Back in the days, Xiaomi is known for offered the flagship specifications at a very attractive price point. Such as the Mi 3 when it came to Singapore it's around SGD$419 with Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoC. Looking at the Pocophone F1's overall built quality and the specification being offered, it greatly does reminds me of the good old days.
The Pocophone F1 was targeted to the India market mainly due to lack of flagship phones at a reasonable price and another reason is the influx of mid rangers.
Poco F1 equipped with top of the line Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC with 6GB of RAM and comes in 3 variants - 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB. The phone also supports a microSD slot and along with a 3.5mm headphone jack. However, it lacks NFC for wireless payment and it's a plastic construction phone. In short, it is a watered down of Xiaomi's Mi 8 in terms of built quality and its premiums.
The phone comes in 3 colors - Navy Blue, Black, and Red. For certain markets, it comes in a very special edition - Kelvar, a carbon fiber printed material which adds a tad of protection onto the phone.
Poco F1 priced at SGD$449 for the 64GB with 6GB while the 128GB with 6GB priced at SGD529 and both are available in Black and Blue/Navy. No news on the Red and Kelvar edition for Singapore's Market.
The notch + MIUI skin does make the viewing of notification more troublesome as it only showed the time, wifi signal, mobile network signal, and battery level. If one needs to check notification needs to swipe down or make full use of lock screen notification setting instead.
To my experience with Notch Phones, Xiaomi does make more steps to check when compared phones like Huawei/Honor and LG G7 make the notification icons viewing with ease
Poco brings in a new technology which previously found on Xiaomi Black Shark - Liquid-cool technology that keeps the phone's core components in very cooling condition when during extensive usage of the phone without throttling the performance.
A hugely sized battery of 4,000mAh was equipped into Poco F1 for a long lasting usage. True enough, on my usage, the phone could last me the almost entire day with an estimated 20% left at about over 5 hours of screen on time (SOT) with the gaming component. To my surprise, the liquid-cool technology does make the phone cooler when playing games or doing intense stuff and which also one of the many reasons that make the battery last tad more.
Poco F1 has the same camera as Xiaomi Mi 8 SE - A dual AI camera setup - 12MP main sensor and 5MP depth of field sensor. The front camera is a 20MP sensor which found on the Mi A2 to give a clearer and brighter selfies with Xiaomi's AI beautify 4.0 software.
Photo quality during daylight shots are looks natural and not oversaturated but do note that the camera has no OIS support. Makes sure to be steady when shooting scenes. Brings your expectation lower for lowlight and night shot as the photo quality has more noise on the artifact. Recalling on my experience on Xiaomi Mi 8 and comparing to Pocophone F1, the shutter speed on Poco F1 seems to be a tad slower as the images being processing...
Poco F1 runs on an MIUI with a twist to make the performance much faster and smoother. It runs on it own Poco Launcher that increased swipe sensitivity and accelerated app startups. and... it has an App Drawer! It's running on MIUI 9 on top of Android 8.1 Oreo with some Poco flavours.
Verdict?
It is the most bang for your bucks phone to date with the top specifications being paired up and some minor compromised on the Pocophone F1 such as no NFC and the troublesomeness of viewing notifications. Hopefully, the next Poco make continue to trend of the affordable flagship.
The Pocophone F1 was targeted to the India market mainly due to lack of flagship phones at a reasonable price and another reason is the influx of mid rangers.
Poco F1 equipped with top of the line Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC with 6GB of RAM and comes in 3 variants - 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB. The phone also supports a microSD slot and along with a 3.5mm headphone jack. However, it lacks NFC for wireless payment and it's a plastic construction phone. In short, it is a watered down of Xiaomi's Mi 8 in terms of built quality and its premiums.
The phone comes in 3 colors - Navy Blue, Black, and Red. For certain markets, it comes in a very special edition - Kelvar, a carbon fiber printed material which adds a tad of protection onto the phone.
Poco F1 priced at SGD$449 for the 64GB with 6GB while the 128GB with 6GB priced at SGD529 and both are available in Black and Blue/Navy. No news on the Red and Kelvar edition for Singapore's Market.
The notch + MIUI skin does make the viewing of notification more troublesome as it only showed the time, wifi signal, mobile network signal, and battery level. If one needs to check notification needs to swipe down or make full use of lock screen notification setting instead.
To my experience with Notch Phones, Xiaomi does make more steps to check when compared phones like Huawei/Honor and LG G7 make the notification icons viewing with ease
Poco brings in a new technology which previously found on Xiaomi Black Shark - Liquid-cool technology that keeps the phone's core components in very cooling condition when during extensive usage of the phone without throttling the performance.
A hugely sized battery of 4,000mAh was equipped into Poco F1 for a long lasting usage. True enough, on my usage, the phone could last me the almost entire day with an estimated 20% left at about over 5 hours of screen on time (SOT) with the gaming component. To my surprise, the liquid-cool technology does make the phone cooler when playing games or doing intense stuff and which also one of the many reasons that make the battery last tad more.
Poco F1 has the same camera as Xiaomi Mi 8 SE - A dual AI camera setup - 12MP main sensor and 5MP depth of field sensor. The front camera is a 20MP sensor which found on the Mi A2 to give a clearer and brighter selfies with Xiaomi's AI beautify 4.0 software.
Photo quality during daylight shots are looks natural and not oversaturated but do note that the camera has no OIS support. Makes sure to be steady when shooting scenes. Brings your expectation lower for lowlight and night shot as the photo quality has more noise on the artifact. Recalling on my experience on Xiaomi Mi 8 and comparing to Pocophone F1, the shutter speed on Poco F1 seems to be a tad slower as the images being processing...
Poco F1 runs on an MIUI with a twist to make the performance much faster and smoother. It runs on it own Poco Launcher that increased swipe sensitivity and accelerated app startups. and... it has an App Drawer! It's running on MIUI 9 on top of Android 8.1 Oreo with some Poco flavours.
Verdict?
It is the most bang for your bucks phone to date with the top specifications being paired up and some minor compromised on the Pocophone F1 such as no NFC and the troublesomeness of viewing notifications. Hopefully, the next Poco make continue to trend of the affordable flagship.