Poco F7 Pro Full Review: Flagship Power, Mid-Range Price?
Poco is back with a new, feature-packed contender aiming to shake up the market: the Poco F7 Pro. Often dubbed a "flagship killer," this premium mid-ranger promises high-end specs without the top-tier price tag. But does it deliver? Let's dive into our Poco F7 Pro full review to find out.
Design and Build Quality
The Poco F7 Pro boasts a premium feel. The back panel is flat glass featuring a distinctive dual-tone design – the upper third is glossy, housing the camera module, while the rest has a frosted matte finish. This is complemented by a flat aluminum frame that aids grip. Overall, it feels solid and well-constructed.
Image source: Poco Global
A significant upgrade this year is the improved ingress protection. Moving beyond basic splash-proofing, the Poco F7 Pro now features an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance, offering better peace of mind against accidental submersion.
Image source: Poco Global
Display: Bright and Sharp
The F7 Pro seems to retain last year's excellent display panel: a 6.67-inch AMOLED screen with a sharp QHD+ (1440p) resolution and a smooth 120Hz refresh rate. This year, it's protected by the tougher Gorilla Glass 7i.
Image source: Poco Global
Brightness sees a notable boost. We measured around 779 nits manually and an impressive peak of 1478 nits in auto mode, ensuring excellent outdoor visibility. The panel looks great, offering high sharpness (526 PPI), 12-bit color depth, and support for Dolby Vision and HDR10+.
However, it doesn't use LTPO technology, meaning the refresh rate adaptation is limited, switching between 120Hz during interaction and dropping to 60Hz when idle to conserve power.
Audio and Biometrics
Audio is handled by a pair of stereo speakers delivering 'Very Good' loudness in our tests. The sound output is well-balanced with a good frequency response and no significant flaws. For security, there's an under-display fingerprint reader. It's an ultrasonic type, proving to be very fast and reliable during our use.
Software, AI Features, and Updates
The phone runs Xiaomi's latest HyperOS 2, based on Android 15 (or the latest available Android version at launch). While offering some optimizations and visual tweaks over previous versions, the core experience remains familiar to users of recent Xiaomi or Poco devices.
Image source: Poco Global
AI features are integrated, including Google's Gemini Assistant. Within the Notes app, AI can generate summaries, proofread text, perform translations, and change layouts. Other AI capabilities include a real-time interpreter for calls and subtitles within supported apps, plus creative tools in the gallery like 'AI Sky' for altering photos.
Image source: Poco Global
Poco promises excellent software support: 4 years of major Android OS updates and 6 years of security patches, which is fantastic for longevity.
Performance and Thermals
Under the hood, the Poco F7 Pro packs last year's flagship powerhouse, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, paired with 12GB of RAM. While not the absolute latest silicon, this chip is incredibly capable, offering performance levels essentially matching many 2024 flagships. It handles demanding tasks like gaming and multitasking with ease.
Image source: Poco Global
Benchmark scores are excellent. Thermal management is also quite decent. In our prolonged CPU stress test, it performed better than expected. While the GPU stress test did induce some thermal throttling, overall performance remains stable for most use cases.
Image source: Poco Global
Battery Life and Charging Speed
Xiaomi has upgraded the battery capacity significantly this year, jumping from 5,000mAh to a substantial 6,000mAh. This translates to considerably better battery life. In our active use testing, the F7 Pro achieved an excellent score of 13 hours and 51 minutes, a noticeable improvement over its predecessor.
Image source: Poco Global
The phone supports rapid 90W wired charging. Depending on the region, the 90W charger might be included in the box. With it, we charged the phone from 0% to 53% in just 15 minutes, and a full charge took only 34 minutes – incredibly fast for such a large battery. However, there's no wireless charging support, a feature reserved for the F7 Ultra model.
Camera Performance
The camera setup on the back consists of a 50MP main camera (f/1.6, OIS, multi-directional AF) and an 8MP ultrawide camera (f/2.2, fixed focus). Poco has dropped the often-underwhelming 2MP macro camera from last year.
Image source: Poco Global
Selfie Camera
On the front, there's a new 20MP selfie camera (up from 16MP). While the resolution bump is welcome, the resulting detail isn't outstanding. However, it produces lively colors and offers a wide dynamic range.
Image source: GSMArena
Main Camera (Daylight & Zoom)
The 50MP main camera, seemingly unchanged from last year, performs very well in daylight. It captures plenty of detail with a natural-looking rendering, pleasant colors, and excellent dynamic range. People shots also look great at the native zoom level.
Image source: GSMArena
Photos taken at 2x digital zoom are quite solid. Detail remains good, though the rendering isn't quite as refined as the 1x shots.
Image source: Poco Global
Main Camera (Low Light)
At night, the main camera truly shines, delivering excellent photos not just for its class, but in absolute terms. Detail is great, dynamic range is nicely wide with well-developed highlights and shadows, and white balance and color saturation are top-notch.
Image source: Poco Global
Ultrawide Camera
The 8MP ultrawide camera takes surprisingly great photos for its specifications. Daylight shots are contrasty, sharp, and exhibit good colors and dynamic range. Even after dark, it punches above its weight with good dynamic range, although shadows and darker areas can become mushy, which is expected for this type of sensor.
Image source: Poco Global
Video Recording
The main camera can record video up to 8K resolution, while the ultrawide and selfie cameras are capped at 1080p. We found the 4K footage from the main camera to be very pleasing, capturing lots of fine detail with mature processing, good dynamic range, and nice colors. Stabilization (EIS) works well, effectively smoothing out walking shake with minimal wobble, and handling pans smoothly. Low-light video from the main camera is also great, with superb detail, wide dynamic range, and accurate colors. The ultrawide's 1080p video is functional but not particularly sharp.
Conclusion and Verdict
The Poco F7 Pro presents a very compelling package. There's a lot to like here: the high-resolution, bright 120Hz AMOLED display, the flagship-grade Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 performance, the significantly improved battery life thanks to the 6000mAh cell, and the incredibly fast 90W charging. Furthermore, while "flagship killers" often compromise on cameras, the F7 Pro delivers solid performance, especially from its main sensor, both day and night.
Minor drawbacks include the somewhat limited selfie camera detail and the lack of LTPO or wireless charging (though the latter is understandable at this price point). However, these are overshadowed by its strengths.
Overall, if you're seeking a high-performance smartphone with a great screen, outstanding battery life, rapid charging, and capable cameras without paying top-dollar flagship prices, the Poco F7 Pro full review concludes that it's an excellent choice and definitely worth recommending.
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