Xiaomi’s continuing its Redmi crusade with yet another Redmi-series launch, the second this week after the Redmi 3.
Known as the Redmi Note 3 Pro, the phone comes with a Snapdragon 650 (erstwhile Snapdragon 618) and features the same surrounding hardware as the other Redmi Note 3 phones.
Let’s take a more detailed look at the Redmi Note 3 Pro.
As mentioned, it runs the Snapdragon 650 which is a 1.8GHz hexa-core chipset from Qualcomm, and one that recently got renamed. The only other thing that has changed from the Helio X10 version (or the ‘standard’ Redmi Note 3) is that the camera is now a 16 mega-pixel shooter (the Redmi Note 3 has a 13 mega-pixel one).
Gizchina News of the week
Other specs of the new Redmi Note 3 Pro include a 5 mega-pixel front facing camera, 4050mAh battery, rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, and two spec sets akin to its Helio X10-powered sibling in 2GB RAM/16GB ROM and 3GB RAM/32GB ROM.
The Redmi Note 3 Pro is priced 999 Yuan ($150). Very clearly, the phone is Xiaomi’s way of giving the Redmi Note 3 a ticket into the Indian market, where it’s expected to launch soon… and where Xiaomi isn’t allowed to sell MediaTek powered phones.
Expect the Redmi Note 3 Pro to land in India for around the 11,000 INR mark.
Indeed! I was so happy to see this is fitted with the SD and not that shitty MTK – even their so called “flagships” with oodles and oodles of cores and misleading promotional material fail to provide truly flagship-worthy performance.
I can also predict that their X30 will provide the same upper mid-tier performance, and will never match Qualcomm’s top chip, or Samsung’s 78xx (which is insanity in the making).
I’m not talking only synthetics, but actual performance in the real world.
Ahh Qualcomm fanboyism at it’s finest. Let’s hope Qualcomm doesn’t suffer from overheating and throttling (810/615) or poor performance (410) this time around. Must have killed you a little on the inside that Qualcomm did so horribly last year, while Mediatek gained significant ground.
haha … bet you’ll love it if you live to see the day when a PREMIUM MTK SoC , which retails for alot LESS than a QC SoC of the same grade , but offers the same(or even better) flagship performance and is in a phone which costs LESS than the one equipped with the Qualcomm cpu !
that would really be something
The biggest thing that holds back MTK chips is the GPU. If they can figure that out they can go toe to toe with Qualcomm. It’s the same problem Kirin (Huawei) has.
their GPUs are not upto the par ?
They aren’t as powerful as the Adreno GPU’s Qualcomm uses. For most people it isn’t an issue, but for the tech press who loves benchmarks it is a huge deal.
ah … the reviewers , who so often sway public opinion one way or the other. im afraid i’ll have to agree on this one and call out MTK core teams to design better GPUs to compliment their impressive and exciting CPUs !
Mediatek has carved out a nice niche for themselves as a budget/midrange SoC company. I don’t think they really care about taking on Qualcomm, they like where they sit in the market and their chips offer most of the performance for a lower price.
playing it safe , eh ?
but times never hold for long , now do they ? sooner or later MTK will have to think about running riot in the HIGHEST END of the smartphone market… its a tendency. i just hope they come well-prepared for that !
Not necessarily. There will always be a demand for budget and midrange phones. In fact more budget phones are sold each year than Flagships. For instance Xiaomi sells more Redmi phones than Mi phones. Mediatek doesn’t need a flagship SoC to compete. But the X30 could end up being that chip for them, just need to wait and see how it does in actual devices.
Yeah! pardon my poor english but do you see the irony?
The guy who was defending Qualcomm with all his strenght.
He probably choose the expensiver piece of tech, based on benchmarks and never care about price/performance ratio.
So he is so happy with Adreno, adreno … (radeon) , the gpu technology qualcomm bought from ATI.
I bet this guy is a Nvidia and bash AMD/ATI the same way.
A lot of people get caught up in brand names and think “best known” means “best”. The benchmark crowd is my favorite to argue with, especially the ones who think Antutu is the holy grail of performance metrics.
I really don’t get the argument about the price of the SoC.
We buy phones, we don’t buy SoC, they don’t retail them.
