POCO M3 Review So Cheap But SHOULD You Buy It? By TechTablets

Hi everyone I'm Chris- and this is the Poco m3, so you've probably already seen a few videos on this one already- and this is just my take on this value budget, offering here from Poco by the way full disclosure this was sent out to me. This is a free unit that I do get to keep. So we've got a 6 000 William hour battery. In this we have the snapdragon 662, it's 4g, dual sim micro SD card support, 3.5 millimeter, headphone jack IR transmitter, dual loudspeakers and a full HD screen all for a starting price of currently 129 us dollars, which is an absolute steal or 129 euros later on it's going to be about. I think it's 150 us dollars now. This model that I got sent is the maximum spec model that has the UFS 2.2 storage, 128 gigabytes worth of it, and it does retail, I think, for about 150 later it's going to be 169 us dollars, so is it actually a good phone for that price? That's what I want to find out, or should you save your money, wait and just get something like the Poco x3 NFC? Instead of this one, let's find out, so it may be a cheap phone, but they didn't cheap out on what we get included. As you shall see.

So there is our sim tray tool. We've got an included CPU case now. This one is clear: it does actually have a little cover for the type c port. We get a warranty card and this is a Xiaomi warranty card, but that is soon going to disappear, because polo's become now completely independent, standalone now brand- and here we have our user guide and right under here, you'll find to some accessories. I've included.

So it's a little bracelet thing if you're into that with the Poco branding, and we do have our standard type-c to USB cable and our charger. So this charger is rated to 22.5 watts, but the phone actually charges at a maximum of 18 watts. Now it will take two hours and 53 minutes to charge that big 6 000 William hour battery. So let's have a look at our build quality now of this phone, so it's not actually bad at all. Considering the price tag, you may hear me say that a few times gorilla glass 3 on a full HD display, so this one full HD plus is 1080 by 2400 teardrop notch houses, an 8 megapixel, if one sorry 2.1 camera there and the bezels and the chin down the bottom- aren't actually particularly bad. Considering again the price of the phone.

Now we've got a side fingerprint reader. This one here does have an always on capacitive to it. So it's what we're seeing on some even more potent and expensive phones like say the 10 t and the 10 t pro, for example. But what happens if I touch it now, you'll see it's relatively slow here. So when I touch it one two, and it didn't read, then I'm finding it a little inaccurate.

So let's do that one more time, two seconds or so just under two seconds to unlock so a little on the slow side there. Now, if I give it a bit of a flex, this phone weighs 200 grams. It's about 10.8 millimeters, the thickness. If you include the camera, which sticks out a little tiny bit, it's not actually bad, there's no creaking noises, it doesn't feel cheap. So, on the left top hand corner here, we do have our sim tray.

Now this sim tray takes two NATO sims and a micro SD card. The good thing about it is: you can run the two sims and the micro SD card. So all three at once with this phone, which is great down the bottom you'll find that type c port, and we do have a microphone there and a loudspeaker one of two, so the earpiece and then the port for the loudspeaker is just here at the top. We have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack, with not too bad quality output from this one. This is a secondary mic, so at least it does have it some other.

Cheaper phones might actually exclude this, and even an IR transmitter here. This phone also does the m3 have FM hardware radio built into it. So there is a tuner, but you need to plug in a headset, of course, the backing on it is. You can see all plastic again now. This has a texture to it, but the good thing about the texture: it's not that rubberized paint job that rubber paint job wears out shows smudges.

So I'm glad they did not go with that at least now the Poco here this is made out of a glossy plastic, not particularly fond of this. Why do they have to put it on there? So big the branding? And if you look in the light here, you can probably pick up. I've already got a couple of fine scratches on this, so that material is not going to age too. Well, we do at least have glass here on the back with our cameras, so the main camera. This one is 48, megapixels, f 1.8. Then we have two megapixel cameras, one for portrait, one for depth, and honestly we did not need these.

I would have rather Poco put the money on those two sensors into an average quality, but maybe more useful, ultra-wide 8 megapixel camera. I think most people would agree with me on this one. It's just much more practical, and I hope this trend of using the sticker cameras, as other others call them stops, and they continue just to give us an ultra-wide and main camera on the lower end phones. I don't think it's going to be too much of a problem, so we've got a gorilla glass, 3 covered screens. I've got no screen protector on it, and it's a full HD plus resolution.

This price point is great. That is definitely a selling point. Now this particular screen it does have quite a weak maximum brightness. Now my unit here could vary from unit to unit I'm measuring a maximum brightness of only 346 nits. Now in direct sunlight.

