Xiaomi Redmi 3S review: Game of Iterations

The gallery

The Xiaomi Redmi 3S and its MIUI 8 comes with a redesigned Gallery app, now showing more photos on the screen than ever. It defaults to your camera roll, but it also supports different albums.

Xiaomi's new app now automatically stacks your photos in Camera, Video, People, Screenshots, and Panoramas albums. The People sorting, once chosen, sorts all of your photos by people's faces.

The MIUI 8 gallery seems to have borrowed some of the iOS Photos looks, but nevertheless it's better than before and we appreciate the new looks and features.

Gallery

The new integrated editor powered by Camera 360 offers various filters, crop options, enhancements (sharpen, contrast, brightness, saturation, vignette), and doodles. Oddly, this image editing app is less capable than the one supplied with the MIUI v7.

Editing an image

Xiaomi Redmi 3S doesn't come with a standalone video app, instead it uses the Gallery for video browsing. Whether you will open your files from the Gallery app or File Explorer - it doesn't matter.

The video player interface is very basic; subtitles and pop-up play are not supported.

Browsing and playing videos

There is also a new video editor with MIUI 8. It supports trimming, filters, and adding text, and audio tracks.

Video editing within the gallery

Music player

The MIUI music player is a custom app with a well laid out, easy to navigate interface. The player has cool effects, transitions, and transparent elements, especially on the expandable Now Playing section. Lyrics are supported, too.

Music Player • Albums • Songs • Now Playing screen • Options

Xiaomi Redmi 3S offers customizable equalizers within the phone's Settings menu - there are a few default presets already available for use. You can also try Xiaomi's MiSound enhancer, which comes into play when you use headphones, and especially, a Xiaomi-branded headset.

Audio enhancements and equalizers

An FM radio app is also available. The Redmi 3S requires a headset to use as an antenna. FM recording is also available.

FM radio

Audio output impressively clean, averagely loud

The Xiaomi Redmi 3s demonstrated perfectly clean output when hooked up to an active external amplifier. Its loudness was only average but there were no weak points to its output as far as quality is concerned.

Better yet, there was next to no degradation when you plug in a pair of headphones. Even the stereo crosstalk hike was very minor, giving us some of the better headphones scores we’ve seen and easily among the best in this price range. Volume remained unimpressive, but you can’t really expect anything better from a sub €200 device.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Xiaomi Redmi 3s	+0.02, -0.07	-94.3	90.6	0.0024	0.0087	-91.8
Xiaomi Redmi 3s (headphones)	+0.02, -0.10	-93.7	90.3	0.028	0.061	-72.2
Oppo F1s	+0.37, -0.00	-71.2	75.3	0.936	1.190	-41.2
Oppo F1s (headphones)	+0.80, -0.05	-67.8	74.6	0.336	0.579	-42.3
Huawei Honor 7 Lite (5c)	+0.03, -0.44	-90.4	90.9	0.0019	0.011	-87.9
Huawei Honor 7 Lite (5c) (headphones)	+0.04, -0.47	-90.3	90.7	0.0067	0.072	-73.1
Samsung Galaxy J3 (2016)	+0.04, -0.24	-92.4	92.5	0.024	0.023	-91.3
Samsung Galaxy J3 (2016) (headphones)	+0.37, -0.04	-88.5	90.6	0.045	0.226	-56.9
Sony Xperia E5	+0.14, -0.81	-92.3	92.4	0.0072	0.0093	-91.9
Sony Xperia E5 (headphones)	+0.15, -0.88	-89.5	88.9	0.0090	0.370	-50.7
Motorola Moto G4	+0.02, -0.07	-92.4	92.5	0.0028	0.0084	-92.1
Motorola Moto G4 (headphones)	+0.04, -0.08	-92.0	92.0	0.0073	0.070	-63.8
Sony Xperia XA	+0.01, -0.18	-93.6	90.6	0.0030	0.010	-91.7
Sony Xperia XA (headphones)	+0.85, -0.18	-87.1	87.8	0.018	0.327	-54.9
Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus	+0.02, -0.08	-93.8	92.8	0.0037	0.034	-91.3
Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus (headphones)	+0.09, -0.03	-93.5	92.6	0.070	0.075	-49.0

Xiaomi Redmi 3s frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.