Poco F3 5G Full Review: Wait….WHAT???!! 😱

So the Poco series smartphone has always held the title to be one of the best bang for your buck smartphones ever since the first iteration. Coming at an extremely affordable price, people KNEW that if you spend your money on the Pocophone, you are surely getting your money’s worth.

In this article, I will let you know whether the latest Poco F3 5G is THE Real Beast and yet another phone that offers everything that an ordinary smartphone user needs with a very good price point.

 

Unboxing

First, let’s unbox the phone.

The Poco F3’s box comes in black, with “Poco F3” in the middle, and the mention of 5G connectivity text down below.

Opening the box, you will find a card that says welcome to the Poco Family.

Then there is a small yellow box that has the SIM ejector pin on the outside. Inside, there are some cool Poco stickers, the user manual and a soft clear phone case.

Then you will find the phone itself.

Then inside the rest of the box, you will find the USB-A to USB-C Cable, the USB-C to 3.5mm headphones dongle, and finally a 33-watts fast charging adapter. Oh yes!!!

Specifications

As for the phone’s specs, the phone comes with the Snapdragon 870 7nm process with 5G support as the name clearly mentions, it has the Adreno 650 GPU.

The variant that I have is the 8 gigabytes of RAM with 256 gigabytes of UFS 3.1 storage. It comes shipped with MIUI 12, where I have updated it to the latest MIUI version 12.0.1.

Build Quality

Looking at the design and build, using the phone as my daily smartphone felt really good in my hands.

Although it comes with a clear phone case, I did not even use it as the phone was quite grippy and had a very solid weight to it as well. You will really need to see the phone in real life to really appreciate the super classy matte white finish on the phone.

Speaking of the back, it has a medium-sized camera bump, where the design looked great but the phone will wobble a bit if you type the phone when you place it on a surface.

The good news is that this rear finish is not made of plastic but made out of glass with Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection, which was great to know, especially with a smartphone within this price range.

Now this same Gorilla Glass 5 is also for the front panel, where it features one of the thinnest dots in the industry at just 2.76mm.

As for the phone’s ports and buttons, down below other than the USB-C port, you will find the card slot and one of the two stereo speakers, as the other is right on top of the phone together with the IR blaster as well, which at first glance, looks like a speaker too so that was really smartly designed.

Then on the right, there is the volume rocker and a very unique power button that doubles up as a fingerprint sensor, where as opposed to the typical side mounting fingerprint sensor that you would see in other smartphones, this had hands down the best quality in terms of the tactile feel of the button and the fastest fingerprint sensor that I have EVER tested as well.

So overall I would totally rate the phone very high on the overall design and build of the phone especially within this smartphone level as it surely has a Flagship Level Design.

 

Display

As for the phone’s screen, it has a 6.67-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 1080 x 2400 pixels HDR 10+ with the ultra-tiny dot drop display.

I was shocked at how good the display quality was, especially since it also comes with a high 120Hz refresh rate and 360Hz touch sampling rate and with its peak brightness of 1300 nits, it made the phone great to view even under really bright and harsh daylight, with its sunlight display 3.0 technology.

Now, using the phone daily just felt great due to its screen quality and color accurate screen when it comes to daily tasks like social media browsing and watching videos on YouTube as well. The screen experience was also quite great, especially with the Dolby Atmos support.

Cameras

Looking at the camera’s specs, it has 4 cameras in total: 

• the main lens is a 48-megapixel f 1.79 aperture 
• an 8-megapixel f 2.2 ultrawide angle lens, and;
• a 5-megapixel tele-macro camera with an aperture of f 2.4

As for the front camera, it has:

• a 20-megapixel f 2.45 lens

Cameras (Photos)

Now here is where again I was very pleased with the photos coming out of the phone. You will be getting almost flagship-level photos on the phone, with nice dynamic range, whether it’s for the ultrawide angle lens, or the main lens as well

The dedicated 48-megapixel mode was also great for situations where you need to crop and zoom into your images, but I would use this mode sparingly since the file sizes are huge.

In terms of zooming, you can zoom optically up to 2 times and digitally up to 10 times, where the results were pretty good as well.

Portrait Mode on the phone was also great for the rear and also the front camera as well.

Then the night mode had yet a great balance of the highlights and shadows, with no sign of a noisy or grainy image even when taking photos in a REALLY poorly lit area.

Cameras (Videos)

As for the video, the phone can record up to 4k 2160p at 30 frames per second for the main lens, where the video quality was really good as well.

Image stabilisation for the main and the ultrawide angle lens was extremely stable as well, but keep in mind that the ultrawide lens can only record up to 1080p instead, BUT I didn’t see a HUGE difference in the image quality.

Then as for the phone’s front camera, it records up to 1080p at 30 frames per second, where the video quality was great with really nice image stabilization but do keep in mind to make sure that you are not in a backlit situation, where the overall background could be overexposed.

But I have to say that among all the cool camera features, I really appreciated the dual video mode where it records both the front and the rear camera for the very first time, which was REALLY nice to know that a smartphone within this range had.

 

Sound Quality

As for the phone’s sound quality, this has to be the best audio quality on any of the Poco series thus far that I have reviewed.

Not only the audio separation was good when listening to music both through wireless earphones and through the stereo speakers as well with its hi-res audio.

The Dolby Atmos surround sound on the speakers was also extremely well pronounced and output volume was also really high as well.

 

Navigation

In terms of the software, it is upgradable to the latest MIUI version 12.0.1, where the latest iteration of MIUI has really given me a positive reaction towards the UI in general compared to the previous version.

The overall experience was great using the phone daily, from multitasking, browsing websites to social media usage as well, without any issues whatsoever, thanks to the DDR5 RAM.

And since the phone comes with a high refresh rate and the high touch sampling rate as mentioned earlier, you would even think that the phone was a flagship with its fluid navigation experience.

 

Battery Life

Now on to the phone’s battery, it comes with 4,520 milliamps of battery with fast charging up to 33 Watts, where the charger comes inside of the box.

Now with this fast charging option, it got me from 0 to 100 percent about 55 minutes, which was extremely sweet. And this phone feels like a phone that I just can’t get it to die within a day unless I really use the phone to the extreme.

Based on my daily usage, I got an average of 4 hours and 49 minutes to 5 hours of screen time when I was at 10% battery. Now THIS is surely a HUGE plus of the phone.

Gaming

In terms of gaming, the good news for you all is that I finally started TRYING to play Gensin Impact.

The Game Turbo mode surely made the gameplay really smooth without any issues both on Gensin Impact and even on COD Mobile as well, and the phone performed like A REAL BEAST.

Now THIS has to be because of its combination of the Adreno 650 GPU with the combination once again because of the DDR5 RAM and UFS 3.1 storage, especially with the 7nm process of the Snapdragon 870.

And with the inclusion of the LiquidCool Technology 1.0, since the device has a great heat distribution that although it can be a little warm during very long gameplay but it didn’t overheat, neither did it affect the overall gameplay. 

Conclusion

Now, in conclusion, the Poco series has yet again exceeded my expectations for a smartphone that is surely an entry-level to even a midrange smartphone killer.

I am still extremely mind blown NOT ONLY about the spec sheet but my overall usage using this phone and really taking the phone to its limits. It is a device which I can fully recommend if you are looking for a smartphone that has a great camera, fantastic gaming performance and of course a great battery life as well.

And with a starting price of ONLY RM1,399 for the 6 plus 128 gigabytes variant, it is surely a smartphone that is going to be totally worth your money!

So with this, I want to know, what do you guys think of the Poco F3 at the comments section below and let’s discuss over there!