This means I do actually struggle to make it out. So if you plan to use your phone outside uh, you may struggle quite a bit another thing I have noticed with this screen that at certain angles, definitely straight away when you don't look at it straight on that it does shift out to a bluish, tint, and you'll notice that straight away that it dims down at certain angles. So for an IPS, the viewing angles aren't actually the best I have seen so don't get me wrong when you're using it indoors and when you're looking at it straight on, at least it's not a bad panel and the touch response seems to be okay. Sometimes it can be a little laggy, but I think that's just the case of that. Snapdragon and you'll see what I mean here when you start to use the phone it's evident, and there were a couple of firmware updates that already come out that um, it's not particularly quick that it does really feel quite choppy and leggy.

It's like to me. The best way to describe this is this: UI is running at somewhere between, like 40 and even down to 20 frames per second, some animations. Now I have noticed that when you go to recent apps, did you see all that lag right there? Now I've got a couple of things open. Yes, quite a few things open in the background, but nothing is really heavy, no demanding game. So if you multitask, even though I've got the best spec version with the UFS, 2.2 storage, 128, gigabytes and four gigabytes of ram, it really is struggling with that. I have noticed, so maybe I've got too much open.

You do need to close things down, but even doing so. Okay, I've cleared the memory you just notice that it just doesn't quite feel as good as it should here. So Poco launcher, that's our UI here, and it is running android 10. Now, if I go into the camera, this is another area that is quite slow and laggy. I do believe that ISP, which is the image signal processing unit part of this par tic particular system on a chip struggling a little with the 48 megapixels, and even when I minimize and get out of it, you can sometimes see that it really lags away there so going into gallery two can be a little slow to load in everything different albums, and I honestly don't have a lot of photos and things in there.

So performance wise. It feels like quite a slouch when you're in chrome, when you're in scrolling. In anything, it's not particularly brilliant, but let's go over a couple of the benchmarks and things that I always cover in my reviews. So I'll start out with the battery life before actually before I do. There is a bit of bloatware you get with this, so it's not actually as bad as the 10 lite, for example, that I recently reviewed in the channel that had 28 bloatware applications that they're on there that I uninstalled 2.2 gigabytes worth. Luckily, here we've only got 10, and you can just go into the system.

You find apps uninstall that rubbish that you don't want, and it's not too hard to do, but I'm reviewing out of the box here and there we go battery life, and we've got a massive battery on here and honestly. I think for the six thousand William hour battery, I expected a little more. I've seen better capacities of 4 000 lamp hours with well probably more efficient chipsets, getting similar results or over so not quite as good as I was expecting, but it's a two-day phone for most people. It is good on battery life. Don't get me wrong there now here we have okay, an tutu yeah, not great.

The GPU is the definite weakness of this chipset and that's why I say it's struggling this GPU with the 1080p resolution, and you do notice it even just scrolling in this I'm seeing it kind of chugging away there. So the internal storage, UFS 2.2 is good, and we are getting some very decent random reads and writes. So this is not a bottleneck. The storage is not slowing it down. It is definitely the snapdragon 662.

For me, that is really the weakness. So what are we looking at here now? If you happen to get this phone of course, and out of the box you're going to find advertising in some system. Apps like the installer, now there's a setting right here to go and actually disable that okay, we can receive recommendations. So that's their app recommendations. Um aka advertising, uh, it shouldn't be there in the first place, but I did notice that when I disabled it is actually came back, so I had it disabled.

First, it popped up again the advertising, which is not great. Why was it re-enabled? Well, I think what happened is the firmware update enabled it again so people who are not great with their phones that don't even know to check for this probably wouldn't even disable it and as wikis. Of course, we go, and we disable it and do all this sort of things. But, as mentioned, I review out of the box, so we do have at least wide vine level. One cert, so that's great you can watch, say Amazon, prime or Netflix is going to be in full HD, which is good, but it may be a little choppy camera 2 API.

So we've got level 3 here as well. If you want a Guam port, we may be able to squeeze a bit more out of that 48 megapixel sensor um, because, as you'll see later on camera samples, it's its not wonderful, but again for the price yeah. I guess it fits, which is also fitting here for the wireless performance up close to my router. I can get almost 200 megabits per second good. That's fine! Considering again the price away from my router 72 yeah, it's okay! I mean it's not amazing, but I can still download things.

GPS is also working just fine. So in those aspects with the performance, I think for the category being a value budget, phone uh and the price, if you get it for that amazing price yeah, it's not too bad, but it's just certainly that system UI lag. I hope that Xiaomi can speed this up a little. Poco should I say now uh but polo. I think they're already pushing probably that chipset to its maximum hey.

