Coolpad Note 3 Lite Review: Bang for the buck

Coolpad is one of the largest brands in the Chinese market which has also released many phones in India. One of them was Coolpad Note 3, which offered features that were beyond the expectations. And now Coolpad have released its smaller brother, Coolpad Note 3 Lite.

The Coolpad Note 3 Lite shares its most of the features with the Note 3, obviously because it is its brother. But does the Note 3 Lite compromise at anything? Let’s check it out in the full review.

Design

Coolpad Note 3 Lite takes its design from the Note 3 but in a smaller package. The thing that makes Note 3 Lite different from the Note 3 is that, the Note 3 Lite has gold rims running along the edges of the body, camera lens and fingerprint sensor which looks nice. The back is made up of plastic but offers a better grip also with a nice texture, which we can’t see in its predecessor. In front, there’s a 5-megapixel camera on the top along with a notification LED and backlit keys on the bottom. The power button is on the right, volume controls are on the left, a 3.5mm jack can be seen on the top and a micro USB slot is placed at the bottom shifted towards the left corner. The rear side of the handset houses the fingerprint scanner, camera module, and the speaker. Under the cover, a micro SD card along with two micro SIM card slots and a non-removable battery are found.

Totally, the handset feels nice in hands but the thing that makes it a bit awkward is the plastic feel but other than that it fits perfectly into the hands compared to the Note 3 which went out of hands. Also, if you’re not a fan of white color, it’ll be also available in black too.

Display

When it comes to the display, the Note 3 Lite has a 5-Inch (294 PPI) screen with a scratch-resistant glass. We tried it without screen guard or tampered glass, and we didn’t found any scratch on the screen which was a little bit awkward compared to other phones at this price. In the sunlight, the Note 3 Lite doesn’t look great but adjusting the brightness will help you. The touch is smooth and quite responsive and smooth and we can see very few lags.

Hardware

With budget pricing comes budget hardware but Coolpad has removed that tag. The Note 3 Lite comes with MediaTek MT6735 Quad Core 1.3 GHz Cortex A53 chipset and Mali T720MP2 GPU on board. The phone comes with an unbelievable 3GB RAM and 16 GB on-board storage which is also expandable up to 32 GB. The RAM capacity makes sure multitasking is handled without any hiccups and the processor looks after the smooth functioning of the device. There’s also Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, USB OTG, FM radio, GPS, and a non-removable 2500mAh battery. The phone has two Micro-SIM slots with 4G support on band 40 through both.Overall, the hardware is great for any phone at this price range.

Software

The Note 3 Lite also runs on Android 5.1 like its predecessor with their own custom UI on top of it known as Cool UI 6.0 skin. The changes were not very impressive and we also felt that some of the changes were really unnecessary to make like the settings app which doesn’t allow us to search for any specific setting which comes with stock Android. Like most of the other Chinese vendors, you get a typical single-layer UI by default, with all app icons and widgets arranged haphazardly on the home screens, but there is a “traditional mode” option buried in the preferences dialog.

The Cool UI also had an enormous “Cool Store” widget on one home screen which showed a banner ad and a few examples of popular apps you can get from the company’s own app store. Probably because of this, the installation of apps downloaded from third-party sources was not blocked by default, which is a potential security problem for users unfamiliar with Android. We would recommend removing this widget immediately to get rid of the ads and prevent background data usage.

The default keyboard is also replaced with something called Xploree, which uses some screen space to display prominent Yahoo search branding, and tracks everything you type in order to display targeted ads – which the company describes as “enabling search and discovery”. We would have liked at least an opt-in prompt or a popup message on first use telling users what the keyboard does. We found this invasive and intrusive, and disabled it immediately and switched back to the same old Google Keyboard which was buried under settings – again, we recommend you do the same if you buy the Coolpad Note 3 Lite.

