Poco X3 - The Shady Truth. By Mrwhosetheboss

So, I wasn't planning on covering this phone. I mean sure it has a lot of good things going for it, but I thought: okay, it's just another, perfect value three to four hundred dollar phone. But then, a couple of days ago, when it was officially announced, I saw the price 199 euros. Okay, I'll take a proper look. As far as the packaging is concerned, there isn't a single indication that you bought anything less than a flagship. It's a weighty box that comes with an insert first with a couple of manuals and a clear, transparent case.

You've got a Poco sticker, which is backwards for some reason, then a full sheet of stickers, the smartphone, an USB cable and a pretty hefty charger. I'm going to be honest with you when I found out the price of the phone, I had absolutely no idea what to compare it to because, yes, it does have some obvious caveats, but still the spec sheet on this phone completely wipes the floor with everything even close to its price range, a 6.6 inch, full HD, plus HDR 10 120 hertz display a 5 160 William hour battery with powerful 33 watt charging right out of the box, a 64 megapixel, quad camera setup, a 20 megapixel front-facing camera all paired with the new snapdragon 732 g, which is up to 15 faster than the snapdragon 730 g, which in itself was already an upgrade over the mid-range 730. It's got six gigs of ram, it's got a dual speaker setup and actually a very capable dual speaker setup using the normal bottom firing, one, but also the earpiece speaker, which actually comes out through the second port above the phone. It's got a headphone jack, it's got a status led, it's even ip53. Splash proof tell me: that's not impressive.

Tell me that doesn't completely destroy your existing perceptions of value for some perspective here. In the UK, this kind of price buys you a 2020, Samsung Galaxy a21s and putting these two phones side by side feels a bit like playground. Bullying like we have two phones from a different decade, let alone year, and you know what even when you're using it, it almost lives up to that hype. That pretext created by its spec sheet. Almost that's the important word, not quite oh, and if you're enjoying this video a sub to the channel would be extraordinary, it is built.

Well, I mean the back is plastic as you would expect, and they haven't really tried to hide it. But you know it's not cheap. It has an aluminum alloy frame. It has gorilla glass 5 on the front and I would say I'm growing kind of fond of this racing. Stripe you've got down the middle, it breaks up the monotony on the back, they've managed to make a camera module that looks legitimately cool and powerful, although there is a fair bit of a protrusion.

Also, this is a big phone. I'm talking like 20 20 flagship sized phones, so not for the faint-hearted but that size isn't wasted. This is an lcd, not OLED, so viewing angles suffer. It's not the brightest display and there does seem to be an ever so slight amount of ghosting, but it's not at all a bad display. It doesn't have that over sharpened, look of cheap LCD panels, and it looks like Xiaomi's kind of compensated for the less vibrant colors by increasing the saturation of their icons and some UI elements, plus the inbuilt sunlight mode, does seem to keep the brightness manageable, even outdoors whatever brightness you set it at this is an all-day phone.

This is an 8 hour to an 11-hour screen on time device. You can wake up in the morning eat your breakfast watch. Netflix eat lunch, watch, Netflix, eat dinner, watch Netflix, and you will easily make it to bedtime thanks in part to a display that can somewhat adjust its refresh rate to match the content you're consuming on a surface level. Even the camera system looks wildly impressive you're, actually getting an almost identical setup to the Xiaomi mi note: 10 lights, a phone that has a good camera for a 300 euro device annoyingly. Two of these four cameras, the 2 megapixel macro and 2 megapixel depth, cameras, they're, practically space fillers, but the main camera and the ultrawide are capable I've taken a fair few photos with both, and I would go as far as to say.

Detail is good and dynamic range is very good. Even the front camera produces sharp photos in favorable lighting, but also up against harsh backlighting, and there is honestly a truckload of camera features here, like potentially more than I've ever seen on any phone ever plenty of interesting filters, some great like gold, vibes and others, not so good, there's a front and back mode which lets you well take video on the front and the back. You can clone yourself by leaving the phone still and you're moving into different positions. There's slow motion, there's vlog mode, there's long exposure and, of course, night mode, which is okay, it's actually noticeably not flagship level and because the camera doesn't have any optical image stabilization in the dark. It can't keep its shutter open for very long without blurring, and so the end result is that his night mode photos are not afraid to get a little grainy.

