With flagship smartphones pushing past $1,000 – depending on how much storage you need – and year-on-year performance upgrades getting harder and harder to notice in day-to-day use, paying mid dollar for last year’s top specs has become more and more attractive.
That’s the offer from the Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro, which uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset from last year, at a price that even beats what last year’s crop of flagship smartphones are going for now (unless you do a lot of price shopping).
However, as we’ll see in our Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro review, the value doesn’t come without sacrifices in other areas, notably the camera array, which is decidedly mid-range even by last year’s standards. It’s also worth asking if it’s a big enough upgrade over the Poco F6, the base model it was released alongside.
Gaming performance
The Poco F6 Pro uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, which was the processor found in 2023’s crop of flagship smartphones. By default, that makes the Poco F6 Pro an impressive performer, and means that the phone also, potentially, has a full suite of connectivity, including 5G and Wi-Fi 7. However, whether you’ll get Wi-Fi 7 on the Poco F6 Pro depends on your market – it won’t be a feature everywhere.
On balance, that’s a slight boost over the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset on the base Poco F6 model – the older flagship chipset on the F6 Pro slightly outpaces the more budget-conscious version of Qualcomm’s current-gen chipset. Still, it means performance isn’t a huge upgrade over the Poco F6.
The phone performs very well on everyday tasks, and is superb when it comes to gaming performance. When playing in both 1080p and 1440p, Genshin Impact ran smoothly – I never noticed any dropped frames, and the game consistently ran at at least 60 fps, even at the highest settings. That was with Wild Turbo turned on within Xiaomi’s HyperOS gaming settings, which maximizes performance settings at the cost of battery life. You’ll want that turned on, or max settings and 1440p will probably make games run a little slow.
Even with all the sliders set to max for performance, the phone only ever felt a little warm – even after an hour of gaming, it wasn’t uncomfortable to hold. The option to buy the phone with 16GB of RAM also helps keep games running smoothly. You might also want to turn on the enhanced touch control setting, which enables 2,160Hz touch sampling, for faster-paced games like racing or action games.
Connectivity was never an issue – both Wi-Fi and 5G were just as stable and fast as most other phones I’ve reviewed. The only hitch I ran into was the on-display optical fingerprint sensor, which I felt was surprisingly inconsistent. I found myself having to reposition my thumb more often than I’m used to – it’s not a complaint I’m seeing in too many other reviews, so I’m not sure if it was just me, but I noticed the issue far more than in other mid-range phones I’ve reviewed lately.
Display and audio
The Poco F6 Pro has a 6.67-inch AMOLED 1440p display that supports Dolby Vision and HDR10+. On the whole, the phone can hit 1200 nits of brightness, but up to 4000 nits of peak brightness is possible in localized areas of the screen for contrast. 1200 isn’t the highest number we’ve seen in mid-range phones, but it was sufficient to make movies and games shine in 1440p, while also making the phone useful in direct sunlight. The display has a 120Hz refresh rate, which is standard and helps ensure faster-paced games display smoothly.
The 1440p display is a slight improvement over the 1220p display on the base Poco F6, which again, like the chipset, represents a modest but noticeable upgrade over the cheaper model.
Movies and games on the Poco F6 Pro look fantastic, but make sure you’re actually enjoying them in 1440p! The phone has 1080p playback activated by default to save battery life. You can probably leave it on 1080p for the most part, and switch it to 1440p in the display settings when you’re about to watch a video or play a game.
The Poco F6 Pro has dual stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos audio. I thought they could have been a little better – while Dolby Atmos is always nice, the speakers had the lowest max volume of any phone I’ve reviewed in the past year, and the audio seemed a bit tinny regardless of volume. Shame considering how good the display is – I’d say using headphones or earbuds will be almost a necessity with this phone, especially if you usually need to deal with a lot of background noise.
