​​​40 could be the reason of the fault.

Good price but remember the gamble is the hassle of returning it should it go wrong. I bought a £40 phone from Gearbest that developed a fault, had to write it off and learnt never again..

what dumb design that you cant use dual sim with uSD card in!

Just don't go thinking you can return it to the 'European Warehouse' if there is a problem. It has to go back to China where postal tracking doesn't exist. I have had several items 'disappear' and not receive a refund. Just letting everyone know.

How much love on here for buying from China and taking a gamble, and ironically some UK companies are not even allowed to be submitted on here but Gearbest is fine!

Topped with how much praise for Xiaomi.....and yet take a look at the Mi 5....what a steaming pile of crap!

[here]

If you want a warranty IBuyGou have it for £130 shipped from China, but it includes a 2 year EU warranty, Import Tax insurance and 3-6 day DHL shipping. Not used them myself but they've been around for years and are a well regarded Xiaomi reseller.

They have the Pro version (3GB/32GB/fingerprint) for about £145 including all of the above aswell.

https://www.ibuygou.com/p-xiaomi-redmi-3-snapdragon-616-octa-core-15ghz-2gb-ram-16gb-rom-7285.html

Buy before June 23rd or risk paying import taxes!

Why do they use the term "ROM" ?

A lot of android phones seem to use the term ROM when they are referring to internal storage. I'm not sure why.

Well...I wouldn't take that test as gospel. If you're the sort of person who wears skinny jeans then yes - you should be worried. For the record, the Nexus 6P also shattered under the bend test but it is widely considered to be the best phone of 2015.

However, by far the biggest problem with Xiaomi devices is that we do not have a way of legitimately buying them from a European dealer. For that reason, the mi5 (or any other Xiaomi devices, no matter how excellent they are) is not really on my short list...

yeah, it is technically incorrect, but they seem to all have started doing it simply to differentiate between internal storage and actual RAM
^ something which used to confuse the hell out of people

ROM is commonly used to mean useable space on the device incorporating the OS
RAM is the amount of mem the device has

that clear it up?

True, which leads me to my other point...many credible UK businesses or for that matter European ones are shunned from HUKD yet crap like Gearbest and alixexpress where you are taking a gamble with peeing your money up the wall are just fine.

Nice looking phone but get the feeling that's all it is, doubt the performance will be any impressive.

you could buy this phone from a seller at Amazon UK, gold one is £116 at the moment, I guess the returns policy should be better? http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01BY1N7GM/ref=cm_sw_r_em_udp_apa_SznhxbS94XMDC

One thing I would say, I have given 3 reviews of products on Gearbest and none show when you go through the reviews, I guess I shouldn't be too surprised by that..

Good price and a good spec phone.

Make sure your network works before buying:

2G: GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz
3G: WCDMA 850/900/1900/2100MHz
4G: FDD-LTE 1800/2100/2600MHz

Gearbest are taking over HDUK by paying to allow their deals to be posted. They have been banned from the Irish deals site for doing exactly this and anyone posting GB links gets an automatic ban,proper order too

Xiaomi sold over 70 million phones last year, they make Sony & LG look like small companies. This phone is using the latest mid range Qualcomm 616, Samsung use the older 615 in some of their £200+ phones. The performance will be fine and this phone has very positive reviews, I'm going for the Pro version probably next month.

Remember, you can always do the hack (with a bit of skill and patience) to have dual SIM and SD card. My daughter has a Xiaomi Mi4C and it is a wonderful phone.

https://www.noreplied.com/how-to-insert-2-nano-sim-dual-sim-enabled-and-microsd-card-in-samsung-galaxy-s7-edge/

​More than you for sure :smiley:

What 4g networks can this phone join on to?

Good find as fulfilled by Amazon, so it will be them that will have to deal with any issues.

Be careful, you'll have your post deleted, like I just did.h

That is very useful info, thanks. Reading it quickly though, it still doesn't appear to stop them making you 'return' it to China even when bought from EU Warehouse?

