Xiaomi Redmi 3S User Reviews

Well my samsung S5duos speaker gave out after getting wet, there where no parts to fix it, got a nice refund from Samy, but money went for important crap.

Needed a cheap phone, with good performance, great battery, ok screen and if possible a good camera... well got almost everything in the Redmi 3s.

REDMI 3S 3GB RAM/32GB STORAGE

THE GOOD+
Phone get's my work done and it looks nice, opens well my e-mails accounts , facebook + chat , whatsapp, gps, banking , dropbox, documents ,calls , sync always on, can see the screen clearly outdoors, 2 day battery life, fast fingerprint unlocking and... wait for it ... LED NOTIFICATIONS MUAHAHHA !!!

THE BAD
CAMERA-
Yeap It's really average or bellow average, with some lags and unresponsive moments. Sometimes my Sam.J1.2016 got better shots than the Redmi3

TEMPERED ROM-
Phone came with a tempered rom, constant barrage of pop up adds was terrible, funny they only start to appear after almost a month of use...

UI-
Did not like the MIUI 7.8 ,the lack of app drawer , icons show on different sizes lacking standards, moving a icon to another page it's freaking hard.(downloaded a few themes but icons sizes where all wrong),So i just installed NovaLauncher, *(using MIUI 8.1.1.0 now, some random reboots every week or so.)

The tempered rom it's a deal breaker, xiaomi should have some type of control over this or at least give a warning . And the process to flash the tempered rom back to original was not easy.

I live in Romania and I bought the Prime version with 32GB internal and 3GB of RAM. I bought it from a Romanian online store with about 180$. The box contains the phone, 2A charger and microUSB 2.0 cable, use instructions and ejector tool.
Design and build quality:
The Xiaomi Redmi 3S has a premium aluminum unibody with curvy edges done in present matte finish an two plastic strips for signal reception at the back. The screen doesn't have any specific glass protection, but until now I haven't got even the smallest scratch. The fingerprint sensor is nicely carved within the metal back and fits really well with the curvy design. It's always on and works blazingly fast with really high accuracy.
Reception, Call quality and Internet:
I got the 2016031 version with 9LTE bands: 1,3,4,5,7,38,39,40,41. It works with both of my cell phone carrier bands (Digi, bands 1 and 38). The reception is slighty better than the one my previous phone (SG S3), about 20 asu on 3G and 50-60 asu on 4G. The call quality is good and you can directly record phone calls from the phone app. The internet speeds I got are ok on 3G (10 mb/s dl, 5 mb/s ul, 40 ms ping), 4G (25 mb/s dl, 10 mb/s up, 20 ms ping) and Wi-fi (45 mb/s dl, 35 mb/s up, 5ms ping ). No buffering on videos, internet pages or Facebook. Also no lag when browsing.
Camera:
For such a cheap phone, the cameras are really good, the rear one slightly better and the front face far better than my S3's one. Both cameras have some very good color reproductions. The rear camera has good viewing angles and the front camera's viewing angles are great. The rear camera with f/2.0 apperture and front camera with f/2.2 take good low-light images with good color reproduction and fair amount of details, kinda noisy though, far better than I expected for a 180$ phone.
UI speed and perfomance:
I have the MIUI 7.5 Global Android 6.0.1. It works really smooth, never lagged, not even in high demanding games on high settings, although it's processor doesn't score even as a S5 in benchmarks. The GPU scores are between S5 and S6. The memory speeds are really good: 146MB/s Read, 127MB/s Write and RAM with 4,4GB/s. The 3GB of RAM are plenty enough and the management is really good, keeping many high demanding games in memory at once, opening them almost instantly. Without any apps opened you get 2-2,1GB free and I never managed to make it have less than 600MB free.
Display:
The display is really nice, 720p for 5 inches being enough. It's sharp, really bright, does great in sunlight, got nice color reproduction and low power consumption.
Battery:
The battery is TRULY EXTRAORDINARY. One of the best on the market. You'll get 1-1,5 days of high usage and 2-3 days of moderate usage. On average you'll get a FANTASTIC time of 10 hours on screen with 4G on, 7-8 if you use it only for gaming, 12-15 if only for calling browsing internet, FB, YT.
Conclusion:
Best bang for the buck, king of the budget phones ! 10/10