Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Xiaomi is one of the most exciting Android OEMs in the industry—despite the fact that you can't buy the company's phones in the US or Europe. It has redefined the term "bang for your buck" for smartphones, offering low-cost, unlocked devices with great specs and build quality.

Previously, we were impressed with the Mi 4 and Mi Note, both of which offered relatively high-end specs for under $400. The Xiaomi Mi 5 will follow a similar pattern, offering the brand new Snapdragon 820 for less than the competition. Xiaomi doesn't just live in the high end of the market, though—today we're asking, "What can you build us for about a hundred bucks?" Xiaomi's answer is the astoundingly good Redmi 3.

Consider the current go-to budget Android phone, the $150 2015 Moto E. The Redmi 3 has a bigger, better screen (a 5.0-inch 720p versus the Moto E's 4.5-inch 540p display), a faster SoC (Snapdragon 616 versus Snapdragon 410), extra RAM (2GB), double the storage (16GB), a big battery (4100mAh versus 2390mAh), and a build quality bump from a sturdy plastic body to a metal one.

Xiaomi manages to do all this while still being $40 cheaper than the Moto E—if you live in a country Xiaomi does business in, you can snag the Redmi 3 for just $107 (CNY 699). The specs even beat the more expensive 2015 Moto G. For $220, Motorola/Lenovo will sell you a 16GB Moto G with 2GB of RAM. It's on par with the Redmi 3, but Xiaomi's phone still has a faster SoC, a bigger battery, and a metal body.

The big catch with this device, like all Xiaomi devices, is that it's not for sale in the US or Europe, and it doesn't support the right LTE bands to work here anyway. Our importer took a month to get the phone to the US and jacked the price 50 percent (which, at $160, is still a bargain). And this is still a Chinese phone from China; while you can pick "English" as the system language, that doesn't work for every app. Some things, like Xiaomi's app store and theme store, remain stuck in Chinese.

SPECS AT A GLANCE: Xiaomi Redmi 3 SCREEN 1280×720 5.0-inch IPS (244 PPI) OS Android 5.1 Lollipop with MIUI 7.0 CPU 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 (1.5Ghz quad-core Cortex A53 and quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex A53) RAM 2GB GPU Qualcomm Adreno 405 STORAGE 16GB NAND flash, expandable by up to 128GB via Micro SD NETWORKING 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1. GSM/GPRS/EDGE (900, 1800, 1900 MHz)

CDMA (800, 1900 MHz)

UMTS/HSPA+ (850, 1900, 2100 MHz)

4G LTE (1, 3, 7, 38, 39, 40, 41) PORTS Micro-USB 2.0, headphones, Micro SD slot CAMERA 13MP rear camera, 5MP front camera SIZE 5.48" × 2.74" × 0.33" (139.3 × 69.6 × 8.5 mm) WEIGHT 5.08 (144 g) BATTERY 4100mAh STARTING PRICE $107 off-contract and unlocked (CNY 699), about $160 for US importers OTHER PERKS IR blaster, Quick Charging, FM Radio, Dual SIM

Design and build quality

Build quality has always been a standout area for Xiaomi, but with the Redmi 3, building a metal device on the shoestring budget of $100 feels like a particularly strong effort from the company. We've tried devices in the $100 ballpark before, like the Moto E, the original wave of Android One phones, or Samsung's Tizen phone. Pick any one of those up and you'll immediately feel that low price in the plastic body (though, admittedly, some plastic phones are better than others). The Xiaomi Redmi 3 feels almost as well-made as a flagship device.

The metal back has a diagonal cross-hatch pattern etched into it, which reflects the light differently than the rest of the back. It probably won't be to everyone's taste. Above and below the metal panel are two plastic caps, which presumably act as a window for the radios. The bottom plastic section houses a surprisingly loud and crisp rear speaker, while the top holds the camera, LED flash, headphone jack, secondary microphone, and IR blaster.

The company didn't cut any corners here. This is a solid little device with zero squeaks or creaks. The power and volume buttons feel as good as any other phone. At 8.5mm thick, it is a little thicker than most high-end phones, (which is fine, OEMs!) but Xiaomi seems to have filled that extra space with battery, so we can forgive them for it.

