So when the POCO F6 Pro was launched two weeks ago, there were lots of negative comments from you, and including me, about it, however, after two weeks I can say that we were wrong!

So here is what’s good and what’s not good about this new POCO F6 Pro after using this for two weeks.

 

Design

Let’s start with the positives, first would be the design.

Here is where I was wrong to feel that I did not like the design during my first impressions, because while yes, the POCO F3 has to be hands down the best minimal look for the rear part of the phone. But I have to say that this whole M series style of camera bump really grew on me.

This is because of two simple facts: first, the amazing white finish’s color contrast and the four rounded camera bumps were nice and symmetrical. 

Secondly, the lenses were all on the same thickness level, especially with the overall camera bump, which means that I had an absolutely great time typing the phone on the table confidently without any annoying wobbles.

Then the bonus factor is of course, the phone’s finish. I did love it during my first impressions and still love it even more right now, and I still prefer it over last year’s HUAWEI P60 Pro’s Rococo Pearl finish.

Finally, the matte finish of the side aluminum frame makes the phone really nice to hold when I was using it daily, especially when it comes to gaming as well, and I’ll be sharing more about my gaming test of this phone later on.

 

Cameras

I’m going to go straight into what’s good about the cameras, because like I said before, we all know how amazing smartphone cameras can be these days, especially during the day.

But just to confirm, yes it did had great cameras during the day, from the High Megapixel photos to the ultrawide lenses, where the ultrawide lenses, even with a lower Megapixel point than the main, still looked great from a dynamic range point and focal length too.

The new main lenses were also amazing during the day, and even the digital 2x zoom.

Speaking of zoom, one very interesting thing I’ve noticed is that every time when I zoom beyond 2x, the camera app really stabilizes the image really nicely too but if you really go up to the maximum zoom, no matter how stable the shots are, you will only get good results during the day.

Then the macro mode on the phone was just OK, I’ve definitely seen better macro lenses out there, so I see no point in having those dedicated macro cameras anymore.

So yeah, during the day is good, but I really wanted to test out the cameras at night.

And it was lovely to see that it is hands down the best image that POCO has done with their image processing for the nighttime photos, and of course, the larger sensor as well, even with a lower 50MP camera compared to 64MP on last year’s model.

The main lens photos at night, both indoors and outdoors, were really amazing, with nicely captured details of the highlights and shadows without any noise being visible.

The portrait mode at night was also nice, and because it has a new sensor, I noticed even without the portrait mode, if you take photos on the 2x digital zoom, the level of shallow depth of field was great on the phone, giving it a more natural-looking blur when taking pictures.

Even the Ultrawide lens images looked great too, but only for pictures because when it comes to video, it only record up to 1080p, which really annoyed me because it’s year 2024, and yet we are still getting 1080p video recording on smartphones?

[Sample video footages available in my YouTube video]

The good news is that the main lens can record up to 8K 24 fps. But this is not my favourite frame rate because you can see some level of motion blur or jitter in this particular mode, especially during a stabilization test, but the 4K recording for the main lens was really good, so just stick with that.

But the front video was, oh my god, remember during my first impressions video I said “What’s Happening”? Well, what’s happening to the front camera man?

While it is understandable that the night time videos for the selfie camera are not the best, and decent for what it does, I feel that there is no excuse for the selfie video cameras to look like this – skin tones were inconsistent, the background was totally blown out.

And even when I tried to touch the screen at the skies to make sure that the exposure gets very well balanced, the camera app panicked, like: “What do I do? What do I do?”

 

Display

So, the display was something like trying to go on a “hot date” but not truly enjoying the hot date, as you need to cut down on the level of hotness.. Okay, let me explain.

What I loved about this “hot date” is the phone’s display because it has a high WQHD+ resolution, with really amazing sharpness, 12 bit color depth, Widevine L1 specification on Netflix, playback of HDR 10 and Dolby Vision, together with Spatial Audio certification, and side note, the speakers on the phone were really great too.

Then the whole idea of having the peak brightness being higher did have a positive impact on my overall experience when using the phone outdoors. The under-display fingerprint sensor also works very well with no issues too, where it unlocks really quickly.

