We see enough mid-range smartphones come through here to make our eyes glaze over sometimes. They’re all mostly solid devices, but it’s become very difficult for one phone to separate itself meaningfully from the pack. The Poco X7 Pro has managed to do just that by giving us flagship-level performance and battery life in a $400 phone, making it one of the best value buys on the market. As we’ll see in our Poco X7 Pro review, they didn’t get to that price without making some sacrifices, but perhaps not as many as you’d think.
Design and build
The first thing I noticed upon picking up the 6.67-inch Poco X7 Pro was how thick it was — at 8.3mm, it’s as thick as the iPhone 16 Pro Max, itself a much bigger and more powerful phone. However, at 195g, the Poco X7 Pro is lighter than it looks. Because of that, I didn’t mind the extra thickness — especially because some of that thickness probably comes from the huge 6,000mAh battery. I felt it was a little easier to hold than other large, thin phones that can feel a little unwieldy. Not everyone will have the same opinion as me, though, as part of the reason the phone seems so thick is its boxy, squared off design. Rounded edges might have been the more ergonomic choice.
The phone is as light as it is because of its plastic build, although it avoid feeling cheap in hand. That said, it’s still a hit to durability, and while the phone is IP68-rated for water and dust resistance, the screen is only protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 7i, rather than the tougher Victus line from Corning. The Poco X7 Pro survived alright during the two weeks I’ve used it, but I have reviewed other phones that used Gorilla Glass 7i and got scratched easily, so buyer beware.
The phone comes in white and green, and launched back in January with a special Iron Man/Avengers red colorway. The standout, which we got on our review unit, is the black/yellow colorway. Might not be everyone’s favorite color combination, but Bumblebee fans should be all about it. I thought it gave the phone a distinctive look, which is tough to manage with smartphones these days.
Performance
If you’re going to buy the Poco X7 Pro, this is the reason. The phone uses the Mediatek Dimensity 8400 Ultra chipset, which can be configured with either 8GB or 12GB of RAM — I would definitely recommend springing for the latter, which we had on our review unit. The Dimensity 8400 Ultra (which has better thermal management, but is otherwise the same as the 8400) is Mediatek’s latest chipset in their second tier, but don’t let that undersell you on its capabilities. The Dimensity 8400 is still a strong performer — the premium 9400 chipset has a more power in processing and graphics, but it’s not a huge gap. Feature-wise, the main thing you’re giving up in Wi-Fi 7, which works with the 9400, but not the 8400.
All that being said, performance on this phone is almost indistinguishable from a flagship on most tasks. It’s smooth and responsive during everyday use, but shines for gaming. Genshin Impact loaded quickly, and in an hour of gameplay at the highest settings, I hit 60fps consistently and felt that the phone only got a little warm.
As with many Android phones, there’s a gaming mode that can give the chipset a performance boost during gameplay, along with additional options to silence notifications, take screenshots, tweak touch settings for gaming, open floating windows, and the like.
No eSIM compatibility, which is bit of a bummer for frequent travelers, but there is an under-display fingerprint scanner (along with facial recognition) for security. Both methods worked quickly and consistently over the couple weeks I used the phone.
Display and audio
If you’ve got a strong chipset, you don’t want to waste it on a bad display! Fortunately, the Poco X7 Pro has an excellent display that gets the most of those smooth gaming sessions. The phone has a 6.67-inch 20:9 FHD AMOLED display, and it can be set to a 120Hz refresh rate for games or faster action like live sports. The screen can get as bright as 1400 nits, which works well in direct sunlight. When watching HDR content, localized brightness can be as high as 3200 nits for contrast.
The Poco X7 Pro makes the most out of the hardware, using Dolby Vision image processing. It works with HDR10+ content, making top-end movies look terrific on this phone. The performance of the Poco X7 Pro is the main reason to buy it, but the superb display to make the most of that performance really cements this phone as one of the best deals in smartphones this year.
Even the on-device stereo speakers punch above their weight. I usually expect some harshness or tinniness at high volumes at this price point, but music sounded pleasant at max volume, with clear highs and mids. Even bass response wasn’t bad, as on-device speakers go. It’s probably the best set of smartphone speakers I’ve heard around the $400-$500 price range this year.
Battery life
As with everything else about the Poco X7 Pro so far, battery life is also impressive. Mostly, that’s because the battery is very large at 6,000mAh. But, it’s used efficiently — an entire day on idle only sipped away 1-2% of battery life. In daily use, the phone always got me to the end of the day with lots to spare, regardless of how much I used it.
Watching a lot of video shouldn’t be a problem — an hour of video at max brightness only used up 6% of the battery capacity for me. Gaming also has decent, albeit not standout, results. Playing an hour of Genshin Impact in performance mode, at max settings, and with the display at full brightness used up 20% of the battery capacity, which isn’t a huge departure from what I usually see with mid-range phones. However, most other mid-range phones can’t make it to or maintain 60fps gameplay, so it’s worth keeping that in mind.
The phone is compatible with a 90W fast charging brick that can get the phone from zero to full in less than an hour, so if there was somehow any battery anxiety, only a few minutes of charging is going to get you far (provided you have a 90W charger with you). Maybe the only downside with the battery is the lack of wireless charging, which is a bummer if you’ve already invested in wireless charging gear.
Camera
Well, at $400, the Poco X7 Pro couldn’t excel at everything. The camera array is the main drawback of this phone — if you’re prioritizing great smartphone pictures at a low price, this probably shouldn’t be the phone you buy. For starters, there are only two rear cameras — a 50MP f/1.5 main camera and an 8MP f/2.2 ultrawide camera, which means there is no dedicated zoom camera, something we’re seeing now even on cheaper mid-range phones. On the front, there’s a 20MP f/2.2 selfie camera.
