Xiaomi unveils its first metal phone with a fingerprint scanner: meet the Redmi Note 3 and its 4,000mAh battery

For starters, the new Redmi Note is the first Xiaomi device to sport a metal build. Well, it's using a new material, but the phone's design language is not strikingly new; on the contrary, the Note 3 employs a refreshed design language that is somewhat similar to the one of its predecessor for the most part. Still, the edges are more rounded, similar to the designs Meizu has been pulling off lately. Still, the new entrant is ever so slightly thicker - at 8.65mm, it's not the perfect example for a super-thin catwalk star, but there's a perfectly good reason for the added bulk. We'll get to that later.

Let's avert our eyes at the specs sheet of the phone. Up front, we have a 5.5-inch 1080p display, laminated with Gorilla Glass; right beneath it, one can find a 2.0GHz Helio X10 MediaTek chipset paired with either 2 or 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM. The former version comes with 16GB of native storage, while the 3GB one has 32 gigs right out of the box. There's no microSD card slot in the mix, though.

At the back, there's a 13MP camera with phase detection autofocus  as well as the another highlight of the device - its large, 4,000mAh battery. Neat-o! The Redmi Note 3 is also the first Xiaom device to come with a fingerprint scanner. It's a circular one and is positioned at the back, just beneath the camera and its flash. Xiaomi says that the user can unlock the phone in 0.3 seconds and also use the scanner for mobile payments.