. Colors are vivid and not overly saturated. The 441 pixel per inch screen is very crisp and sharp. I can't differentiate individual pixels even if I look at it so closely my eyes nearly pop out. The viewing angles are great too. Currently, I have no complaints about the screen at all.
The phone is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 Quad Core 2.3GHz processor with Adreno 330. There is a 2GB of RAM too. The battery has a huge 3050mAh capacity but is not removable. I expect a very long battery life from this phone and I hope it will not disappoint.
You can find almost everything here like NFC, GPS and Bluetooth 4.0 but there are a few compromises too. No 4G LTE is available and no expandable storage either. Given that the internal storage is only 16GB and the 64GB model is not here yet, memory shortage might be an issue for a lot of people.
MIUI V5 is loaded in the phone above Android 4.4. The UI is colourful and smooth. No lag can be detected at all in my short playing period. MIUI is one of the hottest ROMs used by Android phone users and I shall see if the UI works fine for me or not as I am a fan of simple and practical UIs rather than featured-packed yet sluggish ones. For the time being I feel that there is no 'WOW' factor in the software unlike the surprise I had in the hands on of Huawei Honor 3C which packs in the Face Unlock features.
Screen Protector
I also bought a screen protector which cost RM10. You have a choice of matte and clear screen protectors to choose from. In the package there are 2 real screen protectors, 1 practice film, 1 cleaning cloth and 1 static film to clean the screen and 2 stickers for you to apply the screen protector with.
It's very sweet of Xiaomi to include a practice film which will be very useful for people who don't have experience using it. However, the instructions are printed in Mandarin. Given that there are so many people who do not know Mandarin in Malaysia, this is quite a let-down. This shows that Xiaomi still has some work to do if they really want to step out of China.
Verdict
In the short time trying out the phone, I feel that the phone is quite promising and given that price, there should not be any big complaints either. I will give it a good try and share more of my thoughts in the full review. Now my biggest question will be whether I should compare it to the other flagships or compare it to the other phone with the same price. What do you think?
