Xiaomi Mi 3 vs Xiaomi Mi 4: Winners and sinners

Multimedia

We already mentioned the Xiaomi Mi 3 and Mi 4 use the same software builds, so their multimedia features are on par, too.

Both come with a custom Gallery app. It defaults to your camera roll with two shortcuts at the bottom that will take you to album view of your local images and album view of your cloud pictures. You can't change this view, nor can you customize the default folders.

Gallery

The integrated editor offers various effects, frames, tools (crop, mirror, straighten, rotate, fisheye, doodle) plus light adjustments that let you bring out the shadows or the highlights.

The MIUI music player is a custom app with a well-laid out, easy to navigate interface. It has a huge visualization screen doubling as a Now Playing windows. Below you get four non-customizable tabs - All Songs, Artists, Playlists and Online.

Music Player

The Online tab is where you pay for the Baidu Music service, which allows you to listen to their huge online track collection. Here you can also find various internet radio stations you can listen for free.

The player has cool 3D effects, transitions and transparent elements, especially on the expandable Now Playing section.

Now Playing screen • Equalizers

Xiaomi's Music app offers customizable equalizers with 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 set.

Both phones have an FM receiver and supports radio recording. There is a sleep timer as well.

FM radio app

Xiaomi's video player has very basic interface but rich video decoder support. Regardless of the device used, it managed to play everything we threw at it save for WMV files. The AC3 audio codec is supported too. Interestingly, the player won't list MKV files, but it can still play them hassle-free, if you access them from the file manager.

The video player, just like the music player, offers access to a paid video streaming services for movies and TV shows.

Video player

Winner: Tie.

Loudspeaker

The loudspeakers of both Xiaomi Mi 3 and Mi 4 are quiet, though the Mi 4's performance is even worse than the Mi 3. Both score Below Average marks on our test, though clearly the Xiaomi Mi 3 is louder than Mi 4.

Winner: Tie. 2 dB difference is really not enough for you to notice in real life usage.

Audio quality

Neither of the Xiaomi flagships did particularly well in our audio quality test. They both started struggling right from the first part where we tested them with an active external amplifier, showing below par volume levels and a few less than stellar scores.

Plugging in a pair of headphones lead to further degradation in the Mi 3 and Mi 4 and we ended up with less than great results. Still the Xiaomi Mi 4 managed to just edge this one with slightly better scores and a little higher volume. It's hardly a victory worth celebrating too long, though.

And here go the results so you can see for yourselves.

Xiaomi Mi 4 frequency response

Xiaomi Mi 3 frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.

Winner: Tie.