Reviewing the chinese Apple: The Mi3

After successfully creating the vibes with it's flash sales; Xiaomi has attained a trend amongst the techies here. It has become a matter of achievement for people when they successfully order a Mi3 through flipkart.

Shipping/Delivery:

Well amongst many a few; I too became an achiever in the 3rd installment of the flash sale. However flipkart took much longer than usual to deliver the product despite opting for the 1 day delivery. Although Fllipkart refunded the additional amount, but they did so as a flipkart wallet balance which can be used only when you order the items sold my WS retail; which I consider to be unprofessional.

Unboxing:

In any case; all my complaints vanished when yesterday (18th August); I opened the flipkart box containing one of the most awaited devices I ever owned. The box was very well packed with bubble wraps which duly protected the Xiaomi mi3 piece inside. Despite the outer flipkart box showed signs of damage; but fortunately the inside packaging was capable to protect the contents.

On removing the bubble wraps, the Mi3 box was neatly laminated. The packing was so good from Xiaomi, that you really felt there is some premium material inside and rightly it was.

  On removing the lamination, the box had all the information which usually describes the  advertising feature of the mobile.

As soon as you open the box; you would see the mi3 piece well placed for the slot cut out for it within the box. Other items packed inside the box are a usb cable; a power adapter charger; warranty card, startup guide and the pin to remove the sim tray.

Mi3 hands-on:

As soon as you hold the mobile; you feel the premium finish of the handset. The edges are carefully tapered with the volume rockers and the power button are located at the right side.

The speaker slots and the usb is located at the bottom while the 3.5 mm jack; Mini-Sim card slot and the mic at the top.

The only flaw I see with the design is that the push buttons for power and volume  though embedded well in the chassis; sometimes feel as if are a bit loose. 

Once you power on the device; you will notice the mi logo at the startup screen and once you configure your device with the basic set of initial questions; like account set-up; wifi- setup and so on , you are now on your home screen. It would be a good idea to have a valid Wi-Fi connection at the time of first-time boot-up so that you can easily configure your device. On observing the notification pane; you would find an update already waiting for a download. It is the MIUI version 23 (stable) which is around 109MB. Apply the download and you have the latest OS running. You may have to re-boot the device once this patch is applied.

Notice that unlike the traditional stock android; you don't have a menu icon; which will take you to your apps. All your apps are available on your home screen. 

Just a tip; if you are looking for better organize your apps; MIUI provides you to create a folder on your screen with which you can group apps of same genre like Fitness, Social Networks etc and pack apps for fitness and Social Network related apps respectively. For this just long press on the icon of an app and move it over the app which you want it to group with. MIUI automatically creates a folder. You can rename the folder name by pressing the folder icon and then tapping on the "folder".

The next step to charge your device. As you would notice; the device will be having around 20-30% battery. It would be good if you do a full charge. This way you will avoid the issues some people are facing when they try to boot their phone with only 4% charge left.

You can now insert the sim by removing the sim slot using the pin. Note that you would have to press the pin a little harder so as the sim slot to pop out.

Setting up GPRS and 3G:

Once you boot up your device again; ensure that you get the internet settings from the service provider. I did get some weird message that airtel is not able to send the internet settings, since mobile does not have it. I called the service center and they asked me to send MO to 54321. This configured the device with the 3G settings.

Proximity Sensor:

Being sensitive on not removing the matt finished screen guard; is a usual tendency we have with new mobiles. I too did not remove it and I noticed that the proximity sensor did not detect that I was away from it and while making calls; the screen remained black despite of moving the handset away from the ear. It was then that it struck me about it and the guard which is covering the proximity sensor as well was causing the screen to not wake up while the call is in progress.

Performance:

In order to test the performance matrix of the device; I downloaded the Antutu benchmark to check the performance number. I was stunned with the results. With the latest MIUI 23 update; the performance numbers were exceedingly beyond expectations.

 

The score reported was 36,376 which is even above the likes of HTC One M8 and Galaxy S5.