Other than those, Cool Store, which offers a bunch of downloadable games; Xploree, a customizable keyboard with themes and a note-taking feature; FP Lock, which lets you lock apps to your fingerprint so only you can open them; Rock Wallpaper, a widget which randomly changes the wallpaper; and Cool Show, to tinker with the phone’s themes, fonts, and notification sounds.

The Note 3 Lite comes pre-loaded with some apps like, WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook, WPS Office and Amazon – we feel like some of them were really useless and we were successful to remove some of them.

The interface works smoothly but the skin itself looks incomplete at all. For example, there isn’t much choice when it comes to themes, and apart from the default one, the others seem crude and unfinished, especially the icon sets. The custom icons in each theme can get really confusing at times when you’re looking for a specific app.

We tried to install some launchers like Action Launcher 3 and Nova Launcher to get rid of the poor looking Cool UI and we were succeeded in that and the launchers ran smoothly and they looked awesome on the device.

Totally, the software was very average but if they fix it with upcoming updates, then, it is cool.

Performance

The touchscreen is fairly responsive but does attract quite a lot of fingerprint smudges. Call quality is good and we didn’t have any issues with 4G either. The fingerprint sensor is very accurate and works on the first attempt most times. You can unlock the phone by placing your finger on it at any angle. You can store up to five fingerprints and assign each to open an app, dial a number, or take a photo rather than just unlocking the phone. The Note 3 Lite fares decently well in benchmarks considering its budget components. We got 31,372 in AnTuTu Benchmark and 14fps in GFXbench. These numbers translate to good real-world performance, and sure enough, the Note 3 Lite can handle casual games like Alto’s Adventure, Subway Surfers, Temple Run, Asphalt 8, Dead Trigger 2, N.O.V.A. 3, etc. We didn’t find out troubles with the UI while multi-tasking and it was very smooth even there’ only 1.9 GB of RAM available out of the box. The default music player is well designed and is good too. You can sort your music by folder and there are options for equalizer presets along with environmental effects to simulate sound from a large hall, etc. The video player is also quite feature-rich, and lets you edit videos, take screenshots, cast content via DLNA, or have it playing in a floating window while you use other apps. The rear speaker is loud enough for alerts but isn’t great for multimedia use.

Completely, the performance was really high enough for any phone in this price range.

Camera

Coolpad Note 3 Lite has a 13MP primary camera with LED flash and a 5MP front snapper. You can count on the details of images shot in daylight and well-lit areas but the quality suffers in low-light conditions. It is worth noting that pixel count is not solely responsible for the quality of the images. The camera also suffers sharpness in the images too in close up shots. Indoor and low-light shots get quite noisy, with a noticeable dip in autofocus speed.We took some image samples to show you how it works out in different lighting.

Video recording quality maxes out at 1080p and is decent. The camera software isn’t great with metering light automatically and there’s no option to change this either. However, the interface is simple enough to use. There’s also a Pro mode but the tweakable parameters are limited to focus, ISO, white balance, and exposure compensation.

The 5-megapixel front shooter does a decent job with selfies, but again, only in the daytime. You can also use Pro mode with the front camera, which we don’t see too often. And the most annoying and also a good thing about the front camera is “Face Beauty” mode which just washes out your pimples and makes your face clean and look beautiful and handsome. This will mostly attract selfie lovers and they will love that feature.

Here are some samples included for the front camera too in different lighting and face beauty mode.

Front camera samples

Rear camera samples

Battery

The 2500mAh battery lasted for about 7 hours of continuous video playback, which is pretty decent. Under regular use with 4G, we managed to get nearly a full day’s worth of usage. The bundled charger is only rated at 5W and takes a painfully long time to charge the phone fully when it’s totally dead. Also, the charging only works only if you don’t use your phone while charging and will also drain up if you use while charging.

My verdict

The Coolpad Note 3 Lite is a really good buy for this unbelievable 6,999 price but you’ve to compromise with some features like the unpolished UI, a generic design, and a better camera. So, you have to decide which features and specifications you care about the most.