Xiaomi’s been at the forefront of the budget revolution with its Redmi (erstwhile Hongmi) series of phones. The Redmi Note 3 is arguably the best of the lot, and naturally, there’s competition from fellow phone makers.
The Lenovo K5 Note takes the competition a notch higher by not just offering similar specs, but by also looking a lot like the Redmi Note 3. If you haven’t been following GizChina as much as you should be, let me tell you that the K5 Note is an MT6755 Helio P10 phone with 3GB RAM and 32GB ROM.
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Besides that, the K5 Note features a 5.5-inch 1920 x 1080p display, a 13 mega-pixel rear camera, 8 mega-pixel front camera and a 3500mAh battery. All of it sounds like it’s clearly going for the Redmi Note 3…
News from China is that resellers are starting to expect stock of this phone, and have thus listed the device for $198. This makes the K5 Note a bit more expensive than the Redmi Note 3, so is there a reason why you’d pick this over the latter?
It’s not a contender with that CPU. The P10 is old now so makes this phone a none starter.
lol the p10 is old now? then how old is say the ever so popular 6753? the p20 isnt even out yet
Speed isn’t the only thing that an SOC need to has. I’ll take a well balanced SOC with good battery life, good enough app speed (so the competitor open apps 0.05s faster? big f deal), and good gpu over a speed demon (aka, open apps 0.05s faster) battery killer SOC.
And we haven’t even talked about the whole package (THE PHONE itself).
dont bother seems like people nowadays just want specs that dont even work so they can brag or if its old it must be worse
Nope because it’s proven Mediatek < Snapdragon.
the fact that you generalized seems a little ignorant to me mediatek chips are cheaper and still more energy efficient and dont have a history of heating issues, snapdragon is open and more powerful(but power hungry because of this) there is no definitive superiority it all comes down to what a person wants
Nah i can only say that each SOC got its own weakness and strength. So it is a take and give situation to which SOC you prefer.
Mediatek is actually a good SOC but again their Android support is below standard. Their Android power management could be much better and lot of bugs never got fix like forever. But hey they just busy releasing new SOC without improving the current one.
Couple years ago i always buy mediatek smatphones and recommended them to friends, relatives. Why ? because Mediatek smartphone WAS much cheaper than Snapdragon. Please note the wording “WAS”. Nowadays (thanks to xiaomi, OnePlus, LeEco, etc) Smartphone with good snapdragon SOC 650-652 already selling cheaply and even cheaper than low-end MTK6753 so why i want to buy mediatek ???
i wouldnt say its thanks to any oem but rather because the market is getting saturated hence why 3gb of ram is so cheap, but it still remains if you compare each soc category e.g flagship mediatek is still cheaper than flagship snap and also low end vs low end vs i barely see 650/652 being cheaper than 6753 the condition is usually from xiaomi which even has snapdragon 820 for 300 dollars, the x20 for example is far cheaper than 820
but your last point switched to generalization of the mediatek brand vs soc having its own weakness and strength like you said in the beginning, i was expecting you to say “so why i want to buy 6753” your contradicting your self a bit i dont hate any of these socs i still believe they both have general adv and disadv
last adv of mediatek is versatility you will have more spec combinations to choose from and more brands to pick from look at the qiku n4 how amazing that is for the money
Unfortunately a comment like this will generally be received and responded to with negativity here…
There seems to be a lot of love here for that Mediatek crap…
Haha!
Hey I was all for the cheap Mediatek stuff back in the day when THL were making phones like the W100, W8S etc, even had a Zopo ZP998, and a ZP999 but each one had its problems, Mediatek were always cagey about source code and so it all lead to crap software support, though Zopo were massively to blame on that one!
Mediatek then released the fantastic 6752 and it found its way to phones like the Lenovo K3 Note which is a fantastic little(but big) device especially for the money, they then replaced the 6752 with the 6753 because the 6752 was basically too good and was fu*king up their X10 sales (I believe?) And so basically, they’re just a bunch of tw*ts now…
One good thing they have done though is made Qualcomm competitive, both with product spec and price so I will thank them for that, otherwise they need to go straight back to the drawing board because they have nothing special in the limelight these days…
I have the K3 Note, that’s why I’m so anti-Mediatek. The thermals are terrible, just after 5 minutes of gaming it heats up and the games lag.
I can’t comment on gaming as that’s not what it gets used for but out of curiosity, what rom are you running? Running the official Android 6 global rom and she runs great…
(Please consider the cost too…)
Cucco92 ROM, his latest one. Can you link me the official global ROM please.
I can’t remember the exact path I took to get it onto the ROW rom (Rest of World) but basically you’ll be using SPTools to flash it once you find it, you may need to flash a full VibeUI rom first and ‘upgrade’ to a ROW rom from there but once you do, it’ll pull the OTAs through and get you up to the latest Marshmallow..
You could have bought a SD810 phone and become anti-Qualcomm because of overheating and throttling issues… that’s funny.
They improve battery life by giving it a crappy gpu. That is not a trade off, that is a downgrade.
P10 is not X10 successor. X20 is.
P10’s GPU is more than capable for many tasks and games. For the given price, it’s quite fine. Newer doesn’t mean that it always have to surpass the “older” one, not when they have different price segmentation.
Though I doubt you understand lol
Note: X10’s GPU can be hot af. If P10’s GPU is cooler than that while retaining most of the power, I’d be down with it.
You can get X20 devices for $180. P10 devices run in the same range. P10 is overpriced underperforming garbage.
