POCO F2 Pro Review: Snapdragon 865

The new POCO F2 Pro shares that same selling point today, just that it’s for the Snapdragon 865. I got the phone during a sale for just over 500 SGD, which is about the same price as the Pixel 4A, and much cheaper than the OnePlusNord. So let’s take a closer look at the phone, and see what it has to offer.

POCO F2 Pro Design

Unlike its predecessor which was just using a plastic body, the F2 Pro actually has a surprisingly decent build quality and design that reminds me of the Mi 9T. Still no water resistance here, but it has metal on the side, glass on the back with a slightly matte finish, nice design touches around the phone, and it even has a notch-less and almost bezel-less display on the front of the phone thanks to the use of a pop-up camera. Because of that, the viewing experience is really good.

POCO F2 Pro Display Quality

It is using an AMOLED screen with good brightness and color reproduction. The viewing angle might not be the greatest, but I do like that it’s a flat display. It lacks the smoother 90Hz refresh rate, but that's not a deal-breaker for me at this price point. The fingerprint sensor under the screen works well for me as well, and in case you haven’t noticed there is no IR face unlock here anymore.

But considering the situation that we’ rein, I’ll take the nicer display any day of the week. The only unfortunate thing here is just a lack of stereo speakers. The bottom-firing speaker is pretty loud but can sound a bit thin. On the bright side, we still have a headphone jack here.

POCO F2 Pro Performance

As mentioned earlier, the POCO F2 Pro is using the Snapdragon 865. As expected from this chipset, performance is pretty great. Apps launches quickly, games perform well, and the phone doesn’t really heat up much. Battery life has been pretty great too with a 4700mAh battery and modest display setup.

Read this: ASUS ZenFone 7 Pro UNBOXING

POCO F2 Pro Battery Life

Even after a day of heavy use, I would end the day with around 30% battery remaining. It supports 30W fast charging as well, and a full charge takes only about an hour.

POCO F2 Pro Camera Performance

Camera hardware is fairly decent as well with the main camera being the Sony IMX686. The image processing might be a tad aggressive for my taste, but if you don’t pixel peep, it is a pretty capable shooter. Other than the edges looking a little soft, the 13MP ultra wide-angle camera looks decent in good lighting but is pretty much usable in lowlight since Night mode only works for the main rear camera.

The 20MP front camera is able to capture nice details but the dynamic range isn’t the best. Overall, it’s not as good as the Pixel 4afor sure, but camera performance isn’t really the main selling point of the Poco F2 Pro. So I think it’s decent enough.

POCO F2 Pro MIUI

At this point, you might be thinking it all sounds too good to be true, there must be a catch somewhere. And well, you’re right. The catch is that you have to be okay with using MIUI. The amount of features built into MIUI is impressive for sure, and I find a number of them pretty useful. But the UI feels a little rough around the edges with minor stutters and dropped frames in the animation every now and then.

It also comes with quite a number of bloatware out of the box as well, along with ads in some of the built-in apps. The good news is, there are things that you can do to improve the user experience. Using a third-party launcher makes it feel a little smoother to me, a lot of the bloatware can be uninstalled, and there are ways to remove ads.

Read this: IOS 14, Beta 5 More New Features

If this sounds like way too much work for you, then maybe the POCO F2 Pro is not for you. But if it’s something that you can live with, the phone does have a lot to offer. Just being able to get the Snapdragon 865 chipset at this price point is already incredible enough, but on top of that, the phone still has a nice design, good build quality, nice display, solid battery life, as well as decent enough cameras.

If camera performance and software experience are more important to you, I’ll still recommend the Pixel 4a. But if not, POCO F2 Pro with Snapdragon 865 is a pretty good deal, as long as you can live with MIUI.