Hardware:

As has been much advertised; there is no point repeating it; but just quoting it here again; the device packs a 2.3GHz Quad Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800B processor alongwith a 2GB RAM which makes all the applications run as smoother as butter. The Qualcomm chipset uses a equally fast Adreno GPU for graphic intensive applications like gaming which is again capable enough of handling high end games like Asphalt8; FIFA etc. The display is a brilliant 1920x1280 Full HD and one can easily get mesmerized with the quality of this IPS display. To add to these great features; it comes with a corning Gorilla Glass 3.

One more feature I noticed with the battery was; it reaches the first 20% within 10-15 minutes. This is a highlighting feature as it can act as a life saver in several situations. The total time the device took for a full charge was somewhere around 1.30-1.45hrs.  

Battery:

On one full charge; the battery should easily last for more than a day and as stated above takes a little over 1 hour for a complete charge.

Camera:

The camera quality is pretty good and for zooming in and out; you need to control through the screen gestures and not the volume rockers (unlike my Sony handset). Although in low light the camera performance is not that great but with moderate lighting the camera does not disappoint. In sunlight; the pics are just marvelous and are upto the mark with any Sony/Canon mid-range camera's (except for the optical zoom obviously). The color brightness, saturation and the contrast are all perfect. When viewed on a Full HD display on a TV or a monitor they pics do not fall out in pixels.

The video recorder too is pretty decent and captures 1080p videos. Since the aperture if f2.2; the camera is capable of clicking pictures at a pretty fast rate.

Could be better:

The device gets pretty much heated up when the wi-fi is "on" and the device is getting charged. Not a major issue; but probably with a software update can be tackled.

When you press the power button once; the screen is supposed to go dark; it does goes dark but it just does so with a flicker; as we have it in TV sets. It would have been nicer; if the screen fades away instead of the instant flicker.  But I guess that would be a feature with the IPS displays. 

Best available/upcoming Technology: Smartphones and Tablets

As of today (August 2014); there are a several smartphone options that the consumers have to choose from. However when it comes to making one of yours it is an uphill task. Fix a budget of yours; search for the best possible deal for the best possible available configuration can be a daunting task.

Based on the top notch technology available in the market; I have listed below a few useful bits of information that can be used as a reference while making a selection for the top notch/mid-tier device. I have also tried to predict based on the current trend as to where the market is moving:

Processor:

There are several vendors that provide a viable option in terms of processing speeds to the smartphone assemblers. There are the likes of Mediatek (MT), Qualcomm, nVdia are some of the top notch players in this domain.

The latest powerful processor amongst the lot (for smartphones) that is available  is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chipset.

It is clocked at 2.5GHz and is a variant to the 800 processor. Now there is not much of a difference between the 800 and 801 chipset except the fact that the 801 chipset provides an enhanced support to the following:

1. Additional MegaPixel support to the camera

2. Higher post processing speed of the images
3. Dedicated hardware for dual-sim
4. Improved graphics by boosting the performance of Adreno 330GPU

To sum up, 801 offers a better performance boost of CPU, GPU, DSP, camera sensor and memory components (higher SD speed support). It does utilize the low-power mobile experience by switching on just the right desired processing engines. However one can have a tradeoff between the performance vs proce as there is not much to choose between the two.

Qualcomm:

The 801 chipset is based on the same ARMv7 architecture for the quadcore assembly of CPU(Cortex-A9) and I think until the CPU is not upgraded to the ARMv8 architecture; there is hardly to choose between the 800 vs 801 (except for some better performance and lower power requirements)

This brings us to the future of this chipset. ARM has announced its latest processor chips the Cortex-A53/57 chips which will have the 64-bit support. This means added camera resolution support; better support for LTE;  better power management techniques wherein the cores not required at a particular time/moment can be momentarily turned off thus offloading the idle processor. This is a bigger leap in terms of performance and power improvements. Qulacomm's next generation chipset which will be available starting Feb2015 will be based on this architecture and I suppose it would be better to invest in devices having this chipset instead of migrating from the 800 to 801. These chipsets with the arm v8 architecture support will be termed as 808 and 810 chipset.