Battery life
The Poco F6 Pro has a 5,000mAh battery, which is a bit smaller than the 5,160mAh battery found on last year’s Poco F5 Pro. I suspect most folks won’t have a problem getting to bedtime without having to charge the phone, but if you’re watching a lot of videos throughout the day, you might want to have an external battery with you, or be selective about when you use 1440p playback.
That said, during my battery tests, switching to 1440p didn’t come at as great a cost as I thought. An hour of watching videos at 1080p and full brightness ticked the battery down 9%, while 1440p and full brightness for an hour cost 11%. During an hour-long gaming session playing Genshin Impact (highest settings, 60 fps, with Xiaomi’s Wild Boost 3.0 max settings turned on and at full brightness) at 1080p, the battery went down 16%, compared with 22% at 1440p.
Of course, battery concerns are minimal if you have the charging adapter included with the phone on hand. It’s a 120W charger that zaps the phone back to full in about 20 minutes. Wireless charging has been left off, but with how fast and efficient wired charging has gotten, losing the still very inefficient wireless charging option stings a lot less. Still, as always, something to note for folks who have already invested in wireless charging gear.
Like with most phones these days, Xiaomi also has added smart charging features to prevent overcharging and damage to the battery, but we won’t know what battery degradation looks like until months and months from now.
Design and build
The premium build of the Poco F6 Pro is the clearest distinction between this phone and the base Poco F6. The phone is made using a metal frame with glass on the back and front. Fortunately, the glass back has a matte finish that doesn’t hold fingerprints, keeping the phone looking fresh. It makes for a truly premium feel, which beats other phones that were positioned as such and didn’t quite get there, like the iQOO 12.
The glass on the front is Corning Gorilla Glass 5, which is a bit removed from the Corning’s sturdiest offering (and lesser than the Poco F6’s Corning Gorilla Glass Victus), but it still should make the display hardy enough to survive a few drops. The cheaper Poco F6 also has a plastic frame, which should ultimately make it the less durable phone.
Speaking of durability, the Poco F6 Pro is only rated IP54, so it won’t be the phone to hit the beach with. That rating means it will hold up to dust and splashes of water, but definitely won’t survive being submerged in water.
On the back, there’s a bit of a camera array bump from the three cameras and the flash, and the glass around it is decidedly more of a fingerprint magnet than the rest of the back. It’s not so pronounced that the phone sits at too odd an angle when laid down on a table, though.
The phone weighs 209g, which makes it a little heavier than other phones of a similar size. However, I never found that the phone felt uncomfortable to hold after longer stretches of use, so I think the Poco F6 Pro is still in the right place in terms of weight.
As far as ports and extras go, the USB Type-C port uses the USB 2.0 standard, so it’ll be a little slower for data transfer – might not be as relevant to as many people these days, but worth noting. As is increasingly common, there is no microSD card slot or headphone port.
Xiaomi didn’t exactly go hard on the color options – you’ve got black and white to choose from.
Camera
The camera array is where the flagship-from-last-year argument breaks down. The Poco F6 Pro has three cameras – a 50MP, f/1.6 wide-angle camera with multi-directional phase-detect autofocus and optical image stabilization, an 8MP f/2.2 ultrawide-angle camera, and a 2MP macro camera. Nothing special, and you’ll note the lack of a dedicated zoom camera, which is now standard on flagship phones.
Even the macro camera, which is the only upgrade on the Pro version from the Poco F6, is not much to mention – I felt I got as good of results by using the 50MP main camera for close-up shots. In the shot of the orange flowers below, taken with the macro camera, you can notice a little blurring around the edges – the main camera did just as well with similar shots.
Still, the cameras are good enough to result in some nice looking shots, although the low-light shots are nothing special, and HDR shots still had some blown out sections where there was bright light. The main camera is capable of 8k video at 24fps, which is a nice flagship feature, but with a little muddiness, it’s not exactly flagship results.
You can get more out of the cameras using manual video and photo settings in the pro mode, but as a point-and-shoot device, camera quality is the biggest sacrifice you’re making by opting for this phone over a true flagship – a bummer in particular because the cameras don’t represent much of an upgrade from last year’s Poco F5 Pro.