So it's not all bad news because we do have loudspeakers on this particular phone that are better than a lot of mid-range phones that I review in the channel so downwards, firing here and an output that comes from the earpiece and here and actually it's got a little of bass, and it's its reasonably rich and good loudness as well. Now the 3.5 millimeter output- if you love to have still this now dated tech, that everyone's phasing out sounds good, it sounds pretty good, it's not the best I've heard, but it's definitely for the pricing category of this phone punching above its class here and going more towards a mid-range in terms of audio, but here's a sample of this loudspeaker at 100 volume and another reason why you should ignore those synthetic benchmark numbers because, according to the synthetic benchmarks, the CPU is super weak, but it actually games all right. This was a surprise. I found the gaming performance to be reasonable. Just make sure you go with lower settings, so this game, I'm playing, is shadow gun, legends and yeah.

You will see the occasional frame dip, but overall the performance was great and then gaming for 30 minutes. It didn't really get that warm, not even warm enough for me to break out my thermal imaging camera, so I think for the gain for the price. I know I've said it like 28 times now. It does actually perform well for gaming performance at this price point moving over to our cameras now, so we have an 8 megapixel camera here on the front. It has an f 2.1 lens and no electronic image stabilization. The audio quality is 96 kilo bits per second, it's not particularly good, and this footage I would definitely rate as being average and to poor quality.

Almost let's take a look now at the rear camera. So with the rear camera 48 megapixels, with its f 1.8 aperture, we can only shoot 1080p 30 frames per second maximum, and it is of average quality leading towards poor. We don't even have electronic image stabilization, so if you were buying this particular phone for its video performance or even the cameras, I would seriously think again and look at the Poco x3 or the TNT light, I think, is a good alternative. Okay, so a lot of people are probably gonna. Think that hey this guy's being far too harsh the phone just costs 129 us dollars, but this version I have is going to be later on 169.

So I'm factoring that in a little, but I'm also factoring years of experience of testing out budget phones, I've been reviewing Xiaomi phones ever since the 2s, I'm talking about like seven years and all the other budget phones out there. I've reviewed a lot of them. Don't have some of the issues that I'm seeing with this particular one here now, I'm talking about the UI lag I'm experiencing Poco is definitely aware of this we've already seen now. I think I'm on the third patch that came through that does say system, optimization, they're, addressing performance issues, they're trying to improve it. So clearly they know that it's not really well.

I don't think it's acceptable even for that price tag, I'm not being too harsh here. Please do just bear with me on this. I know a lot of owners are probably going to join in and see this review and just comment that hey I'm being too harsh. What are you talking about? That always happens? The buyers jump on and attack the reviewers. The cameras, okay, yeah daytime still is all right.

Low light is not good at all. We have a dull display, don't get me wrong, having full HD at this price tag and an IPS is great, but it should be a little brighter because I'm struggling to see it in daylight and the plastic build, even though it is plastic, it is good. Okay, good, build quality, fingerprint reader is a little slow face, unlocking as well as is a little faster, actually the face, unlocking but still a little slow with the animations. Now one thing to point out: uh with the cameras that I have in various other videos that I review is still this trend of using two basically useless cameras, two megapixel macro two megapixel depth, and why do we have this I'd rather have an 8 megapixel ultra-wide or better. Yet why not just a single camera on the rear? That's more high quality.

I think they can do it, maybe even one of those high quality, Samsung, 12, megapixel ones. We don't need to be part of the megapixel race, but hey the general average consumer thinks more. Megapixels are better. More cameras are better but of course, they're not so huge battery. In this six thousand William hours it takes almost three hours to charge, which is okay for the price tag.

Surely the battery life a little disappointing? I was actually expecting more I've seen four thousand William hour. Batteries get very similar scores at 60 hertz and the UI is not clearly running at 60 hertz, either on this, so as a phone in total as a package, even in factoring in that perfect price. I can't recommend this. I just can't, I can't get behind it, because I don't want to put my name behind a phone like this and say: yeah go out and buy it. It's a value champ, it's a battery king.

It's amazing, wow, clickbait thumbnail! No, I think the TNT light is the better deal to go for or the Poco x3, okay, because if this later is going to be selling for about 169 us dollars, then it's not too far away, save yourself an additional 30 40, and maybe even if it is 50, more okay, get yourself the poker, x3 NFC or the mi 10t light. The TNT light in fact was selling for just recently for about 175 euros, whereas this model is about 150. It's clear to winner to me is to go for the light. Okay, it's got a much better chipset. It's way faster, we're talking about a higher refresh rate screen, better cameras.

The list goes on and on and on and on, so that is why I simply cannot, unfortunately, with my experience at least, recommend the Poco m3. So if you are an owner, I know there are a lot of owners that love to watch, reviews and later disagree with the reviewers. Let me know in the comments why you disagree me why you think that I'm being too harsh or whatever and let's hear those opinions- and I do hope to see you in the next up and coming review bye for now.

Source : TechTablets