The 50MP main camera isn’t bad — colors are sharp and light balance is OK, although I thought the sky often came out a bit washed out. Details get muddy quickly when you zoom in, but as a quick point-and-shoot, you could do worse.
There is no dedicated zoom camera on the Poco X7 Pro, so the best you can do (outside of digital zoom) is 2x optical zoom using the 50MP main camera. Even on a windy day, the camera handled 2x zoom fairly well, with no unexpected drop-off from performance at 1x zoom. It’s not as sharp as a lot of other phones, though, even at this price point.
Low-light pictures fall off pretty hard. Even with the 50MP main camera, there’s a lot of blurriness, especially around distant light sources like the ones on the Bay Bridge here. In order to get solid pictures with this phone, you’ll usually want favorable conditions, and that cuts low-light out entirely.
The 8MP ultrawide camera struggles. There’s a clear drop-off from the 50MP main camera in color reproduction, moreso than I usually see in ultrawide cameras in other smartphones. A lot of the blur and lack of focus in this picture comes from how windy it was that day, which only highlights the lack of optical image stabilization on the ultrawide camera (which is on the 50MP main camera).
Low-light shots with the 8MP ultrawide camera were also very noticeably less sharp than their 50MP main camera counterparts. Lots of blur in these shots, and this particular one was taken when there was much less wind, so the lack of OIS was less of an issue.
All that’s to say that the camera simply wasn’t the point of focus for this phone. The 50MP main camera is plenty serviceable for quick shots for social media, but that might be the extent of it.
Software
The Poco X7 Pro runs Android 15 out of the box with the HyperOS 2 overlay. HyperOS 2 is fine — there are a lot of familiar UI options, like splitting the notification bar and quick settings into swipes down from the left side or right side and auto-adding downloaded apps to the home screen. There’s some bloatware, of course, but I’ve seen worse at this price point, and almost all of it can be uninstalled — even some of the system apps native to the UI, like the calendar app.
As it is with every other smartphone in 2025, there’s a spate of AI features to play around with. There’s an AI image engine which I understand sort of engineers an HDR-like experience for non-HDR videos, but it wasn’t clear which apps that works with. I never noticed a difference when I had it turned on.
There are lots of AI features baked into the system apps — AI-generated summaries and proofreading in the Notes app, a magic eraser (removes items and people from photos), glare remover, and AI expansion (use AI to generate an expanded landscape shot, for example) in Gallery, and speech-to-text transcription and AI-generated summaries in the Recorder app. There are also AI-generated subtitles and an AI interpreter that can help if you have your phone out while you’re having a face-to-face conversation with someone speaking a different language.
Your mileage is going to vary with a lot of those, based on which languages are being used, how big the items you’re trying to remove from a photo are, and a bunch of other variables. There’s one constant you might not like, though — using most of the Poco X7 Pro’s native AI features requires the use of a Xiaomi account (Poco is made by Xiaomi). There are other AI tools not tied to the phone you can probably use instead, if you don’t want to create yet another username and password.
Sustainability
What we want these days isn’t just a good phone — it’s a good phone we can use for four or five (or more!) years, making that asking price stretch out as long as possible. As far as durability goes, the Poco X7 Pro, is just so-so — we love to see the IP68 rating for water and dust resistance, but Corning Gorilla Glass 7i isn’t the best, and the plastic build will probably get dinged up easily with a few drops.
The Poco X7 Pro will get three years of OS updates and four years of security upgrades — it’s not the seven years Samsung often guarantees, but it’s on par with the best of the rest of the mid-range smartphone world. With a little caution, we could see this being a phone you can use for at least four years, which makes that $400 price tag all the more attractive.
Pricing and availability
There aren’t a ton of options to get the Poco X7 Pro in the United States — it looks like the one straightforward way to get it is off Amazon, with Mint Mobile (owned by T-Mobile) as a carrier. That’s worth noting, because from what we understand, the phone won’t work on the AT&T or Verizon networks.
The Poco X7 Pro can be configured with 256GB or 512GB of storage and 8GB or 12GB of RAM, depending on which market you’re in and who you buy it from — it’s that 256GB/8GB base model you’ll find for around $400. Buying it on Mint Mobile’s network through Amazon in the U.S., you can only buy the 512GB/12GB configuration, but you’re getting that for $440, so it’s not a huge price increase (and getting 12GB of RAM on this phone is highly recommended, anyway).
Bottom line
This one’s easy to sum up — if you want strong performance at a low price and don’t care that much about taking pictures, this is the mid-range Android phone to buy right now. The performance, battery life, and display are all very good and competitive with much more expensive phones. And, while the camera quality is subpar, it’s not like you’re getting bad pictures. There’s not much to really dislike here.
If you want great smartphone pictures for a low price, then the Poco X7 Pro probably shouldn’t be on your list. But, virtually everyone else value shopping for smartphones this year should take a long look at the Poco X7 Pro, especially if you’re big into games.
Ultimately, the Poco X7 Pro delivers extraordinary value with flagship-level performance, excellent battery life, and a superb display at just $400, making it one of the best mid-range smartphones for gamers and power users who prioritize speed over photography. While its camera system falls short of competitors at this price point, the combination of the powerful MediaTek Dimensity 8400 Ultra processor, massive 6,000mAh battery, and high-quality 120Hz AMOLED screen makes this phone an exceptional choice for anyone seeking premium performance without the premium price tag.