The focusing is a bit hit-and-miss too, but yeah I mean for 200 euros, it's a good camera system, and do you know what, before I pick the phone up, I was convinced the haptics would suck. I was convinced that when you're typing on it is would sound something like this, but Poco have put at least some care into making sure this feels nice to use typing is firm and responsive scrolling to the bottom of the list. You feel some physical impact, and just generally the mini 12 that this runs on is a polished bit of software. What you get here is almost identical to the mini 12 seen on Xiaomi's me 10 ultra, but the Poco launcher they use is a little lighter and a little less animated. But this is where the shadiness starts.

I can't help but feel like with this phone. In particular, the company have used every trick in the book to basically artificially lower its price, starting with baking ads right into the software. You see them when you install an app, you see them when you uninstall an app, you even see them in first party apps that come pre-loaded on the phone, and I kind of feel like a few times. When I've tried to do things, it actually adds steps that don't need to be there just so it can show you an extra ad on the way now in case it wasn't already clear. I don't like this.

It just cheapens the experience, and it feels shady that it wasn't made clear to you like the practice of putting ads into a product, I'm completely fine with Amazon did it with their Kindle devices to try and bring them to an even more affordable price point. But at least they clearly stated that on the product page, but there's more 199 euros is the price that Poco is shouting about. It's the price that the media is shouting about, and while you can right now get this for 199 euros. This price is specifically a limited run. Early bird price at retail it'll be 30 euros higher.

It kind of feels like when they were building this phone. The company did everything they could to try and hit that 199 price point. They realized part way through that they couldn't, but they still tried to find a way to show this number during their presentation. Also, the phone only has 64 gigs of internal storage, which you know it's not unheard of at this price, but only 44 gigs of it is usable and if you do want to upgrade to the 128 model, that'll cost you 249 euros or 269 without the early bird discount. That is an extra 25 over the base model, and you're, not even getting any extra ram, you're, literally paying 25 percent of the value of the phone just for an extra 64 gigs of storage.

Thankfully, there is micro, SD card support, which means I would never really recommend that upper model, but you can tell that the strategy here is to hook people in with 199 and try to funnel them towards actually paying 269. And finally, they're marketing this camera setup as a flagship, 64 megapixel quad camera, which, although the camera is not bad, is absolutely not true. If you look up the Sony imx682 used in here, it is not present in a single flagship. This phone doesn't have optical image stabilization like a flagship, so video quality is fine, but not great, especially on the front and those two bottom cameras are in no world flagship. Okay, so a lot of this stuff does feel deceptive, I'm not a fan of it, but at the same time we can understand why they're doing it, and it would be unfair to say that all of this stuff actually ruins the phone.

Admittedly, it does sound, less cool, being a 229 euro phone with ads and a mid-range camera setup, but at the same time I can think of a lot of people who would pick this phone up, use it and just not care about the ads, and it doesn't change the fact, really that this is still beastly hardware for the price. Although that said, the performance is not ultra smooth sailing. The scrolling is fine. If I go to the right, but almost without fail, when I scroll to the Google feed it lags, so I disabled it HDR photos they take a little longer to process, and while I do love side mounted fingerprint scanners and this one actually does the scanning extremely quickly. It takes a fair bit of time to process that information, also every now and again, when you're closing an app or when you're pulling up and holding to open up multitasking, it's not as smooth as it should be, but to be fair, a lot of this doesn't feel like a lack of power.

Just a lack of optimization for this new chip, so fingers crossed it improves and gaming is good. The upper mid-range chipset delivers an upper mid-range gaming experience, oh and if you're wondering why the literal name of the phone is the Poco x3 NFC whoa, it's because it has NFC shocker. I know it's for things like Google Pay, and it's good to see, but at the same time it's not a particularly rare feature. So it's quite strange to see it in the name of the device. Okay.

So when you break it all down the Poco x3 NFC is not the miracle that it first might seem. You can gradually see how they've managed to bit by bit to make decisions that allow for this 199 euro price tag, but even then there's just so much good stuff going on here, especially that battery life, that if you can put up with a few ads every now and again, then this is the best phone you can get for under 250 euros. It is good enough that if someone had told me it was 400, I'd have believed them. Thanks for watching my name is Aaron. This is Mr who's, the boss, and I'll catch you in the next one.

You.

Source : Mrwhosetheboss