The team at POCO has just announced their latest line of mobile devices, including the POCO Pad and POCO F6, and the subject of this coverage is the POCO F6 Pro. Its previous model, the F5 Pro, received good reviews overall but didn’t check all the boxes of a lot of users, and while I am not saying that they have met every standard of the pickiest users, they’ve come a long way.
In the box, you get the POCO F6 Pro with a pre-installed screen protector, a sim ejector, a simple black case, the documentation, a 120W charger and a USB-A to USB-C cable. The F6 Pro sports a 50 MP F/1.6 main camera with Optical Image Stabilization, an 8MP f/2.2 ultra-wide camera and a 2MP f/2.4 macro camera, the latter of which I would like to have seen scrapped in favour of something a little more useful, day to day, with a higher resolution. The phone also has a 16MP front-facing camera for all of your beautiful selfies and vlogging needs.
It’s also worth noting the beauty in the design, with the metal frame and quad-curved glass back, which in the case of the phone I got, was this appealing textured pattern with a slight gloss in some of it that makes it look really nice when it catches the light. Another small but beautiful detail is the gold ring around each of the three camera lenses and the flash, which makes for a much more luxurious aesthetic than the price of the average POCO flagship.
The 209g POCO F6 Pro’s display is a 3200×1440 6,67” WQHD+ 120Hz Flow AMOLED screen with 4000 nits of peak brightness. Compared side by side with the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, which claims a max brightness of 1750 nits, you can see a brightness advantage in a lot of areas on the F6 Pro, but don’t let the numbers on the page fool you into thinking it is some kind of runaway victory. It is not.
Moving on to the insides of the phone, the POCO F6 Pro runs on a Spadragon 8 Gen 2 chipset with an Octa-Core Cortex CPU capable of up to 3.19GHz of processing power and is cooled by their LiquidCool technology 4.0. They updated their GPU from the Adreno 730 on the F5 Pro to an Adreno 740, which isn’t the newest GPU they offer but only one generation back from their top end. Inside the F6 Pro, you will also find a 5000mAh battery, matching up with Samsung’s flagship and topping Apple’s (but we’ll get to whether or not that matters in a bit).
The 5G POCO F6 Pro operates on Xiaomi’s HyperOS and harnesses the Qualcomm AI Engine. It boasts powerful features, from AI facial recognition to AI image enhancement, making it a valuable tool for photography. RAM and storage options vary, with configurations including 12GB of RAM with either 256GB or 512GB of storage and a 16GB RAM model with 1TB of storage, which is the unit I reviewed. The 12GB model is sufficient for most users, but the 16GB version offers superior performance for demanding games and multitasking, ensuring a fast, responsive experience in virtually any scenario.
“The 5G POCO F6 Pro operates on Xiaomi’s HyperOS and harnesses the Qualcomm AI Engine.”
The camera has often been an overlooked feature of previous POCO phones. It’s not that they were bad, but they just didn’t seem like a priority selling point. However, there have been notable improvements in the overall image quality and the experience of using the POCO F6 Pro’s camera. The 50MP photos are stunning, with fantastic colour and detail, even when zooming in on the original photo. Even with standard photos, I was able to zoom in on my face and see a level of detail that made me regret testing it out. My existential crisis aside, the detail is impressive and looks quite good.
Also really impressive was the low-light photography and videography on the POCO F6 Pro. I did a comparison by shooting footage at night simultaneously with the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. It wasn’t even close. The overall detail of the F/1.6 lens on the F6 Pro (a lens with a 10x zoom) maintains that low light advantage over the Samsung flagship, whose telephoto lenses are f/2.4 and f/4.9, which results in a much noisier photo as Samsung seeks to compensate digitally. I am perfectly comfortable saying that POCO’s newest phone is simply a better low-light option. It isn’t perfect. There is still some noise in areas with no lighting source, but even vaguely lit areas look good.
Another addition to the POCO F6 Pro’s Camera user experience is the addition of AI Expansion, which can be found under the crop option when you edit your photo. AI technology continues to grow by leaps and bounds, and this tool is no exception in terms of technology’s evolution. I took a photo that was 9×16 and wanted to make it 16×9. In the photo were the end of a fork and a small dessert. The AI expansion helped fill up the plate, complete the fork and add more details to the table.
It lets you A/B test the change against the original, and if you aren’t happy with the result, you can select “try again,” and it will give it another go. On my first attempt, the shape of the fork was a little off, and there was a half-completed utensil next to it. On the retry, only a truly discerning eye would have caught something to call it out as a fake. It’s an amazing addition to POCO’s toolbox.
Gaming on the POCO F6 Pro is a smooth experience. I played my usual games when testing phones, specifically Genshin Impact, Call of Duty Mobile, and Real Racing 3. I didn’t experience any lag, and it consistently pushed high frame rates even at the highest graphics settings. POCO’s WildBoost optimization and GameTurbo application make the necessary changes to your phone to achieve the best performance possible. You can adjust settings by selecting Balanced or Ultimate Mode, but POCO warns that Ultimate Mode can result in a hotter phone. There are also settings to minimize those effects when playing more demanding games.
“Gaming on the POCO F6 Pro is a smooth experience.”
When it comes to battery life, the numbers don’t lie. The 5000mAh battery delivers long life to the point where I have never killed the battery in a 24-hour period, even on the first day when I was transferring data and opening every app to get the phone ready for daily use. The usual suspects continue to negatively impact battery life, such as heavy gaming and using the camera, particularly when shooting video at 4K. Still, even when I saw the battery dropping at a faster-than-normal rate, it wasn’t enough to make me rush for a charger.
Its toughest test came just one day before this review was published when I was on a desert safari at temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) while taking a lot of video as a 4×4 vehicle was stunt driving over large sand dunes. I was outdoors in the searing heat for about 5 hours and shot 16 lengthy videos and about quintuple the amount of photos, but I made it through the day. So, if it can handle that, a generic day of texting, selfies, and casual gaming will be a cakewalk for the POCO F6 Pro.
I did a benchmark of the POCO F6 Pro against the in-my-other-pocket competition that was my Galaxy S23 Ultra and while Samsung takes the single core score with a score of 1903 to POCO’s 1391, but the MultiCore score was a different story, with The F6 Pro outsourcing the Galaxy S23 Ultra 5141-5041, which isn’t a massive victory, but good considering that Samsung’s processor is capable of up to 3.36GHz (compared to the F6 Pro’s 3.19GHz), but still lost.
“When it comes to battery life, the numbers don’t lie.”
The POCO F6 pro retails for $499 USD for the 8GB/256GB version, $549 for the 8GB/512GB version and $629 for the 16GB/1TB version with $50 off as an early bird deal. The price, as expected, is well below the launch price of the phone we have been comparing it to in this article. So its value, being able to come close to Samsung in some ways, match them in others and even occasionally beat them, is unquestionably high.
I am incredibly impressed with the overall experience offered by the POCO F6 Pro. It is a lightning-quick phone that has made improvements where they needed it the most. There is still a lot of room to grow with the phone, like making the UI a bit more intuitive as the more popular brands, a better selection of cameras and just a few quality-of-life improvements that are more subjective but accounting for its price and the large improvements that it has made from its predecessor, the POCO F6 Pro just flat-out delivers.
