Mi A3, one of the most hyped phones of the year, was recently launched on August 23. Following the hype, we got our very own Mi A3. We have mixed feelings about this phone, we would be sharing the good and bad aspects of the phone and let you decide.
We would not waste our time by mentioning the specifications. For that, you can check: Xiaomi Mi A3 – Full Phone Specifications
What are the reasons you should buy Mi A3?
Build & design
Only a year has passed since Xiaomi Mi A2 but the step forward made by the company, in terms of design and customization, is remarkable. Xiaomi Mi A3 comes with a dimension of 153.5 x 71.9 x 8.5 mm for a weight of 173 grams. You will have noticed the rather pronounced thickness, because of the large battery. However, this thickness in daily use will not be a problem. Thanks to the tapering of the rear body you can enjoy excellent grip, even with one hand.
The new Mi A3 mount a display from 6.01 inch Super AMOLED HD + (720 x 1560 pixels, 286 PPI). Good viewing angles and responsiveness of the touch screen, as well as the management of frames that “don’t cut” portions of the display.
Cameras
The camera has always been one of the strong points of the Mi A series. Mi A3 success to shine in this department. Rocking a 48 MP main sensor with 8 MP ultra-wide-angle camera has also 2 MP depth sensor for portrait images. The image processing is pretty good with sharp, vibrant and has a fair bit of dynamic range to the image. Talking about night mode pics, they are also usable. On the video recording side of things, the Mi A1 is capable of recording 2160p video at 30 fps at its best.
For the selfie camera, we have a 32 MP camera which takes some extremely detailed selfies and shoots up to 1080p at 30 fps video.
Stock Android
Android One, a program announced by Google in 2014, has been one of the main points of why one should buy Mi A series. Android One on Mi A3. Stock android is certainly better than MIUI. some of the advantages:
- No Advertisement
- No preloaded apps
- Monthly and timely software update
- Optimized stock android feel
Battery
When you consider the low-resolution screen, large battery, and modern SoC, it’s not difficult to see why the Mi A3 offers good battery life. I easily got a full day of usage with this phone, using it mostly for browsing social media and watching YouTube videos. With 4,030mAh bulky battery and 18 W fast charging.
What are the reasons you should not buy Mi A3?
Xiaomi Mi A series phones have always been in demand because they pair good hardware with clean Android One software. But there is noting that one should get happy about the third version on this line-up. So, we would be sharing what actually are the reasons you should not buy Mi A3.
Lack of full HD display – only 720p display
One of the biggest problems with this phone is its display. Offering only 720p display or only HD+ display seems to be inferior against its own siblings on the exact same price point. We have never seen a company to downgrade the display quality, Mi A1 and A2 both were strong in terms of the display with A1 offering Full HD+ and A2 offering 1080p display Mi A3 with only 720p display seems to be its biggest flaw.
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Because of the display on this phone, watching or streaming movies and playing games would be just the disappointment. With the videos that can be only streamed in 720p and gaming with only limited pixels to work on, we got only a bad experience.
Chipset
With the availability of such good processors like Snapdragon 710 or Snapdragon 712 in a similar price range, Xiaomi chooses to use Snapdragon 665. We are paying 23,999/- for just Snapdragon 665, that not a price justified processor.
Although Xiaomi aggressively markets Snapdragon 665 to delivers the power you need for a superior gaming or browsing experience but the things remain just on paper. We played PUBG: Mobile on this phone and the best we got was HD high and not even smooth extreme but only smooth ultra. Gameplay was laggy and the phone heated up to 40°C. So, we can say we had a bad experience wasting our 23,999/-
Lack of 18W charger
Another disadvantage of Mi A3 is – it can support a charging speed up to 18W but it comes with a 10W normal charger in the box. Xiaomi Mi A3 also doesn’t support wireless charging which is another drawback of this device.
Hybrid slot
The Mi A3 features a hybrid SIM slot Instead of a dedicated micro SD card slot that means at a time you can use 2 nano SIMs or 1 nano-SIM and 1 micro SD card on this phone. You can’t use 2 SIMs and 1 SD card at a time.
In today’s world, the hybrid slot is just not a good choice because we need both the sim and card slot as 64 GB is not just enough.
Face unlock & fingerprint
No one thought Mi A3 would implement an on-screen fingerprint sensor. It comes with a slow and buggy fingerprint sensor and talking about face unlock on the variant we received, we got the serious issue that our phone was unlocked even without us looking to the screen. That’s a serious issue. Hope officials would roll some software update for fixing that problem. Even after the problem gets fixed absence of IR-sensor would seriously affect the accuracy of the face unlock.
Thus, Mi A3 got a serious issue with user security. So, the company and officials must pay attention.
Mi A3 Specification:
| Display: 6.08 inches (15.44 cm), 720×1560 px, 283 PPI, Super AMOLED |
| Chipset: Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 665 |
| Primary camera: 48 MP, f/1.8, (wide), 1/2″, 0.8µm, PDAF 8 MP, f/2.2, 13mm (ultrawide), 1/4″, 1.12µm 2 MP, f/2.4, depth sensor LED flash, HDR, panorama 2160p@30fps, 1080p@30/60/120fps |
| Front Camera: 32 MP, f/2.0, 0.8µm |
| Body: 6.04 x 2.83 x 0.33 in, 173.8 g , back glass (Gorilla Glass 5) |
| Communications: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 5.0, GPS, Infrared, Radio, USB 2.0 Type-c 1.0 |
| Sound: 3.5mm jack available |
| Memory: 64GB 4GB RAM, 128GB 4GB RAM, 128GB 6GB RAM (IN), expandable upto 256GB |
| Sensors: Fingerprint (under display, optical), accelerometer, gyro, proxi mity, compass |
| Battery: 4030mAh battery |
| Colors: Kind of Gray, Not just Blue, More than White |
| Price in Nepal: (4/64GB) Rs. 23,999/- (6/128GB) RS. 27,999 /- |
Well, that’s it for now. Make sure you stay tuned as we’ll be publishing reviews and news of the technology world.