We unbox the Xiaomi Mi 3!
We’ve been hotly anticipating our review device of Xiaomi’s current flagship, the Mi 3, ever since the company announced that they’d be sending out review units when we talked to them last Monday. We’ve finally taken posession of the Mi 3, and today we’ll be unboxing it for you guys!
Xiaomi Mi 3 specs
- 2.3GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 MSM8274AB processor
- 2GB of RAM
- 16GB of storage, non-expandable
- 5-inch full HD IPS display, 1080 x 1920 resolution
- 13-megapixel camera with autofocus, dual LED flash
- 2-megapixel front camera
- Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, NFC, USB OTG, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS
- 3G, HSDPA
- 144 x 73.6 x 8.1 mm
- 3050mAh li-ion battery (non-removable)
- Android 4.4 with MIUI
Packaging and contents
The Mi 3 comes in a small, very unassuming brown box. The box is small and relatively thin, without the normal branding that you’d normally associate with international flagship devices.
The only thing that clues you in to the contents within is the Mi branding on the top of the package, and the specifications of the Mi 3 that’s printed on the back. It’s a very understated and elegant packaging that’s also not wasteful, which seems to be the overall theme of Xiaomi in general.
Inside, you’ll find the Mi 3, along with a charger cable, charger and a manual. Xiaomi does not include a pair of headphones in the package, which is kind of odd. Then again, many of us either have a reliable pair of headphones anyway that we use with our phones, so that’s not really that big of a deal.
Initial impressions, part deux: still fast, solid and beautiful
In a nutshell, the Mi 3 is beautiful, and has a design that mirrors the packaging it came with – it’s simple, elegant, somewhat understated yet still manage to turn heads whenever we take it out of our pocket.
We mistakenly thought that the body of the Mi 3 was made out of aluminum when we first wrote about it, though now we know better. It’s actually made of plastic, but the finish on it usually fools anyone that sees it for the first time.
Since the Mi 3 uses a plastic body, it’s less slippery than metal bodied phones – that’s the theory anyway. The sides of the Mi 3 are rounded, which makes it easier and more pleasant to hold in your hands.
We were also blown away by how sharp and bright the display of the Mi 3 was. While full HD displays are almost a dime a dozen nowadays, the one on the Mi 3 stands out because of just how nice it is. It has great color saturation and accurate colors overall.
We didn’t get to run AnTuTu on the Mi 3 that we played with last Monday, something that we made up for with the review unit sent to us. While the AnTuTu score on our device is far from the 36000 points that Hugo said the Mi 3 is capable of, we managed to score a respectable 31607 points (AnTuTu actually has the Mi 3 pegged at a higher score than that).
It’s very early in the review cycle to give the Mi 3 a verdict, but right now things are looking good. While the company has not said anything definite about pricing as of yet, the Mi 3 will have a price that’s close to what it retails for in other countries, so you can probably expect it to go for less than 15K that it used to sell in Lazada.