So Adam, what do you mean by cutting down the beauty of the screen then? Well, in order for me to really enjoy the screen during the whole entire day, I had to bring down the screen’s resolution down to FHD+. Why? Because the battery life on the phone when I use the highest resolution made me feel like I couldn’t really fully experience this amazing display throughout the whole entire day.

And I did not want to bring down the refresh rate to even not really fully experience the phone, and why should we? Maybe if it’s an LTPO panel, then the battery life would be better, so let’s talk about the battery life next.

 

Battery

So the exact battery life I was getting was only an average of 3 hours on the highest resolution, with dark mode turned on at 12 percent battery, which is plain right sad. 

I mean, it is a 5000 mAh of battery in this phone and yet we have to sit and figure out what is the best way to save battery? All the talk about improvements on using cooling system and the previous Snapdragon chip but not doing the best for the battery optimization was really frustrating guys.

Then, to add salt to the wound, POCO has decided to remove the wireless charging, when there were wireless charging on the POCO F5 Pro last year even though the back panel is made out of glass, so that fact still made me go “What’s happening?”

But what about the battery life if you switch down to the FHD+ resolution then? Well it was significantly better, close to about 4 hours, still not really on par with a lot of other mid-range smartphones, but the Hypercharge of 120W and the fact that the charger comes inside of the box, getting a full battery charge close to 25 minutes, is the phone’s only saving grace when it comes to this battery department.

 

Gaming

So, let’s talk gaming then, well here is where we get back to the positives, because gaming on this phone was an absolute delight!

Even with last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, on Genshin Impact, it performed very well at the highest settings at 60 fps, with absolutely no lag at all, and the phone was barely even warm after 10 minutes of continuous gameplay.

There was even no major battery drain during a 20 minutes of continued gameplay, and it honestly felt like I was using a gaming phone or even a flagship phone!

So, gaming on this phone? A HUGE A+! 

Being the best for the price segment. Now, this could also be because the storage is using UFS 4.0 instead of last year’s version 3.1 on the POCO F5 Pro.

 

Software

Next, let’s talk about software because there are things that I did not mention and test when I first had the phone, and now, after two weeks – I did.

Firstly, just so you know, the software version on this is Xiaomi’s HyperOS version 1.0.3.0, on top of Android 14, of course, and we all can together agree that this version of the software is way better than MIUI.

With the independent and clean-looking control center on the top right swipe and the notification on the top left.

Then of course, there are some very useful dedicated Xiaomi apps like the Mi Remote, aesthetic changes on the fonts, nicer textures on the interface, including the status bar when charging the phone, and all in all, everything was way better under the hood, so thank God for this change.

 

And just so you know, POCO promises 3 years of software updates and 4 years of security patches, so that was also really neat.

During my use for the past two weeks, I did not encounter any issues, so that is a huge positive note because you all would know if I did have any issues, I would definitely mention it.

But an area that I didn’t talk about that really surprised me during POCO’s keynote presentation is the improvements on the AI features on the phone, so was it really good?

Based on my proper test, there is an easy way to remove the subject from the background by pressing and holding on the subject, and once you click save, it will have a transparent background, which did a very good job overall.

And if you want to change the background, you can do so by pressing and holding the image once again, but with the transparent background, and selecting Change Background, so that is pretty neat and works very seamlessly as well.

Then I also tested out the AI Expansion, let’s say you want to readjust a photo to a different aspect ratio, say 16:9, under the Crop tool, when you edit the photo, you can create an AI-generated fill, which gives you some very interesting results. It is not perfect all the time, but it’s a nice feature to have, especially on a smartphone within this price range.

And another very useful AI tool is Erase, where you can find it under the Create tab under the photo editor menu. For example, you can choose to remove people, where the AI will immediately look for people in the photo, and you can select and delete them instantly. 

And there are other AI features as well, which you can play around and use according to the type of photos that you have taken.

 

Conclusion

So that’s it, I guess we were indeed wrong and right on certain areas of the POCO F6 Pro. So the question I have for you is, what do you think of the POCO F6 Pro and is it worth the price?