It's not just the build quality that's great. Xiaomi has boosted the capabilities of the $100 segment more than any other vendor. Xiaomi went with components that are usually a full tier above this price segment.

The worst part of any of these cheap devices is usually the screen. As your main interface with the phone, it's the part you stare at all day, and a bad screen will affect a phone more than anything else. In the $100 segment we're used to mediocre 540p screens, but the Redmi 3 has a fantastic 5-inch, 720p LCD. Its 244 PPI isn't as sharp as a $700 500 PPI phone, but I really don't feel like I'm missing anything when using the Redmi 3's screen. The screen is bright and crisp, with great viewing angles. There's really nothing to complain about here, especially for $100.

The SoC is the same story—you'd expect a Snapdragon 4xx at this price point, but Xiaomi upgraded to an eight-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon 616 with 2GB of RAM.

There are even a few extras here. On the side of the phone is a SIM tray, which has two slots of cards in it. The first slot is for the primary SIM, while the second slot can take a second SIM or a microSD card. There are more things you would expect on a $100 device, like a secondary microphone for noise canceling, and even an IR blaster, which often doesn't show up on those $700 flagships we like covering so much. You are missing a few extras you'd usually get on a more expensive phone, though—namely NFC, USB Type-C, and a fingerprint reader. Xiaomi also isn't talking about the front display cover, which means it's probably not Gorilla Glass—it does seem to be some kind of glass, though.

MIUI 7: Android 5.x without any of the Android 5.x features







The Redmi 3 ships with Android 5.1 Lollipop and version 7 of Xiaomi's "MIUI" (pronounced "Me UI") skin. While most OEMs are content to paint inside Google's lines by branding Android with their own color scheme and icons, Xiaomi makes much more drastic changes, often coming up with interface solutions that are completely different from what you would expect from Android.

A lot of the changes make Android work more like iOS, like the removal of the app drawer, the switch to all rounded square icons (even if that means forcing a background on third-party icons), and changing Recent Apps from a vertical interface to a horizontal one. Other changes are purely MIUI inventions, like moving the quick settings to a horizontal panel next to your notifications.

Some Android skins out there tend to "rebuild" with every Android release, incorporating the new features that Google adds while rebranding the interface with the OEM's color scheme and UI artwork. MIUI doesn't rebuild with every Android release; it gets dropped on top of the new Android core. MIUI 6, for instance, released on top of Android 4.4 and Android 5.0—Xiaomi's user interface is independent of the Android version, and as a result it often paves over existing Android features.

As a result of this development cycle, the Redmi 3 ships with Android 5.1, but there are still a lot of Android 5.1 and 5.0 features that are missing. One of Android 5.0's biggest features was the overhauled "Overview" task switcher, which allowed apps to have multiple entries in the task list. Chrome used it to display every tab as a thumbnail in the Overview screen, and Google Docs could show multiple documents, making it easy to jump from webpage to webpage or document to document. This feature never made it to MIUI 7. The lock screen in Android 5.0 was updated to show notifications, but that's not in MIUI 7 either. Settings search, another Android 5.0 feature, is gone. This is something that would be especially useful on MIUI 7, since Xiaomi completely rearranged the settings, making it totally different from stock Android and from MIUI 6. Multi-user support is also dead. That's nearly every user-facing Android 5.x feature down the tubes, leaving only the under-the-hood improvements present in MIUI 7.

















What MIUI does offer is tons of customization. The whole interface supports theming, and Xiaomi ships an app store featuring a huge ecosystem of users and developers. The theme engine has been upgraded in MIUI 7, allowing for not just animations (Check out that sweet robot theme in the gallery) but for entire games to be contained in a theme. The Pixels theme has a lock screen with a working Pac-Man game (though it plays nothing like Pac-Man thanks to the ultra-sluggish character and lack of power pills). There's a GameBoy-style theme with a tiny Dragon Quest clone on the lock screen, complete with random RPG battles with enemies and an XP system.

