A day after it already hit it's local authorized stores, we managed to have a rare hands-on (for a while) in a store of Xiaomi Philippines' latest phone release.
Glad that we saw it in their SM North EDSA Annex branch (and they only have one demo unit so far), meet the Xiaomi Mi A3.
So this what the front view of the Mi A3 looked like with the notched display and 32 MP selfie camera
Here is the back view of the device with it's triple main camera system and Xiaomi logo. They got the shiny (?) blue variant which is so far, the color option that is available right now.
The top portion has 3.5 mm audio jack, noise cancelling mic and IR blaster
Here are the two sides of the device which includes the hybrid dual SIM tray (as confimed from one of their male salespersons so if you need to put in a micro SD, sacrifice the SIM 2 slot), power/unlock button and volume rocker. The sides were pretty neat in the looks and grip. No surrprise that there's a bit of a camera bump but for sure that it will be that easy to find at least a third-party protective case in here.
A joy once again to saw a Xiaomi smartphone in it's stock form and continues on the A3. So far with the few minutes that we played, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 processor inside of it had no issues. We never experienced some sluggish moments.
As a norm that you can have a few minutes in the store to have some playtime in the device so we took the primary and the selfie camera samples which produced very good results. We already saw it on some Mi and Redmi devices - the 48 MP sensor can still be checked in the pro section. Speaking of the pro section, it was not that extensive compared to some Huawei high midrangers with only up to ISO 1600 and limited shutter speeds which we hope Xiaomi will have a look of it in it's follow-up
Xiaomi Mi A3 main rear camera sample (f/1.8)
Xiaomi Mi A3 selfie camera sample (f/2.0)
As you know it, Xiaomi Mi A3 is now available in Mi authorized stores but if you are far away from any of their kiosks and stores, the only way to get it is thru Lazada or Shopee and wait til September 9 2019. With 4 GB RAM/128 GB ROM version, it's price of Php 11,990 was pretty good so far based on our few minutes of experience
