Yes, not a tablet but now and then I do review interesting mobiles from China. I’ll admit I’ve taken a liking to Xiaomi’s recent products, this company is really setting the standard for price-performance ratio with it comes to mobile phones. And their Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 Pro is the latest mobile to do so yet again. It features the new 2016 Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 Hexacore, which can turbo up to 1.8 Ghz, GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage. Unlike the Redmi Note 3 MediaTek Helio X10 I reviewed, this one now support microSD cards and has an improved Samsung S5K3P3 ISOCELL 16 Megapixel sensor over the 13MP one.
You get some great specs for the $215 starting price:
- Premium metal build
- Bright 1080p 403 PPI screen
- Large 4000mAh battery good for 9 hours of screen on time. (depending on the task)
- Dual Band 4G/LTE
- FM Radio
- 5MP front facing camera with 1080p video
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 six core CPU max turbo 1.8Ghz
- Adreno 510 GPU up to 600Mhz
- 2/3GB of Ram
- Fast eMMC internal storage of up to 150mb/s reads and 50 mb/s writes.
- 16MP (S5K3P3) camera with hardware 4k video support (using Google Camera)
Pros:
- Amazing performance for the price
- Great battery life over 9 hours on screen time and a PCMark work result of over 10 hours.
- Bright and vivid 1080p panel looks sharp and has good viewing angles
- GPS works well
- Audio quality is very decent. Calls, loudspeaker and 3.5mm headphone jack output
- 78,000 Antutu score is a new record for this price range
- 1500 single core score in Geekbench 3 is impressive, beats the Snapdragon 810 and my Exynos 7420 (Note 5)
- Premium build and specs at a non-premium price.
Cons:
- Camera performance in low light is very poor
- 1080p video quality is average. (But still one of the better ones at this price point)
- No NFC
- No faster quick charge 3 support, but the chipset supports it.
- Stock camera app doesn’t support 4k but the hardware does.
- MIUI is full of Chinese, Needs a Global ROM Asap without Chinese.
Overall this is an impressive phone with amazing performance for the price tag. Its performance beats many 2015 model flagship mobiles that cost a good three times the price. The only negatives of the mobile I can find are it has no NFC support and the camera is rubbish in low light conditions. But in good lighting takes a very decent picture. This is going to be one hard mobile to beat for the price, things are only getting better in the low-end category in 2016.
I’ve very interested in seeing what the new snapdragon 820 will be capable of if this 650 is anything to go by…
16MP Camera samples:
Redmi Note 3 Pro video samples, 1080p and 4k using Google camera.