Xiaomi for example have sold the same phone with different SoC for the same price ( Redmi1 and Redmi1s or now with Note3 and Note3 pro)
Or some phone company sells a heliox10 phone at about the same price of another phone with SD810 (meizu mx5 and OP2)
I never understand that either at least on the consumer end. The SoC isn’t even the most expensive part of a phone, that’s usually the display. People often assume SoC price determines phone price.
thats Xiaomi for you , honest chinese brothers working and striving to create a fairer and widely reachable market ! im not a economist , so i don’t get how they do it , but i bet their marketing dept is fire 😀
its not the case with every other phone maker (elephone and co.) plus reduction in CPU cost will allow two opening to phone makers :
i – chance to sell well-equipped phones at crazily LOW rates
ii – focus on MOAR innovation in an already versatile and diverse feature set found in phones.
if i the SD 810 hadnt been an egg boiler and performed as good as the x10 , it would be rated as much better than the x10 (thats the stupid tech press for u) , so to say … you can’t really compare the SD 810 to x10 when one of them suffered from alot of bashing and issues, if they were BOTH without problems , then we would see an actual winner.
it all comes down to my ultimate desire … to see OUTRAGEOUSLY cheap phones. that and the fact that lower prices tend to create terrific battles in the market and no doubt cheap (but thor like) SoCs would only add to the flair !
Put aside Xiaomi then and let’s go back to a couple of years ago while we had the SD801 and MT6595.
All the flagships used to cost the same (~$300).
Zopo zp999 and Meizu MX4 for Mediatek and probably 20 different phones for the SD801.
According to you the Mediatek variant had to cost less, but truth is that it didn’t happen.
Speaking of outrageously cheap phones… In my opinion we reached the lowest level.
I honestly don’t think prices will go down anymore, the market is saturated.
(Unless you buy older technology)
That was just my feeling about the price.
What can happen is what is happening right now.
Last year I had to go for a flagship to satisfy my needs (I know, big word) this year I can go with a midranger because they reached the level of last year flagship and even more.
So I can save few bucks in that way
Lol, just can’t stand the ignorant fanboy comments. My favorite chipset maker is actually Samsung, but they all have good and bad chips. I have used some excellent MTK’s (6752, X10) and some horrible ones (6582). I have used some excellent SD’s (801, 800, S4) and some horrible ones (410, 615). Every company has good and bad chips.
lol @balcobomber25:disqus , it exists everywhere. a few days ago , a phD who’s teaching us Integrated Circuits (my fav subject) in Computer Engineering also said that smartphones are so cheap due to MTK chips in them. i only avoided arguing on the basis of utmost respect i have for him (he’s a good teacher and v.knowledgeable) and class atmosphere.
Yea I usually don’t get involved in the fanboy flame wars, I like all chipset makers. But when I see the overtly fanboyish comments I have to respond.
don’t know why people would bash MTK .. they’re the reason Samsung and SD cpu equipped phones somehow try to stay in sane price ranges. IF MTK dint gave them a run for their cash (and that too with a strong performance) … we’d all be priced out of DECENT phones !
Exynos and certain Qualcomm phones are soo over priced and out of a student’s/common man’s reach …
People are stuck in the old days when MTK chips were crap. They refuse to accept that they are now viable competitors to Qualcomm. Even Samsung SoC’s don’t get as much love from the Media as Qualcomm does.
guess Qualcomm knows how to share its wealth :p
Maybe it happens a lot with anything Asian … people or chips. 😉
I understand that “urge” 😀
Not really. Just happy that the X10 hasn’t gained widespread market share, that the X20 is really really late, and the X30 is a figment of imagination for 2016.
Also, extremely happy that Xiaomi didn’t choose MTK for this device. Last year I stuck with an SD-801 chip, which once again blasted everything MTK out of the water, so I was extremely happy as well! 😀
The X10 has gained significant market share, especially compared to the previous generation Mediatek flagship, the 6595. This year we saw phones from Xiaomi, Meizu, HTC, LeTV, Elephone and several other brands using this chip. This was made possible by the 64 bit SD chips being an absolute disaster. Many of these phones would have used the SD615 if it wasn’t so terrible.
How is the X20 late? It is meant as a SoC for 2016….
Sure X30 won’t meet the Qualcomm speed man, also won’t cost as high as you must pay for your new shiny Snapdragon phone.
No Microsd yet? Damn Xiaomi…