Redmi Note 3

I bought this for my parents. Before this, my mother was using a Sony Xperia Z1 I’d handed down to her, and my father was on a first-gen Meizu M1 Note.

I bought the Redmi Note 3 mainly for three reasons:

1. New 全网通 processor, supposedly very solid.
2. Massive 4000 mAh battery, supposedly very solid.
3. For people my parents’ age, MIUI is an explosively user-friendly system.

Don’t even think about the official site for this thing — you won’t be able to get one. I camped out on JD instead, and then one afternoon I finally saw it in stock there. I could even pay with Baitiao after ordering, so I snapped up two without hesitating.

It’s JD.com, after all — it arrived fast.

The unboxing of this thing has been roasted to death by every self-media outlet, paid shill, and hater out there, so I’ll skip that and just talk about what I heard from my mom.

1. MIUI is good, good, good, good. For someone with my mom’s needs, it basically reaches the level of “whatever feature she wants, she finds MIUI already provides it” — MIUI has clearly pushed things to the limit for Chinese users’ requirements.
2. The battery is strong. My mom just scrolls WeChat Moments in her spare time, no 4G, only 2G plus WiFi at home and at work, and after two days of use she still had 25% left.
3. The camera isn’t great. Night shots are obviously bad, worse than the Sony Xperia Z1 she had before.

Overall my mom is happy with the phone, and I think it’s pretty good too—plus it has a fingerprint sensor.

But there was a little hiccup with buying this thing. I ordered two units on JD, one for my dad and one for my mom. After they arrived, though, one of them turned out to be abnormally sluggish—flashing and rebooting did nothing. The only conclusion was a quality-control issue. Since these things weren’t easy to get your hands on, I chose “exchange.”

But after waiting two days, JD.com said there was no stock for an exchange — you’d better just return it……

So I returned it anyway.

But then I refreshed Suning and Gome and found another machine worth buying… so I ordered one more, and it arrived without any problems.

Turns out when buying a Xiaomi phone, don’t play monkey on the official site — checking third-party stores is the real way to go.