There are some AI editing features, but as usual, they’re mostly only good and reliable for removing unwanted objects or people in the background, and the occasional touch-up. Other features, like expanding the background of the shot using generative AI, is hit or miss, as is even the case with more AI-centric phones like the Google Pixel 8.
On the front, there is a 16MP selfie camera that can take 1080p video at 30 or 60 fps, making it solid for streaming and video calls.
Software
The Poco F6 Pro runs Xiaomi HyperOS on top of Android 14. It’s mostly inoffensive, although it defaults to swipe down from the left half of the phone for notifications and swipe down from the right for settings, which I haven’t been a fan of in the past. Other than that, I didn’t notice anything too disruptive about the OS.
But boy is there a ton of pre-installed bloatware. I’ve had a policy of measured tolerance for bloatware, as a necessary evil to subsidize costs and keep the price tag low on budget phones, but there’s a bit much here for a phone that isn’t expensive, but isn’t in the bargain bin, either.
I haven’t seen this many bloatware games pre-installed on an Android phone in a while, and while you can uninstall most everything, it’ll take you a fair bit of time to do so at setup. Granted, it’s a one-time time cost, but I thought it was a bit excessive.
Like with most phones, the Poco F6 Pro ships with an always-on display option that is off by default to save battery life, so along with the 1080p/1440p toggle, that’s something you might want to remember to activate. The phone can also serve as a Xiaomi Smart Hub device, although folks in western markets might not be as deep into that ecosystem as shoppers in China.
Sustainability
Especially in flagship phones, OS update and security patch guarantees have become more generous in a bid to bill devices as good for more than just two or three years. While we’ve seen guarantees as long as seven years, the guarantee of three OS updates and four years of security patches is not too shabby, especially among mid-range phones.
The tough part about mid-range phones is that the low price becomes less valuable when you have to cycle them out more often – a $500 phone that you can squeeze four or five years out of strikes me as a solid deal, especially when it’s a flagship-level performer in all areas but the camera.
We would’ve liked to see those guarantees combined with a more durable build, but an IP54 should see the phone through a few mishaps. While Corning Gorilla Glass 5 isn’t the best available, it should be good enough to protect the phone from shattering for a while.
Nothing in particular to report as to more sustainable packaging or materials in the build, although like with most brands, there’s now very little plastic used in the packaging.
Pricing and availability
The Poco F6 Pro has launched globally, and is available for purchase online only – I found it on Amazon for as low as $500, but the price goes up for configurations with more memory. You can buy the Poco F6 Pro in 16GB RAM / 1TB of storage, 12GB RAM / 512 GB of storage, and 12GB RAM / 256GB of storage configurations. The Poco F6 Pro comes in black and white.
Should you buy the Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro?
As we mentioned before, the best argument for the Poco F6 Pro is that buying last year’s flagship specs for a mid-range price is a good deal. That means your buying decision boils down to how much you value the camera, because it’s the only piece of the puzzle that isn’t flagship by 2023 standards.
The complete lack of a dedicated zoom camera is a big omission in 2024, and I imagine will be a dealbreaker for many. On top of that, the cameras that are here don’t stand out – if you’re considering the Poco F6 Pro, you’re getting it as a great gaming and entertainment phone, and aren’t too concerned about photo quality.
Otherwise, the Poco F6 Pro is an absolute great value. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset holds up well one year on, the display is wonderful, the battery life is solid (and bolstered by fast charging), the phone has a nice, premium physical feel to it, and three OS upgrades and four years of security patches guarantees gives us confidence that this is a phone you’ll be able to hang onto for four or five years, making its relatively low $500+ price range a much better value proposition.
I do wish there were a little more of a reason to buy this Pro model over the base Poco F6 model, although the premium metal build might be worth it on its own. If all that’s appealing, and the camera quality isn’t a high priority for you, give the Poco F6 Pro a look!
The Poco F6 Pro is currently available on Amazon for $517.