Xiaomi Redmi 3s Prime owner’s review

After using Xiaomi Redmi 3s Prime for more than a year I felt like a detailed review can be written. I have used this smartphone very roughly yet it never let me down. It worked mostly as a wifi router for me. I was using JIO SIM and for making calls i required VoLTE which this phone had. My primary phone was Sony Xperia Z5. Even being the flagship phone of Sony for 2015 they somehow did not add VoLTE support in that phone. So for calls i was using Redmi 3S Prime and to use internet i was using Xperia Z5 accessing internet via wifi from redmi 3s prime. This setup is a battery depleting one but redmi 3s prime outperformed wonderfully.

Redmi 3S Prime review

Design & build quality: Fairly compact & solid built, an impressive metallic unibody design. It just feels great in the hand. And if you happen to drop the phone even from shoulder length height, I assure you guys, nothing major will happen to it unless you are very unlucky. It may get a few scratches, but believe me, nothing more than that. Reminds me of old, but gold Nokia phones of earlier generation. It is available in Silver, Grey and Gold colour.

Hardware: Redmi 3S Prime is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 CPU clocked at 1.4GHz. The processor is coupled with an Adreno 505 GPU to take care of graphical intensive tasks. It is having 3GB RAM and 32GB of internal storage. The storage can be expanded further using a microSD card of up to 128GB in size. For my usage 3GB RAM is more than enough to handle the everyday multitasking.

Display quality & touch response: Ultra smooth touch response is what you get from the device. And the display is great to look at. Vivid, bright colors, deep blacks & sharp text. Certainly nothing to complain about at this price segment.

Software: The Redmi 3S Prime comes with MIUI8 which is built over Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Like all Xiaomi devices, the UI feels smooth. The menus, transitions and animations are nice and the applications loads up fast. You wont find any bloatware. Even most of the Google apps are not there. So you have to manually download them from app store. The Security app of MIUI is very useful. It keeps tabs on most of the activities of the system and includes a system junk and cache cleaner, a battery manager, data manager, a virus scanner, contacts block list and a permissions manager. There is an inbuilt call recorder which records the calls without any beep sound. Torchlight is also inbuilt and can be accessed even when the device is locked. Okay-Google works flawlessly.

Camera: Camera is decent performer. The 13mp rear camera captures nice images in good daylight and the front camera is good for selfies but make sure the lighting conditions are good. The front camera is good. The filters and beautify options are also useful.

Gaming experience: Haven’t tried heavy graphically intensive games yet, however light to mid graphics games such as Clash of Clans, Subway surfers, Temple run, 8 ball pool etc runs without an issue.
Battery backup : It has got a healthy battery life. Even with heavy usage, it easily outlasts 2 days on a full charge.

Redmi 3S Prime technical specifications

The Redmi 3S Prime is once again an excellent smartphone from Xiaomi (my previous favorite was Xiaomi MI3 ) and is also the best smartphone to buy under a budget of Rs. 10,000. It looks very nice and does its job perfectly. It’s an amazing phone without a shadow of doubt and delivers what it promises. Processor runs apps without hanging or heating up the phone. Fingerprint works flawlessly and is very fast. Battery life is the best part. Charge once and use it upto 2 days with medium usage.

Bought an iPhone 8 Plus few weeks back, my review of iPhone 8 Plus is coming up. Stay tuned.