Here comes 小米 Xiaomi baby!
First batch of Xiaomi Mi3 smartphones sold out in Singapore
Sidney Wong
Hardware Zone
Monday, Mar 10, 2014
It only took two minutes for stocks to run out.
The first batch of Xiaomi Mi3 was snapped up by consumers within minutes after it went on sale at 12 noon on Friday.
Priced at S$419, the Mi3 is a good deal if you do not require 4G LTE connectivity and a memory card slot.
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Its midrange offering, the Redmi has proven to be very popular among consumers too. The first batch sold out within 8 minutes on February 21 while the second batch was gone in 6 minutes.
Xiaomi sells most of its smartphones through its website and social networks in China. For Singapore, Xiaomi also partnered with the three telcos to sell its phones. Selling phones online helps the company minimise costs for consumer as it eliminates the need for middlemen and distributors.
Many critics pointed out that Xiaomi is using scarcity marketing to create artificial shortages, the Chinese phone maker stated that these flash sales are used to gauge consumer reaction to each phone model. If the response to a particular phone model is positive, Xiaomi will increase production of the phones to meet demand. This helps to keep costs to a minimum while ensuring that there is no surplus.
Xiaomi Mi3 - A flagship smartphone that doesn't cost a bomb
Overview
Xiaomi may be a new player in the mobile scene here, but its marketing strategies and presence do not go unnoticed. Its midrange smartphone, the Redmi, is so popular among consumers in Singapore that the first batch of stocks ran out in 8 minutes on February 21. The second batch released six days later was snapped up in 6 minutes.
It's not hard to guess why the Redmi sold like hotcakes; it presents itself as an extremely good value for money smartphone and delivers good performance for its price point. Its flagship smartphone, the Mi3 is selling very well in the Chinese market too. Here's a quick overview of its sales figures for the past few months:
• 100,000 units were sold out in less than two minutes (to be exact, 86 seconds or 1 minute and 26 seconds) on October 2013
• 150,000 units were sold in 9 minutes and 55 seconds on WeChat
• 50,000 units were sold out in 4 minutes and 59 seconds on January 7
Let's take a look at what the Mi3 has to offer and how it stands among the other Android flagship smartphones.
The Mi3 (front) is the flagship smartphone for Xiaomi whle the Redmi (behind) is the midrange smartphone.
Design and Handling
Upon first handling the Mi3, we felt that it had an uncanny resemblance to certain phones that we've reviewed. It took us quite a while to figure it out, and perhaps you may disagree with us, but the Mi3 has a similar feel to Nokia's Lumia devices.
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The curvy sides of the Mi3 and the speaker grille at the centre bottom section are design trademarks of Nokia Lumia smartphones, especially the older models such as the Lumia 800 and 900. As such, you can expect its handling to be fairly good and perhaps even a tad better than the Lumia devices considering the Mi3 is quite sleek at 8.1mm and weighs 145g. It is even lighter than the 4.7-inch Redmi which weighs in at 158g.
The Xiaomi Mi3 (bottom) has similar design attributes as the Nokia Lumia 900 (top) such as the curved sides and the speaker grille.
The Xiaomi Mi3 has a flatter design compared to the Redmi which has a slightly tapered back.
As a flagship smartphone, the build quality and design of the Mi3 is obviously a rank better than that of the Redmi, and can rival most of the Android flagship smartphones except the ASUS PadFone Infinity and HTC One which have an aluminium unibody that looks and feels premium. Having said that, on first appearances, the Mi3 also seemed to have an aluminium back. Looks can be deceiving, so we clarified it with Hugo Barra himself and confirmed that it is actually plastic. Yes, you read that right - it's not metal.
According to Xiaomi, the chassis has an internal magnesium alloy structure encased in three layers of graphite. This gives the Mi3 a solid feel and a "metallic" appearance. The sandblast finish further helps to keep the Mi3 looking clean even after using it for a week; fingerprints and smudges aren't obvious and to most, you probably can't spot it.
Looks can be deceiving; the Xiaomi Mi3 does not have a metal rear. It is actually plastic.
Unlike the Redmi, the Mi3 does not have a removable back cover and battery. Perhaps Xiaomi wants to maintain the elegant design of the phone and does not want a removable cover to break the uniformity. The normal-sized SIM card slot can be found at the top centre section of the Mi3. There is also no memory card slot to further augment the 16GB internal storage capacity of the Mi3. Out of the box, the Mi3 comes with 12.28GB of available storage space to install apps and store multimedia files.
Most Android smartphones today use micro-SIM cards and the Xiaomi Mi3 is an exception to the rule. It uses a standard sized SIM card. Seen here is a micro-SIM card in a black SIM card adapter.
The Mi3 also has the standard three capacitive navigation buttons located below the display, but unlike the value-oriented Redmi device, Mi3 comes with backlighting. You can turn it off or determine the duration of the the backlight if you think it is unnecessary or further preserve power draw. You can access these options via Settings > Buttons > Button Light or Button Light Settings.
The small notification LED that resides below the home button on the Redmi is shifted to the right side of the front-facing camera above the display. You can set it to light up in any of the 7 colors (blue, red, yellow, green, cyan, white and violet) for notifications, calls and messages.
5-Inch Full-HD IPS Display
The Mi3 comes with a 5-inch Full-HD (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) IPS display, which is on-par with almost all the Android flagship smartphones we've seen so far including the recently announced Samsung Galaxy S5 and Sony Xperia Z2.
We find the display to be as good as most of its competing peers, but it is not as bright as some of the other phones. In addition, its anti-glare coating appeared to be ineffective when using the phone outdoors as we had to bump up the brightness to 100 per cent to read content comfortably.
Xiaomi also includes a Glove mode for the Mi3, which makes the display more sensitive; this allows you to navigate the interface even when wearing gloves, ideal in harsher temperate climate. This feature can be enabled via Settings > Display > Glove mode. You can also adjust the colour temperature and saturation of the display, an option that is also present in some Samsung mobile devices.
You can adjust the color temperature of the display to be warm, standard or cool. There is even colour saturation options - standard and brillant.
Software Features
The Mi3 ships with MIUI V5 OS (JXDSGBA8.0) which is based on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. We've a detailed explanation on what is MIUI and the top five features of the platform in our review of the Redmi device, which also uses the same OS. As such, we will not be discussing these aspects again. Since MIUI is a new interface for most users in this part of the world, we're currently working on a separate article to explore more features of MIUI V5.
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