POCO F2 Pro Review – A battery champ that cuts the right corners By XDA

The Poco f2 pro is one of those 20 20 flagships. That's in a pretty weird position, so, of course, with the rush for 5g we've had issues where companies are no longer necessarily able to push for that flagship killer device of the year so, for example, uh dating back even to the OnePlus 3 going into last year, uh the year before the homophone f1 uh. All of these phones kind of thrived off of that whole flagship killer thing that we can't really get at the moment. Uh you'll see even with the Realme x50 that just launched that's launched for 299 pounds, but of course it doesn't have a snapdragon 865 and that's kind of the same issue that we've got here where we've got a snapdragon 865, but we've had other corners cut as a result of needing to kind of push down the price, because 5g is expensive. While we've got this 64 megapixel camera we've got a pop-up camera as well. As you can see there, and that's that's really.

That's really the extent of I guess the fancy features uh. It's a 64 hertz display this 180 hertz uh touch sampling rate, so you know I mean like that. That's good for low latency kind of touching and scrolling and what have you, but you won't actually see more frames per second, it's still only 60 hertz. Likewise, then, it's only 1080p panel 30 watt fast charging in the box, which is pretty good. You get that charger uh, but there's no wireless charging, and it's all of this kind of cutbacks and not even cutbacks.

It's all of these just kind of straight out the box kind of nothing, fancy no bells and whistles experience that you'll get with the Poco f2 pro um. So even with this device, there's no dual speakers. The single firing speaker is pretty good um, there's an in-display fingerprint sensor and again there's nothing fancy out of it. You know: there's a headphone jack in the device, though uh, and it works. I've tested it um.

I don't like the position of it. It's up the top. So when you're putting your phone in your pocket, you've got to put it top down or top up, because obviously then, if you have your headphones plugged into or whatever, but I mean at this point- I think we kind of just have to follow the phrase of beggar's campy choosers. The fact there's a flagship device releasing in 2020 with a headphone jack is surprising in and of itself. So obviously we would hope, then that polo, or I guess, Xiaomi, because, as I said, this is just a Redmi k30 pro.

This device is already out um, but anyway there's nothing hugely special about it, and the fact that that headphone jack is even there is one of the crazier parts and there's the side power button which is red. I have the neon blue variant. The red stands out, but it doesn't look too nice I mean, I guess it makes it easier to find, but again you'll kind of get a feel for where the power button is on your phone very quickly. So I don't really see the need for kind of having that now. Obviously, on this one you've got the 64 megapixel uh camera sensor, which is the primary sensor, and I don't really find myself using any other sensors on this device.

There's a macro camera, which is actually very, very good. It's a 5 megapixel, most phones that I've seen only have a 2 megapixel, then there's a wide angle and then there's a depth sensor, I'm showing you a number of photos on the screen. At the moment that I have taken. I went on a little staycation because you know covet 19 and all that uh to a city in Ireland known as Waterford, and I took lots of photos. While I was down there, I used it as my primary smartphone camera, and it did very well.

It was probably one of the better phones I've used in terms of cameras. I mean I've used like the OnePlus 8 pro I've used the honor 20 pro um. It beats those devices and r is on par with them. I use the nights cape mode sparingly uh. I don't really find myself using those modes and phones too much, because sometimes I find it can be unnatural.

Often you get like a mini night mode when you're just taking a photo in darkness, with the flash off where it takes longer to take the photo, but it doesn't kind of over brighten it to the point that it looks weird which I found this phone would sometimes do not a big deal, just kind of something to look out for, I guess there's only the single front-facing camera, which I mean very few phones, have more than one the Realme x50 pro comes to mind, which has a wide-angle camera as the second one uh. But people didn't like that. Obviously, because then you've got a massive cutout on the screen. So, and I mean this is only a pop-up camera uh. One of the things I don't like with this pop-up camera, though, is the fact that when you are on the lock screen, and you go to swipe to unlock it, uh cannot just press that power button and have the uh pop-up camera come up straight away.

You need to swipe to go to where you put in your pin or your pattern or your password, and then it will scan for your face, as opposed to the likes of say the OnePlus 7 series which what it did was when you turned on the screen. The camera immediately popped up. I assume this is done for wear and tear reasons, but it's still just annoying um, especially when other devices on the market have already kind of not solved that issue, but kind of just skirted around it, but yeah uh in terms of performance. The locos 2 pro kind of confused me, so I mean using it is fine. There are no issues.

Gaming is fine. I was able to emulate games such as the Simpsons hit-and-run from the game cube childhood favorite of mine, but when I tried to do a stress test, uh Poco whole thing with this phone. Therefore, their thing has been that it's a cool phone um, it doesn't overheat, and it doesn't. I mean, like it, it's a normal temperature all the time, even when gaming uh, but I think how Poco has partially achieved. This is actually because they are throttling it pretty heavily.

