So far we’ve been rather impressed with Xiaomi’s line-up of products. The Chinese firm’s smartphones and cheerful Mi Band Pulse have given us hope that you can get great tech without paying a fortune.

Design:
The Note 3 is powered by a six-core Qualcom 650 system on a chip, which despite first appearances is a significant upgrade to the eight core CPU in the Note 2.
The Note 2 housed a 1.92GHz octa-core processor, namely the Mediatek MT6795 Helio X10, which sports eight ARM Coretx-A53 cores and a PowerVR graphics unit. The Note 3’s chip also has four Cortex-A53s clocked at 1.4GHz for background tasks, and a pair of newer Cortext-A72s running at 1.8GHz for performance.
The handset itself also operates at a snail’s pace. There is noticeable lag when opening applications and if you open multiple apps at once you will see that RAM figure in the task manager slowly whittle down to below “719MB of 2GB available” rather quickly.
If the 16GB storage feels less than ample you can add an SD Card for extra space. The only problem is that you lose the second SIM slot if you do – something that is a much desirable feature on this phone.

Frustration abounds:
The most noticeable addition to the Note 3 is a fingerprint scanner. Located at the back of the handset it functions in the same way that Huawei and LG’s does in that you simply need to place your finger in the right spot and the sensor will scan your digit.
The problem, we found, was that the scanner wasn’t as responsive as on other handsets and often failed to detect our digit correctly. Compared to phones from the last couple of years, it was a bit disappointing.

Camera:
The camera sensor at the rear of the handset has been bumped up from a 13MP in the Note 2 to a 16MP in the Note 3. You’ll find the usual list of features including HDR, Panaorama and Beautify. The camera is good but its still not quite enough to make the Note 3 feel special.

Battery:
The 4 000mAh Li-Po battery will give about two days of use if the phone is used for the occasional call, text and social media update. In practice, we found this equated to one full day of heavy use for web and mail, and around 6-8 hours of continuous movie watching and game playing. Which is, on the whole, satisfactory.
The Note 3 does have fast charging which can bring your battery up to full charge in just under three hours from empty.