POCO F3 Full Review - Budget but beastly! By Izzi Boye

Aside its speed and fluid 120 hertz experience, my favorite thing to do with the POCO F3 is gaming. What is up guys, the name is Izzi and welcome to the channel. So, the POCO F3, tagged "The Real Beast". What exactly is beastly about this phone anyway you might ask? Well, POCO is known to bring flagship specifications and performance with their devices at very competitive pricing and the POCO F3 is no different. The most interesting part... you get it for less than half the price of current flagships, which makes you wonder... what exactly is the compromise to make this possible, how is it that the POCO F3 has such flagship specifications at a very low price point? Does the POCO F3 actually give you flagship performance? Well, we are going to find out soon enough.

Now it's going to mean a lot to me if you hit that subscribe button and subscribe to the channel. Now let's get started. The POCO F3 comes nicely packaged with a couple of accessories including a USB-C cable, a 33watts fast charger, no headphones but you do get a type C to 3.5 millimeter adapter, this should come in handy if you use wired earphones. There is also a transparent protective casing. You will get a POCO card welcoming you to the POCO family, and some stickers.

Lest I forget, you also get a pre-installed screen protector. I've always admired POCO phones for the value they bring at very affordable price points, but I've really never used one. The F3 is my first POCO phone and having had it for well over two weeks I have to say I'm loving the experience so far. The POCO F3 has what I'd like to call a flagship feel with this Gorilla Glass 5 protection on the display and the rear. Sadly it has no official IP rating so keep that in mind, but it should survive a few splashes.

The POCO F3 has a glossy and shiny finish on the rear, actually the black is so shiny that it can pass for a mirror, not shy of smudges. The camera module is fitted nicely to the top left in a two-stepped bump housing its triple rear cameras and flash. The frame of the POCO F3 is plastic and it houses the ports and buttons. The volume rocker and power buttons are on the right. The power button also doubles as the fingerprint scanner and it sits nicely below the volume keys.

It is pretty accurate and very responsive. It is going to unlock your device 99 percent of the time. You have stereo speakers on the POCO F3, one at the bottom and the other at the top and of course the signature IR blaster. It has its sim tray at the bottom. It's supports dual sim card but there is no micro sd card support.

The POCO F3 is a slim device and it weighs 196grams. For a device packing a 4,500 milliamps per hour battery you would expect it to be heavier, but it isn't. It is quite a handful though and you might want to forget about typing on this one with one hand. The typing experience however is lovely though, much thanks to that 360hz touch sampling rate, very responsive. Haptic feedback on here is also on-point.

The display on the POCO F3 is a 6.67 inch E4 Super Amoled display with a 120 hertz refresh rate which is not enabled by default. It is a display made by Samsung so you know what to expect. It supports HDR10+ and it can get really bright, up to 1300 nits of peak brightness. As a Full HD Super Amoled display, you can expect to have deep blacks and vibrant colors. The display has Gorilla Glass 5 protection and its selfie camera is placed in a center hole punch cut-out.

Complemented by the loud and lovely sounding stereo speakers you are certain to have enjoyable media experience whether through gaming or watching movies. The POCO F3 starts at around 350 dollars for the 6 gig version with a 128 gigs of storage. That is just about 20 dollars more than the Samsung Galaxy A52 4G. A comparison between these two devices is going to be quite interesting, I think I'm going to do a video. The F3 I have here is the one with 8 gigs of ram and 256 gigs of storage.

One of the main selling points of the POCO F3 is its flagship processor. The Snapdragon 870 5G chipset which powers the POCO F3 is an improvement to the Snapdragon 865 chipset which was used on flagship devices of last year. For context, the 865 is the processor powering the Snapdragon variant of the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. The benchmark scores of the POCO F3 are flagship standard. For 350 dollars I'd that's a steal.

Pretty cool right? The POCO F3 runs on Android 11 and POCO's version of MIUI 12. I was expecting a lot of bloatware apps and ads but so far it is not as much as I initially anticipated. Ads are subtle and you are only going to see them when using the system file manager or after installing an application. As for bloatwares I found no more than one or two apps that I needed to uninstall. The software experience is pretty snappy especially with that 120hz refresh rate, however, on 120 hertz the battery drains quite faster.

Now don't get me wrong though, you are still going to get a full day of use on 120hz, but on 60hz refresh rate you are going to get significantly more battery life. It has a quick charge functionality which allows you to power up from 0 to 100 in just under one hour. I did mention earlier that gaming was my favorite thing to do on the POCO F3. You get the Adreno 650 GPU along the Snapdragon 870 processor, add these to 120hz refresh rate and you get an amazing gaming experience all the time. Not to forget the stereo speakers to give you that epic sound while you blast your way through your favorite games.

You're able to play most titles on the highest graphics settings with no frame drops. Genshin Impact comes at a default medium settings and the gaming experience is mostly flawless thanks to its liquid cooling. The POCO F3 does not heat up even during long gameplay sessions. I'll be doing a dedicated gaming review of the POCO F3 to see just how well this holds up against those heavy and demanding titles so make sure you are subscribed to the channel and you have your notifications turned on. The cameras of the POCO F3 is where you find a few compromises.

You're going to get a 20 megapixel selfie camera on the display. On the rear you get a triple camera combination of a 48 megapixel main camera, an 8 megapixel ultra-wide camera and a 5 megapixel macro camera. The camera performance is not flagship standard, mid-range at best, but for the price of this device I'd it is impressive and good enough. You can decide to use GCAM if you want to get more out of it. The macro camera also does a great job at macro photography.

Selfies are decent, both normal and portraits. Its night mode is also not bad at all. Its rear camera is able to shoot 4k 30 frames per second videos, it does not have optical image stabilization but I'd say it does pretty good with electronic stabilization. Its selfie camera is only able to shoot up to 1080p 60 frames per second, no 4k here. Uhh it's a selfie camera sample from the POCO F3, it actually looks good.

It can only do 1080p 60 frames per second uh you can get 4k 30 fps from the rear cameras. Looks good, what do you think? For the price the POCO F3 retails at, this is probably the best value phone you can get right now and expect flagship performance. It has a flagship processor and it can do very good gaming and you are not going to bother about heating issues. Now it may not have flagship specifications for its cameras but I think you'll be pretty satisfied with what its cameras can do. I intend to compare this device in a video with the Samsung Galaxy A52 and the Redmi Note 10 Pro.

Do let me know which one you'd like to see first. If you find this video helpful, do hit that thumbs up, and a sub to the channel would not be a bad idea. Catch you in the next one, peace.

Source : Izzi Boye