I’m getting one of those x20 device so I know. However I’m still getting a P10 equipped 5″ phone with good features the moment one is available. There IS a place for both SOC.
I’d get a good 5″ phone with X20 instead IF they are available though.
I was going to say something along those lines, I would add also that the Redmi Note 3 has a bigger battery too.
Ive ordered 7x Redmi Note 3 Pro (3GB/32GB) for Friends and Family now and I can honestly say, they’ll take some beating!
What an amazing device for the money and the regular OTAs make it look like Xiaomi genuinely do care about their user experience also!
I’ll take a solid speedy OS with only occasional security updates over a slow battery-guzzler OS that needs to be patched every week. I need to use my phone, not the other way around.
Flashing my redmi to cyanogenmod was one of the best decision I took for the phone.
Miui battery guzzling? Wrong. And it doesn’t need to be updated unless you want new features and security patches. Talk about making things up…
lol if you say so. I have experienced it first hand, perhaps you just don’t have another phone to compare and happy with yours. Nothing’s wrong being a frog inside a well.
Actually i couldn’t agree more about Cyanogen. In fact i love them a lot. Speed,stability and battery wise, MIUI cannot even compare to Cyanogen.
But problem is nowaday i am not so free anymore like i used to be so now lesser time to mess around with Cyanogen.
I know the latest CM12, CM13 from XDADeveloper are quite mature, but also got some features that still not working properly yet compare to MIUI. I do have great respect to those Cyanogen Developers that spend numerous hours of their time to do the coding, debug,compile, testing their Cyanogen release.
But again unfortunately for now i need something that is ready to use without need to worry about certain unknown Cyanogen bugs. Maybe it sound selfish but once you got married with kids, hectic work schedule, and earn not enough dollars for your family, you will know what i mean. I need to prioritize what is more important than to spend time debugging android firmware LOL. It is sad but true.
From time to time i still login to XDADeveloper for any good news for CM13. once i see lesser complained about it then it is time for me to wipe everything and start as Cyanogen user for my redmi note 3 pro.
I don’t even mess around with mine. Installed it and that’s it. Had more problem with Miui than Cyanogenmod.
Ah then you must tell me which recovery and Cyanogen that you are using ?
Now i am not a heavy smartphone user LOL so MIUI is more than sufficient. But if i can have a better android, why not ?
Nowadays only using for calling, sms (very seldom) ,watzup, and occasionally internet browsing. Sometime need to share with my kids if they want to install games. That’s all.
Btw actually there is a MIUI bug that bother me, a lot of people from certain countries complained that they lost their 4G LTE connection once they upgraded to MIUI 7.3.5.0 or newer. So only 3G is available.for those countries for newer MIUI firmware
grabbed the ones in needrom, didn’t really remember which one.
Stick to XDA… Needrom gets out of date fast…
Sounds like you might have been on a Reseller specific rom… Everyone I know with one has had theirs flashed away from GearBests strange rom version obto the official OTA path and they’re all mega happy with them including the battery performance, one of my friends says he has admittedly turned GPS, 4G and Bluetooth off but in return gets 3 days battery out of it… The only thing the majority of them have done is replace the stock launcher because they don’t like the no app drawer iPhone clone style stuff…
Not sure how to say it , but yeah nowaday pricing for redmi note 3 pro (3GB/32GB) already start selling below $170 at aliexpress from some reputable shops there.
With this kind of aggressive pricing, i will not even look at other competitor that still using mediatek P10. maybe it is different if they use X20 or x30
I do know that some features those P10 wins but come to basic for smartphone for me is always the same : Speed, Battery consumption, durability, Android Software support.
As for Redmi note 3 pro Camera i find it very descent, it can capture most of the image sharply and fast. For low light i cannot argue that the image is not so good and again any other smarphone brands now can take very good image at low light at price below $180 ????
I am not Xiaomi Fanboys, heck even this is the first time i bought Xiaomi smartphone and i fell in love in it. it just feel very good to buy at such a low price and get this kind of superb quality smartphone.
And in 2 weeks, i already got 2 OTA updates already. Latest one now is MIUI 7.3.7.0 global stable (still running lollipop though , not yet marsmallow, but coming MIUI 8.0 i think they will upgrade to M already)
Mediatek support for their SOC i can say quite sucks, don’t expect any future upgrade or bug fixes. You bought it , use it and bare with all the bugs inside forever. I bought some mediatek smartphones before and believe me for 1 year using, there is none update from OTA.
I agree with most of your points. But having a mediatek SoC doesn’t prevent upgrades or bug fixes. Especially the latter, bug fixes have very little (for the most part) to do with the type of SoC. It really comes down to the brand and model. The Mediatek Redmi phones get the same MIUI updates.
A phone is made up of a whole lot more than just a SoC. For the majority of people that will buy this a P10 is more than powerful enough. A lot will come down to how everything else compares to the RN3P like camera, battery (smaller on paper), audio and software.
It depends from what is more important to people.
It could be that the camera, audio is better, plus there is independent sdcard slot.
the RMN3P is easily the best of the bunch for the full AOSP / Cyanogenmod support alone…
For you it is the best. Most people don’t ever change the rom. The modding community only makes up a small percentage of the phone buying population. For the rest it will come down to the things I mentioned.
It could compete with Note 3 (X10), not with Note 3 Pro (SD650)
But now there is the price factor… as its pricier than N3 Pro, and a lot pricier than N3 ^^