I did a review over on the DA news portal, which you can check out. I've got that up here beside me, I'm kind of just looking at it occasionally and um what they did was they throttled the CPU very heavily after 10 minutes, and I did a comparison with it with the OnePlus 8 pro, and it didn't throttle like at all it throttled to 95 percent of its total capacity, while the Pogo f2 pro did it in between 70 and 80. Depending on the certain situation, you were in again not really noticeable, but something to keep in mind if you're kind of doing intensive tasks on your smartphone. Generally speaking, I mean when I'm away or whatever I can often end up using my smartphone as a replacement for a laptop, because I replenish a lot of work. Email messages all that kind of thing and when I'm using my device, I need it to number one last, and I need the performance to be good.

However, this is where the Poco f2 pro really shines is the battery life. I took this with me: I didn't get to charge it at night after using it for a day, and then it lasted me until halfway through the next day before it died. Now keep in mind I'm using this extremely heavily. I'm using Snapchat Facebook, Reddit Twitter, Gmail slack discord all of these things, and it lasted. I mean like it handled all of it.

Furthermore, I'm not really impressed me because I've never had a phone capable of that. The OnePlus 8 pro dies on me by the evening um the realm x50 pro did the same uh. While this phone, I managed to get between eight and ten hours of screen on time uh. While that is obviously not the norm for most smartphones, if you need something with a big battery life yeah, this will do it. I did the PC benchmark test and on maximum brightness uh, no airplane mode.

It reached eight hours of screen on time, then what that does be. It goes and basically continuously processes data so that it will kind of synthetically, reproduce you using your phone constantly, and I got eight hours, ten minutes of the screen being on uh, when I did it at the alt, the ultimate minimum, so lower screen, brightness airplane mode on. I got 22 hours uh. For contrast, the Realme x50 pro got five hours uh with brightness maximum and 10 hours, with brightness on low airplane mode on. So obviously, this is already in a lot better of a position than those devices like the real mix 60 pro and the OnePlus 8 pro.

I've never had a phone battery last this long, even when I've reviewed mid-range devices which often can have either bigger batteries or lower end chipsets. So then, as a result, it uses less power. Overall, the Pokémon 2 pro is pretty decent. I mean yes, it's a cheap flagship uh, but I can't really see anything else on the market that can even compare uh. You would be spending upwards of a hundred euro more to get a Realme x50 pro, which is possibly the closest thing to it.

You get 65 watt charging and a 90 hertz screen with that which is actually only 20 euro more than the high-end Poco f2 pro the Poco f2 pro comes in at a 499 euro for the uh, the six gigabytes of ram 128 gigabytes of storage variant, while the eight gigs of ram 256 gigabytes of storage variant comes in a 599 uh, which is the exact same price as the Realme x50 pro. Currently, the Poco f2 pro has a little of a deal on. It's actually 579 euro, or at least what I saw on Xiaomi's uh Spanish website, and they seem to be doing different European deals where it seems to be five: seven, nine is huh so slightly cheaper. But I mean, if you're willing to spend an extra hundred euro, you may as well kind of just start looking at other options. But if you don't care about that, we have the six gigabytes of ram 128 gigabytes of model.

I have no issues with this device and this is considerably cheaper. Uh 499 euro for a snapdragon 865 devices is expensive uh when we contrast that to the likes of the other flagship killers that we saw in other years, but it's as an in contrast to the devices released this year I mean yeah, that's a that's a good price. If, however, you find that too expensive, you can look to other devices in the market, I've seen actually mid-range devices. At the moment you can get like an Oppo a9 2020. You can get the Redmi Note 9s.

All of these devices are much cheaper but offer pretty good experiences. Uh they're definitely worth looking at. If you think that even this is too expensive, because I mean it is a lot of money. Uh 499 euro is a lot of money to drop on the phone. I can understand that.

There's nothing really wrong with this device. Uh it has NFC. It has an always on display. It's AMOLED 1080p 60, hertz, snapdragon 865, six gigs of ram 128 gigs of storage. All of these are just the bare minimum of what you get the headphone jack pop-up camera.

I know people myself included really like having that pop-up camera, because, obviously with devices that do not have a notch or a cutout or whatever those are really nice for watching Netflix on uh. Currently, while I am actually reviewing a different device at the moment uh, so this is no longer my daily driver uh. When I am watching Netflix or YouTube. I actually go back to this phone because it has the nicest display out of all my phones, my OnePlus 7 pro I scratched badly. So but yeah I mean this is a good device and if you want to check out my written review, which kind of goes in more depth of a lot of things, you can check that out in the description below thanks for watching and if you enjoyed the video like the video and subscribe to the channel.

This has been Adam Conway with CATV, thanks for watching.

Source : XDA