There are also a million settings to dive into. You can customize the single press and long press action of all the hardware navigation buttons. You can rearrange the quick settings panel, change how the home screen scrolls, customize the status bar, change the system font, adjust the screen contrast and white balance, change the notification LED color, and a million other things. Again, it's really a shame that the settings search from Andorid 5.0 never made the jump to MIUI, because finding the thing you want is often difficult.

MIUI also has its own slate of features. Xiaomi's own permissions system is here, even though the feature was only added to stock Android in 6.0. There's also the ability to record phone calls.

I was surprised to find the Google Play Store front and center on our home screen, even on this device imported directly from China—a country where the Google Play Store supposedly isn't up and running. Google Play has been taking baby steps toward a full launch in China—Chinese developers can sell apps to people outside of China, but in the country itself Google still doesn't support paid apps. Rumor has it the company is working on a custom version of the Play Store specifically for China.

What's interesting is that Xiaomi ships the Google Play Store as the only Google app on this Chinese device. A normal Android phone would launch with Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome, Hangouts, and other Google apps, but on this China-bound Xiaomi phone, there's only the bare minimum of Google support. Xiaomi also ships its own stores on the Redmi3. There's the MIUI app store—the phone's only source for paid apps in China—and the separate theme store—which actually supports paid themes.

Update: After we posted this review, Xiaomi contacted us and gave us with some rather scary news: "The Redmi 3 should not come with Google Play preinstalled because it is a China-only product. It is very likely that the Play store you saw was preinstalled by the importer/seller. This is a very common practice with the unauthorised importers." This would mean our phone arrived at the reseller, they opened it, unlocked the bootloader, flashed on a new ROM with Google Play, relocked the bootloader, and stuck it back in the box.

I still wouldn't quite call the OS a fork of Android, since it still does continually update to the newest version (the flagship Mi 5 is on Android 6.0). It still ships with Google Play, which means it passed Google's Android compatibility tests and will run all your favorite apps. Xiaomi seems content to throw out the entire Android interface, though—it has its own interface, and it's going in its own direction. The problem I have is that Xiaomi's interface still feels like something that was based on Android 4.4, with no effort made to incorporate the latest changes and improvements made to Android since then. It feels like a totally different interface, and it's also clearly older, with more fluff and less functionality.

Defective Defaults

One of the most annoying MIUI changes is that it completely breaks Android's app picker in a way that makes picking and keeping your own default apps very difficult. In stock Android, when you have multiple apps that can handle an action—like if you want to open a link but have multiple Web browsers installed—a box will pop up and ask which app you want to use. You're also given an option to pick a default app and never see the box again for that action.

Android on the Redmi 3 never brings up an app picker. For instance, Xiaomi's browser is the default, and if you install Chrome, you are never given the option to make Chrome the default browser; Xiaomi's remains the default. If you want to change the default browser, launcher, e-mail app, or several other "core" apps that compete with Xiaomi's default offerings, you have to dig into the settings to do it.

What's worse, if you set the default app to a third-party one and install a third app of that type, the default resets to Xiaomi's app. Out of the box, Xiaomi's browser is the default. You can install Chrome and trudge through the settings to make it the default, but then if you install Firefox, Xiaomi's browser will become the default again. Ditto for third-party launchers and SMS apps. It's very easy to install something and have the default reset to Xiaomi's app.

There are some very rare instances when an app picker will pop up, which makes us think that maybe this is a bug. Google's Android Compatibility Definition Document (CDD) lays out specific requirements for how stuff like this works, and while maybe the current implementation on the Redmi 3 isn't technically against the rules, it certainly seems to go against the spirit of them.

One of the defaults you can never change, which is rather annoying, is the Redmi 3's app store. The default store belongs to Xiaomi, and while play.google.com links will still open the Play Store, "Market://" links—which are often used in apps—will only open Xiaomi's app store. Xiaomi's app store doesn't have anywhere near the number of apps that Google Play has, so most of the time this just opens a blank page. Market:// links isn't one of the specific Android intents protected by the CDD, so there is no rules violation here, but maybe there should be.

Listing image by Ron Amadeo