The Xiaomi Mi 3 is a

high-end In economics, a luxury good (or upmarket good) is a good for which demand increases more than what is proportional as income rises, so that expenditures on the good become a greater proportion of overall spending. Luxury goods are in contrast t ...

, premium Android

smartphone A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whi ...

produced by

Xiaomi Corporation (; ), commonly known as Xiaomi and registered as Xiaomi Inc., is a Chinese designer and manufacturer of consumer electronics and related software, home appliances, and household items. Behind Samsung, it is the second largest ...

made in the Philippines. The Xiaomi Mi 3 was unveiled during the Xiaomi New Product Launch Event 2013 on 5 September 2013, and was released in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

in October 2013. It features either a 2.3 GHz quad-core

Qualcomm Qualcomm () is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, and incorporated in Delaware. It creates semiconductors, software, and services related to wireless technology. It owns patents critical to the 5G, ...

Snapdragon 800 This is a list of Qualcomm Snapdragon systems on chips (SoC) made by Qualcomm for use in smartphones, tablets, laptops, 2-in-1 PCs, smartwatches, and smartbooks devices. Before Snapdragon SoC made by Qualcomm before it was renamed to Snapdr ...

processor or a 1.8 GHz quad plus one core

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

Tegra 4 Tegra is a system on a chip (SoC) series developed by Nvidia for mobile devices such as smartphones, personal digital assistants, and mobile Internet devices. The Tegra integrates an ARM architecture central processing unit (CPU), graphics proc ...

processor, which support WCDMA and TDCDMA respectively. The device was made available in late November 2013 in

Manila, Philippines Manila ( , ; fil, Maynila, ), officially the City of Manila ( fil, Lungsod ng Maynila, ), is the capital of the Philippines, and its second-most populous city. It is highly urbanized and, as of 2019, was the world's most densely populated ...

and was later available in

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a List of cities in China, city and Special administrative regions of China, special ...

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the no ...

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bor ...

and

Malaysia Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federal constitutional monarchy consists of thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two regions: Peninsular Malaysia and Borneo's East Mal ...

. Upon its release, it became the fastest selling smartphone in Xiaomi's history; the company sold 200,000 Mi3 units in

Philippines The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no), * bik, Republika kan Filipinas * ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas * cbk, República de Filipinas * hil, Republ ...

within 3 minutes of launch.

Specifications

Hardware

The Xiaomi Mi 3 contains an internal frame of aluminium-magnesium alloy, though the body is made of a polycarbonate. The speakers and

microUSB The initial versions of the USB standard specified connectors that were easy to use and that would have acceptable life spans; revisions of the standard added smaller connectors useful for compact portable devices. Higher-speed development of t ...

port are located at the bottom of the device with the standard-sized SIM card tray and audio jack are located at the top of the device. The power and volume keys are located on the right hand side. Near the top of the device are the front-facing camera, proximity sensors, and

notification LED A Notification LED is a small RGB or monochrome LED light usually present on the front-facing screen bezel (display side) of smartphones and feature phones whose purpose is to blink or pulse to notify the phone user of missed calls, incoming SMS ...

. The MI3 is available in a number of colours, including black, white, pink, blue and silver. The device's display is larger than its predecessor, with a 5-inch, 1080p IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen with an anti-glare coating. The device comes with 16 GB or 64 GB of internal storage and has a 3050 mAh battery.

Software

The Xiaomi Mi 3 ships with Android and Xiaomi's

MIUI MIUI (pronunciation: ''Me You I'') is an Android -based mobile operating system developed and maintained by Xiaomi independently of Google exclusively for its smartphones. MIUI includes various features such as theme support. It is the basis ...

user interface. Initially running Android 4.3 & 4.4 it has continuously received updates, with MIUI 5 – a customised version of Android. Later, it received MIUI 6, 7, 8 and finally 9. In January 2016, it was the first Xiaomi device to get official Marshmallow 6.0.1 update, together with Mi 4 and Mi Note. The third-party development is also strong for Mi3 on

XDA Developers XDA Developers (also known simply as XDA; often stylized as xda-developers) is a mobile software development community launched on 20 December 2002. Although discussion primarily revolves around Android, members also talk about many other opera ...

, there are numerous custom ROMs available from 5.0 Lollipop to 9.0 Pie. Those, who want a unique experience and try something else than Android, can try Sailfish OS, an operating system based on

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...

MeeGo MeeGo is a discontinued Linux distribution hosted by the Linux Foundation, using source code from the operating systems Moblin (produced by Intel) and Maemo (produced by Nokia). Primarily targeted at mobile devices and information appliances ...

, exclusively available on the N9.

Popularity

The phone has enjoyed demand in India, with it going out of stock on

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manag ...

retailer

Flipkart Flipkart Private Limited is an Indian e-commerce company, headquartered in Bengaluru, and incorporated in Singapore as a private limited company. The company initially focused on online book sales before expanding into other product categorie ...

, after just 39 minutes of going on sale at midday on 22 July 2014. In the next batch of sales, the Mi 3 went out of stock in less than 5 seconds and it is believed that the stock consisted of 10,000 phones. On 5 August 2014, Mi 3 was again sold out on Flipkart in just 2 seconds due to unprecedented demand. On 12 August 2014, 20,000 units went out of stock in 2.4 seconds on Flipkart. On 19 August 2014, Another 20,000 units went out of stock in 2.3 seconds on Flipkart. On 4 October 2014, Xiaomi announced on their official Facebook page that Mi 3 would be going for sale one last time. However, there was no flash sale, and only customers who had entered to buy the handset five times or more would be automatically selected by Xiaomi and Flipkart. The handset would be added to their cart automatically on 6 October, and all they had to do was just click on the "Buy Now" button. There was no time limit, but if the customer didn't want to buy it, it would be allocated for a second batch of buyers.

Successor

The

Xiaomi Mi 4 The Xiaomi Mi 4 (Chinese: 小米手机4) is a smartphone developed by the Chinese electronics manufacturer Xiaomi for its high-end smartphone line, and was released in August 2014. Xiaomi held an event to formally introduce the high-end phone, a ...

is a smartphone developed and produced by Xiaomi Inc, that was released in August 2014. It is the successor to the Xiaomi Mi 3.

References