For the mid-tier segment or rather for the lower end market; the Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 Krait quad core chipset is a bet that the company offers. Many of the OEM's like the Motorola rode high with its Moto G and Moto E having this chipset on board. It is being clocked at 1.3GHz and usually coupled with 1GB RAM.

Nvidia:

On the other hand NVidia has come up with a Tegra k1 - 192 core chipset (based on the nvidia Kepler architecture) which kind of blows away the Snapdragon 801 processor chipset. However, this is currently limited to only tablets as I suppose the issue would be with the power management. One think to note here is that the 192 core is for the GPU while the CPU cores remain at the quad core assembly + 1 (the additional core acts as the battery saver core). This is possibly the fastest chipset OEM available in  the market with the likes of Xiaomi MI-pad and the nVidia's homegrown Tegra K1 SHIELD tablet using it. I think with some modifications to the chipset; if NVidia can come up with a solution to tackle the power issues, I think it can easily beat the Qualcomm's 800/801 chipset which has been gaining lot of accolades.  On the other hand, some reports do suggest that it is the cost factor that is barring this beast to be available under the hood for the smartphones. For installing the Tegra K1 chip; a device would need a perquisite of Icera 500 modem for LTE and 3G connectivity which would add to the overall cost of the motherboard. Not sure if Nvidia and its partners will bring it to smartphones or keep it limited to tablets for now.

Conclusion:

Not even comparing the MediaTek chipset as I am not a great fan of MediaTek since even the octa-core assembly of MT chipsets lags the performance compared to its Nvidia or Qualcomm's counterparts.

Speaking about Smartphones, the current chipset available is the Qualcomm's 801 which is shipped along with almost all the flagship devices from many of the OEM partners. However if one is looking for a device which comes with a 800 chipset at a lower proce point; I think it would be a better bargain as there is not much of a difference between the two. Qualcomm's 805 chipset is a further enhancement to the 801 but not many partneres have opted for it as I guess probably the 808 and 810 chipset which will be avaiable later this year would rule the markets for the next couple of years atleast unless Nvidia has some other plans with their Tegra K1 chipset!

In tablets however, the nvidia Tegra K1 is the best available option. However it is now yet available with all the partners but currently only with the Xiaomi MI pad and Nvidia's SHIELD tablet. But we should see more of it with other players as well soon.

Future of Mobile Processors - A possibility explored:

The smartphones and the tablets enjoy the fact that they do not have to go through the cycle of evolution that the regular desktop PCs have went through. There is no need to re-invent the wheel, but rather customize the already available technology features according to the need. For example, the 64-bit architecture was introduced much earlier by the AMD chipset in early days of 2000, whereas the ARM v8 architecture which will be rolled out later this year or early next year will now feature a 64-bit architecture. Ofcourse it has lot of additional features like power management amongst the many; but the base remains the same. From how the technology trend is moving; I think we will witness the desktop and the mobile market to merge at some point within the next couple of years.

A step towards that would possibly be with the use of FPGA's to offload the CPU for some operations. As was recently announced by Intel that it's new Xeon processor will feature a Xeon-FPGA  combo. However, the power consumption still poses a threat to the tie-up but with a tradeoff in it in desktop and servers; I think the industry would soon see this merger in the mobile domain as well as FPGA has the capability to improve the performance by almost 10x in certain scenarios.  Now one can easily argue as to why not just keep adding the cores like the quad, octa which are making the news currently for improving performance; but there is a limitation to the number of cores that one can add to a ASIC chip. The limitation is again the power consumption. The more the number of cores; the more the power is drained from the battery. Thus we are witnessing multiple innovations in various fields including improving the charge storage in batteries; architectural aspect of the chipsets, etc.  I still am not convinced that apart from some gaming and video intensive applications there are other applications that do a justice to the multi-core system. In short there are only a few apps that require such a high configuration.

Instead I feel would it be a better idea to add more RAM and improve the speed of the sluggish RAM's which actually store all the information required?Adding more RAM certainly does help in multi-tasking. When the processor seeks for this information; it must be delivered at much greater speeds that it does currently?

With these advents I am sure a powerful system at your fingertips is surely in the reckoning!!