POCO, across all the phones I have reviewed, has never failed to impress, and they tend to punch a little bit above their weight in performance relative to the level of phone they are. With the POCO X8 Pro, they have done it again, delivering a midrange phone that looks premium and delivers a well-optimized product.
The POCO X8 Pro comes with a 100 W charging block and USB-C cable, as well as a soft case, which I love to see still being provided by these companies, even though the biggest companies in North America stopped this practice some time ago. The phone comes in Black, White and Mint Green. It features an aluminum body, a glass back, and a Corning Gorilla Glass 7i display. The X8 Pro truly has a high-end yet minimalist look and feel, and it feels as good in my hand as my iPhone 17.
The POCO X8 Pro features a 6.59-inch 120 Hz AMOLED display with a 2746 × 1268 resolution and 2,000 nits of peak brightness, with 3,500 nits on up to 25 per cent of the display area. It supports HDR10+ dynamic range and can reproduce up to 68 billion colours. The phone has IP66, IP68, IP69 and IP69K water and dust resistance. The POCO X8 Pro is a super durable phone at every level.
“The POCO X8 Pro is a super durable phone at every level.”
Inside the POCO X8 Pro, you’ll find the Dimensity 8500-Ultra CPU and Mali-G720 MC8 GPU, with either 8 GB of RAM (in the 256 GB and 512 GB storage versions) or 12 GB of RAM (in the 512 GB version only), which is the phone we are testing. The phone also offers an additional 6 GB of extended memory, taking resources from the storage to provide temporary RAM.
The camera setup on the POCO X8 Pro offers a 50 MP f/1.5 main camera with a 1/1.95-inch sensor and optical image stabilization, an 8 MP f/2.2 ultra-wide lens and a 20 MP selfie camera. The rear camera can shoot video at up to 4K at 60 fps, but the front camera can only shoot at a maximum of 1080p at 30 fps, which, even for a midrange phone, is a bit of a letdown, especially for creators who would use that camera for vlogging or shorts. The overall quality of the camera is perfectly fine, but the smaller sensor struggles with low light.
The POCO X8 Pro sports a 6,500 mAh battery and, in addition to its 100 W PPS charging, supports up to 27 W reverse charging for other devices. It supports smart charging, which adjusts charging speed and power distribution to control the phone’s temperature for an optimized charging experience. Unless you are pushing the phone to unrealistic limits, with some higher-than-usual gaming and camera use, you should have a really easy time getting a full day out of the battery. If you do go hard, however, you can charge it up again in no time.
“What never fails to impress me is how POCO takes a phone with specs that do not scream ‘gaming phone.’”
When I say “unrealistic limits,” I mean it, especially when it comes to gaming. When testing these phones, I like to push them with a resource-heavy game. With the POCO X8 Pro, I loaded up Wuthering Waves. What never fails to impress me is how POCO takes a phone with specs that do not scream “gaming phone” and uses what they have so efficiently that you can play one of the chonkiest games on the market with no lag and only use up seven per cent of your battery after an hour of gaming.
Part of what makes the POCO X8 Pro so efficient is its cooling system, POCO’s 3D dual-layer Iceloop cooling system, which pulls heat away from the guts of the X8 Pro and lets it dissipate through the heat-conducting aluminum frame. It makes the phone a little hot on the outside, but not too bad. POCO’s Wildboost optimization dynamically manages thermals, frame rates and network connections to meet your needs based on a performance, battery saver or balanced optimization setting.
A fun little addition to the POCO X8 Pro is the Dynamic RGB light, the RGB that surrounds the camera lenses, which, in addition to being pretty, gives a lot of information. You can set up different colours for phone and app notifications, camera status lights indicating things like battery life, camera timers and gaming lighting effects. It is a fun feature and actually quite useful when you have your phone face down on the table, disconnecting you a bit by letting you know when to check the phone instead of constantly checking it out of habit.
The POCO X8 Pro’s AI solutions are also very much in line with this generation of phones at large, with the one-two punch of Xiaomi HyperAI, offering tools like AI Writing and AI Interpreter, along with Google’s suite of tools, such as Gemini and Circle to Search. You won’t feel like you are missing out on the top AI features currently on offer.
“Part of what makes the POCO X8 Pro so efficient is its cooling system.”
On Geekbench 6, the POCO X8 Pro scored 1,643 on the single-core benchmark and 5,806 on the multi-core benchmark, placing it generally between the Samsung Galaxy S23 and S24 series, which is a decent place for a midrange phone to land. It also gives you a reference point: it is essentially a couple of generations old and equivalent to a flagship. The OpenCL GPU test came in at 13,118, just below the S24 Ultra. AnTuTu’s overall score of 2,022,818 placed it close to the POCO F7 Pro and even above the Samsung Galaxy S25 FE overall.
The POCO X8 Pro, like any of the midrange phones in POCO’s lineup, is a real jack-of-all-trades. If you are not in need of the best camera because you are not a creator, or the best gaming experience, but want perfectly good experiences all around, a phone like this is perfect for you. The POCO X8 Pro, to my mind, gives you all of that and more in a phone that looks slick and in no way like a budget device.
