Xiaomi Poco X3 NFC review: Terrific value at a cost By Android Authority

We need to talk about value. A cheaper phone has more value right. Well, it's not quite that simple, it's a little more personal and to demonstrate this we're going to be looking at the Poco x3 NFC. Today this phone costs 199 euros for early bird pricing, but even at full price. The Poco x3 NFC starts at just 229. , that's well under a quarter the price of the iPhone 11 Pro or note 25g, and is even cheaper than the OnePlus word and Pixel 4a.

For that you get a mid-range snapdragon 732g, slightly more powerful than what's found in the Pixel 4a 6 gigabytes of ram 64, gigabytes of storage with micros expansion, a big 6.67 inch, full HD, 120, hertz IPS display and a huge 5000 plus William hour battery with 33 watt fast charging. That's a lot of phone for 229 euro, and I'm going to cut straight to the chase. This phone is running ads, and it's how Xiaomi is able to keep the price so low for such an otherwise impressive spec sheet, mini 12, which is running atop android 10 here, is running ads, and this means that when you install an app, you might be served an ad. If you change a setting in the Xiaomi settings menu, you might be served an ad and in my personal experience they weren't very intrusive, and I barely ever noticed them, but they are there, and you need to know that when you go to purchase the device that you are paying yes 229 euros, but also you are being served ads at the same time, whether you accept that or not is rather down to whether you value having a clean stock operating system or spending less on your smartphone, and it's not just the specs that are impressive. Either.

The external shell, whilst made of polycarbonate not glass, does look rather striking in this cobalt blue color, with its bold Poco branding and oddly shaped camera housing. The aluminum sides help the phone feel rigid and solid. The haptics are great. On budget smartphones, haptics tend to get left out, and they feel very hollow, and they don't feel like the phone is built very well. These are tight, they're, crisp they're, not quite as good as an iPhone or a pixel, but they're certainly good, and definitely surprised me.

Haptics go a long way in making a phone feel premium. There's, certainly a lot of value in the bigger design. Because of that larger screen, there's room for a huge 5160 William hour battery, which isn't all numbers either. It got me through a full two days of usage, pretty consistently with around four hours of screen on time. For each day, my kind of usage is a little of Bluetooth, earbuds some 4g usage here and there listening to music watching maybe a couple of videos in the morning- there's not much to it, and I'm not a power user.

However, being a power user, you could expect around a day of usage. It is such a big battery and the thing with charging. It is even though it's such a big battery and 33 watts doesn't sound all that impressive compared to the big wattage numbers that we've seen on charges recently, you still get basically a full charge in around an hour just slightly above an hour which is great. Now, if you are a power user, this might not be the device for you. The snapdragon 732g works well for my day-to-day usage, but I don't edit videos on my phone or live stream or play lots of games on my phone and I definitely don't shoot loads and loads of video for those more heavy tasks.

The 732g will crumble and even before, then, you will notice that this is a lower end chipset, if you're coming from anything like a flagship, there will be lagged, there will be crashes, you're not going to get a perfect experience from a phone that cost 230 euros and whilst it can play a fair few games quite well, it definitely wasn't the smoothest experience. But again it comes down to whether you value a really high performance, chipset or spending less on a phone budget options like the x3 tend to come with hardware features that add value to the user experience, but typically don't really cost much. These features that are missing from flagships are usually missing, because the companies are enticing you to buy a bigger storage model or more first party accessories, and people who spend more on their smartphones are more likely to pay that extra money. The ones found on the x3 include a headphone port, expandable storage, an IR blaster notification led all present and correct on the x-ray NFC, but it doesn't stop there. The side mounted figure scanner was brilliant.

In my experience and the stereo speakers really surprised me, the earpiece is amplified to match the bottom speaker, which gives a pretty good stereo listening experience. I happily watched a couple of episodes of future armor on this thing and I didn't feel like I was missing out. The display on this thing is flagship size at 6.67 inches, it's full HD, it's IPS, it's 120 hertz, and it reached around 440 nits, sustained peak brightness in our testing. What does this mean? Well, you get a pretty similarly fluid experience when zipping around the home screen and notification shade as a flagship since the chipset isn't that powerful most games won't be running 120 fps to make good use of that 120hz display. When gaming, though the panel gets pretty bright, so it's easily viewable.

Outdoors, though, isn't topping any brightness charts by any means. Also, there's a little of IPS shadowing at the edges of the panel. It doesn't take away massively from the user experience, but if you use your phone slightly off axis quite often, then you're going to notice it more. It's just a trade-off. You kind of have to make if you want 120, hertz fluidity in a phone at this price.

So it's not an amazing display, but it is pretty good and that kind of sums up my thoughts on both the display, but also the camera. Now the main cameras are a 64 megapixel, main 13 megapixels. Ultra-wide and 20 megapixel selfie camera. There are a couple of two megapixel extra cameras in there, but they're pretty much just there to fill out the spec sheet. As for the image quality, if you're coming from a Galaxy Note, 20 or iPhone 11 Pro or pixel 4, then you're not going to be very impressed.

Colors are kind of inaccurately over saturated and there's a bit too much contrast and the dynamic range is a bit so. However, if you look at these photos with the active thought that they're coming from a 230 euro phone, they start to look pretty good. There's enough sharpness and detail enough dynamic range and enough low light performance for this price point. Consistency is probably the area that it's lacking in most some shots. I thought looked quite fine, whilst others kind of messed up with the colors and the contrast and yeah.

But again that's the price. You pay for a really cheap, 64 megapixel camera phone. If you really value a good quality smartphone camera for cheap, then you'll likely either pony up the 350 euro for the Pixel 4a or spend the same 230 euro on a used pixel series device. This is definitely not as good as those two devices in the camera department, but it has its unique set of features. Take the 2-day battery life, for example, or the 120 hertz screen or the expandable storage.

These are features that different people will value over top tier chipsets and an OLED panel. At the end of the day, it comes back to the pricing and those ads. As I said right at the start, I didn't find the ads to be an issue, but I personally value those extra hardware features over an ad free experience. Some won't and making the decision to buy this smartphone is going to depend heavily on what you value in a smartphone for 230 euro you're, getting a lot of smartphones for your money, and that about covers our Poco x3 NFC review. Guys.

Please do check out the link in the video description to the full article, where I cover everything in even more detail than I could in this video also check the other links in the video description and whilst you're down there. Please do hit like and subscribe to never miss a video like this one. I've been Ryan Thomas with android authority, and I'll catch. You later.

Source : Android Authority