Ee and 3 (so id too)
I've had mine couple of months and love it.
Battery lasts well over a day

My Mi5 is still looking sexy as it was the day I bought it. Not bended one bit!!

I would doubt anyone would purposely go and bend one, it was demonstrating however how fragile the frame structure of it is.

I'm positive it has nothing to do with Gearbest recently signing up to Quidco, which of course has close links to hukd. Never forget that hukd is a business that exists to make money.

Yet shuns companies 'self promotion' tactics :wink:

Well spotted, this is a much better IMO, simply down to the fact that it's fulfilled by Amazon.

Thank you for that knowledge :smiley:

Perhaps VAT will be reduced on it because we leave. The EU insists VAT is levied on most goods, another source of income for them as they take a cut. Import taxes = VAT.

Cannot understand how Gearbest get on here. The fraudulently mark the cost of goods down to avoid VAT and fees for buyers. HUKD are encouraging tax evasion and criminal activity. Harsh but true. + they are dodgy.

LOL. Try it. Small claims for a business based in China with a lock up somewhere in the EU. Cat in hells chance.

Business Name: Digitalab Limited
Business Type: Ltd
Trade Register Number: 2161532
Phone number: 852 68706870
Business Address:
Flat 8N, Camelpaint Building III
60 Hoi Yuen Road
Kwun Tong
Kowloon
HK

Silly to buy the standard Redmi 3 for £110 when the Red 3 Pro is £125 and comes with 3gb/32gb/fingerprint scanner etc.

Sorry, but COLD.

believe it or not, 5.5" is just plain too big for some folk

​There is a pro / prime version of this phone which is 5". He's not talking about the note pro which is 5.5 as you say

The Red 3 Pro is 5".

http://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomis_new_redmi_3_pro_is_basically_redmi_3_with_fingerprint_scanner_and_3gb_ram-news-17488.php

Looks like the EU warehouse is now out of stock.

I'd never buy Xiaomi again, my Redmi Note 2 came with un-getridabble-of adware malware through the weQR scanning app, impossible to remove
My MiPad2 wont keep the Google or Nova Launcher and keeps on reverting. Some may love these, but never again!

Are you sure that's not some rogue ROM installed by an unofficial distributor or some 3rd party reseller?

http://en.miui.com/thread-196400-1-1.html

You can get rid of the ad/malware by installing the official ROM as it doesn't have these strange adware apps:

http://en.miui.com/thread-198696-1-1.html

I've always wanted to know more about how gearbest filters reviews. It's clear that their review system isn't trustworthy, so it's interesting to hear about someone that it has happened to first hand. Now I'm curious about how it goes on aliexpress

One of the products i reviewed was this one, said it was fine but the temperature displayed was about 7° too high.
I didn't add pictures and I'm def not Russian, but there is only one review!! So where is mine?
http://www.gearbest.com/smart-watches/pp_187718.html#customer_review

I guess they don't make £4.99 fitness bands like they used to...

I reviewed it because you gain points which gives a bit of a discount, it wasn't ultra critical, but obviously it didn't fit their plan..

Take a look at the message on Trust Pilot. For this reason alone in my opinion, they shouldn't be on hotukdeals.

I find it frankly quite disturbing too how people can have their hotukdeals accounts suspended or their comments deleted just for querying things like this. I'm expecting this comment to be deleted too.


https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/gearbest.com

Great price, although I would pay a little extra for the pro version as it has 32gb ROM and 3gb RAM

​Ridiculous comment - just because something is £40 rather than £107 doesn't mean it's allowed to fail after two months!

Do not mention the irish "HUKD" site.The last 3 people on here who mentioned it recently "disappeared" suddenly.
This is because it is against.....one minute there are a couple of guys outside my door...be right back.

There has now been 440 deals from gearbest on this website over just the past 6 months. I am guessing some business tactics are going on :smirk:

What happened to the post of the guy who linked to his blog on how to install google services on this phone? Why was that post taken off? Seemed pretty useful to me.

