Friends+Design
- Premium build & gorgeous design: Dual Gorilla Glass 5 build, with an attractive, striking gradient design
- Modern front panel, with a small notch
- Compact form-factor - fairly easy to use one-handed
- Decent, reasonably accurate under-display fingerprint scanner (it's not the fastest though)
Display
- Large, high-contrast AMOLED display
- The 720p resolution is on the low side though for a PenTile AMOLED display of that size, and this is the only weak-ish point of the Mi A3 - the screen is not the most ideally suited for long reading or browsing
Software
- Being part of the Android One series, you get a simple/stock Android experience, along with a promise of minimum 2 years of Android updates
Performance
- With the powerful Snapdragon 665 at the core, you get smooth dependable performance all-round - it's great for gaming too
Camera
- Very good triple camera setup on the rear (48MP primary + 8MP ultra-wide + 2MP depth)
- Images turn out with high level of detail and true-to-life colors - the contrast is also excellent, while the dynamic range is notably wide
- 8MP images with the ultrawide-angle camera are decent too - its per-pixel quality is much lower than the main camera, but the colors are still nice, and noise is minimal
- Portrait mode works well - shots are detailed, with excellent subject separation and convincing faux blur
- Night mode works decently well too
- Excellent selfies too, from the 32MP selfie camera - there is enough detail, the colors are nice, and the images are sharp enough
- Good video recording performance too - both 4K and 1080p videos are sharp and detailed, contrast is excellent, color rendition is quite nice and true to life, and the dynamic range is decent - at 1080p 30fps, there is also EIS, which works well
- Overall, the Mi A3 is easily one of the better camera phones in this price bracket, going head-to-head with excellent camera phones like the Redmi Note 7 Pro
Audio
- Very good speaker - loud, with fairly rich and deep sound
Battery
- Very good battery life with a large 4030mAH battery - you will comfortably get 1.5 days of use
- Fast charging (Quick Charge 3.0) support, with up to 18W charger
- The phones ships with a lower 10W charger though, that gives still decent, but not the quickest charging speeds - it recharges from 0 to 28% in 30 mins, while a full charge takes about 150 mins
Verdict
- Overall, the Mi A3 is an all-round good Android One phone, that does well on most counts, and additionally packs a stock Android experience (plus promised updates) - for a lot of users, who value a stock Android experience, and whose main consumption on the phone is images & video, it will be a good bet
- But if you tend to do a lot of long reading on your phone, then you might want to consider higher resolution phones in this price bracket (and there are many good ones out there)