Yes it does sound odd. The thing is, whilst it's good to have cheap phones, there's no doubt this encourages people to buy phones they don't need which must have an impact on the production chain.

Where do the raw materials for the phones come from? I don't know about these specific manufacturer but in the industry sometimes children do mine raw materials, workers are paid pittance and sadly people die.

Plus the manufacturers of mobile phones are notorious for adopting harsh work practices. That's why I always think it's best to keep your purchases to a minimum and get maximum use out of the phone you have.

Think of the environmental impact too. How much of an impact on the environment does producing one mobile phone create? I know that you need large amounts of rock to extract a small amounts of certain metals and fossil fuel use must be very high.

Basically when companies like Gearbest are clearly evading tax, what do you think is going on in the production chain?

For Xiaomi who now are the 5th largest phone maker in the world it cannot be to do with lack of warranty which some people attribute to the lower cost of Chinese phones....I disagree because anyone in China who bought from Gearbest for this very same price would be getting a warranty as Xiaomi obviously have operations out there, so the dirt cheap price still factors that.

In India Taiwanese company Foxconn are assembling Xiaomi phones for sale within that territory, this is to cut costs and boost their market share.

Something is giving somewhere, either other companies are making vast profits or Xiaomi are as you say adopting harsh work practices. Questionable about raw materials though because besides mainboard design I am sure you would find as with all mobile phone manufacturers a variety of chipsets that most certainly would not be in house. Memory chips, LCD Screen, Camera Sensor, CMOS, Processor, audio DAC etc etc would all be sourced from other companies.

Would be interested in knowing exactly what does go on in the production chain and how they can manufacture so cheap.

Interesting article below,

Rare earth metals: tech manufacturers must think again, and so must users


As the raw materials become scarcer, and China tightens its grip on trade, we need to break our IT upgrade habit


A man caked in wet mud struggles under a heavy load at a rare earth metals mine at Nancheng, China
A worker at a rare earth metals mine at Nancheng county, Jiangxi province, China. Photograph: Reuters

Askar Sheibani

Wednesday 26 March 2014 14.29 GMT Last modified on Saturday 23 January 2016 02.28 GMT

Rare earth metals are the crucial ingredient in many of our tech products. From smartphones, tablets and laptops, to the niche technology used by the military and medical profession, all depend on them to function, for features as broad as a phone's coloured screen to the magnets used to power hybrid cars. As new technology continues to flood the market, the demand for these metals will grow, but they're already in short supply.

If we're going to ensure that there are enough rare earth metals to keep pace with the current rate of technological innovation, and if we're going to stop these dangerous metals from filling landfill sites, we need to end today's rip-and-replace attitude towards IT equipment, as well as an end to the overproduction of devices by manufacturers.

......


Our current use of rare earth metals has huge implications in terms of toxic pollution. They are often mined using extremely energy-intensive processes, spewing carbon emissions into the atmosphere and toxins into the ground. Indeed, the metals involved, which include mercury, barium, lead, chromium and cadmium, are extremely damaging to the environment. Recent survey findings from United Nations University (UNU) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) on the impact e-waste has on child health, raised concerns around chemical burns, cancer and stunted growth. Eradicating these substances from discarded products is difficult and costly, which is why much of the e-waste exported to the developing world under the pretence of being reused or refurbished ends up being dumped. The WHO has reported that 23% of deaths in the developing world are attributable to environmental factors, one of which is pollution, and that environmental risk factors contribute to more than 80% of regularly reported diseases.ck

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/rare-earth-metals-upgrade-recycle-ethical-china

Post 60 "Would be interested in knowing exactly what does go on in the production chain and how they can manufacture so cheap. "

Try researching Apple products , like where the TV documentary exposed iphones costs less than £5 in parts to make and they are made in Chinise sweat shops/factories.
Now ask the question why iDiots pay so much for phones then you might fathom why
Xiaomi can sell a superior product for a less price.

It is amazing that sometimes when people post a bargain on this site you get a few people who want to ban them or **** them off, probably through ignorance or lack of knowledge, when the majority of people have never had a problem.