Poco F7 Pro Review
Pros
- Massive 6000mAh battery
- Full charge in 35 minutes
- Top-tier performance
- Premium design and durability
Cons
- HyperOS software is clunky and bloated
- Weak ultrawide camera, particularly in low light
- Poco F7 Ultra is more powerful
Key Features
-
Review Price: £499 -
Flagship-level power Though not the Snapdragon 8 Elite of the Poco F7 Ultra, the F7 Pro's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was still the chipset of choice for most 2024 flagships.
-
All-day battery life With a 6000mAh cell under the hood, you won't struggle to make it through the day.
-
Flagship-level water resistance Sporting IP68 dust and water resistance, you can take the F7 Pro to the pool or beach without worry.
Introduction
Every year with Poco’s F-series phones, the Pro model is the easiest to recommend and an instant recommendation for anyone looking for the best value phone. At least, if you’re mainly looking for flagship-level power for as little money as possible.
But with the Poco F7 Ultra now hitting the market alongside it with an even more powerful processor and a heftier price tag, is it still the model to go for? I think it might be.
I’ve spent the past week using the Poco F7 Pro, and here’s what I learnt.
Design
- Flat edges and flat screen design
- Two-tone design
- IP68 dust and water resistance
When it comes to design, there’s very little new to say about the Poco F7 Pro. Like so many phones in recent times, the F7 Pro has been shaped with flat edges. It is – as you’d expect – a glass rectangle slab.
There’s some subtle softening of the metal from where it joins with the glass on the front and back, so it doesn’t feel sharp or too uncomfortable to hold. And, in the black variant supplied for review, the styling is far more understated and sophisticated. It doesn’t look like a cheap phone cosplaying as a more expensive one. It looks like a proper grown-up, sensible phone.
The two-tone design on the back, where the top, patterned, glossy portion contrasts with the matte, frosted bottom part, is a nice touch too.
Even that round hump of a camera island has its charm, and from a practical perspective, having all three camera covered by a single piece of glass means there are no individual protrusions to gather dust and grime. So it’s easier to keep clean than the last one.
Otherwise, it feels sturdy, well-made and features IP68 water and dust resistance to ensure that it won’t be troubled by any tiny particles, either solid or liquid. And it will even survive being dropped in water.
For those concerned about scratching or damage, you’ll be pleased to know the new Poco F-series models still come with a pre-applied screen protector and a case ships with the phone in the box. So you’re covered against scratches and dings. Literally.
Screen
- 6.67-inch AMOLED screen
- QHD+ resolution
- Peak brightness of 3200nits
What surprised me about the F7 Pro’s 6.67-inch AMOLED display is how bright it can get when cranked up to full brightness. It probably shouldn’t have, given the spec sheet says it can reach 1800 nits in high brightness mode, across the panel. It’s the sort of brightness that can sear your eyeballs if you have it set to max in a setting that doesn’t require it.
With a 3200nit peak for HDR bright spots, it’s also well equipped for HDR video and is generally a joy to watch movies, stream YouTube, scroll through social media and game on. The latter undoubtedly helped by the 120Hz refresh rates it can hit, to keep gameplay fluid.
Like a lot of phones, when that brightness cranks up too much, it can lead to highlighted, bright parts of video and photos blowing out and losing a bit of texture and detail. But it does mean that when you’re outdoors in bright light, you can still see what’s on the screen fairly clearly most of the time.
I had no trouble seeing what was on screen when framing photographs and shooting video, which can often feel like a bit of a litmus test for any smartphone display. Especially in the bright, sunny conditions I was taking photos in.
Videos on YouTube and other platforms sometimes felt a little like there was some over-sharpening going on in the processing, but otherwise, I have no complaints about the AMOLED panel. Colours are vibrant without being over the top in the display’s default setting, and contrast levels are high enough to give shots a bit of pop.
Cameras
- OIS-enabled 50MP main camera
- Solid performance from main camera
- Secondary ultrawide lens isn’t quite as capable
Camera performance is rarely the top of the list of priorities with any Poco phone. They’re more about raw speed, power, and graphics processing to keep up with demanding tasks. So it’s no real surprise to find what is effectively a mid-range dual camera setup on the F7 Pro.
You get a primary optically stabilised camera with a 50-megapixel sensor. As is typical, those pixels bin down, combining to form an image just over 12 megapixels. But it also means you can punch in to 2x zoom without losing much in the way of detail.
Images at 2x zoom still look sharp, well-defined and clear. Anything further than that, though, and things start to fall away pretty rapidly. At 5x zoom and 10x zoom, pictures lose a lot of detail and start to look more like paintings than photographs.
I actually found it a great camera for taking close-up shots of small objects. It can focus quickly and reliably, even when pretty close to the object, and hitting that 2x zoom delivers a lovely-looking macro-like shot with heavy, attractive background blur for that depth of field.
Trying to focus on these objects with it set to the standard 1x angle can be a bit trickier if the object you’re focusing on is very small, so it sometimes misses if you don’t zoom in.
The primary camera is strong. Certainly more than good enough in most conditions if your photos are mostly seen on social media. My only criticism is the boosting of greens and blues, and the way it saturates colours leaves a bit of an unrealistic look on everything.
With that, and the way it processes contrast, over-sharpening a little at times, it removes some of the natural depth from photos. But really, that’s being quite nitpicky. It is, overall, reliable, quick and snaps photos easily with no trouble.
Sadly, however, as strong and reliable as the primary camera is most of the time, the ultrawide isn’t quite up to scratch. It can take photos in strong daylight, but even here, there’s quite a dark, crushed look to the shots. They also tend to look a bit grainy and noisy, lacking a bit in sharpness and clarity. It’s a lens I’d only use if I absolutely had to get a wider shot.
It’s especially weak in low-light situations. When trying to shoot night mode shots handheld, the images end up blurry or soft a lot of the time, and it doesn’t pull in anywhere near the same amount of light as the primary lens can. It also lacks the breadth and nuances of colour, particularly in sunsets.
You still see a lot of that over-saturation from the daytime leaking into nighttime photos, making them just a little too colourful and vivid. But it manages to retain textures and detail pretty cleanly. So, stay away from the ultrawide at night, and you’re good.
Performance
- Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 performance
- Not quite as fast as F7 Ultra, but it doesn’t really matter
- Capable of high-end gaming
The beauty of the Poco F-series is that it’s far more capable in terms of performance than any big-name phone of the same price. Think of phones like the Samsung Galaxy A56 or the Google Pixel 9a, and it’ll run rings around them when looking at things like gaming. Particularly, the more graphically demanding titles like Call of Duty.
A big reason is that, instead of going with a current mid-range processor to keep costs down, Poco F-series phones have the previous generation of flagship processor. In this case, it’s the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Which, until a few months ago, was the most powerful processor you could get in an Android phone.
So when we run it through benchmarks, settle into long gaming sessions and perform stress tests, it acts more like the most expensive phones from 2024 than it does a 2025 mid-range phone that costs the same amount. It’s genuinely brilliant being able to get this sort of power and speed from a phone that costs under £500.
Even with the maximum QHD+ resolution enabled, it can keep frame rates smooth and animations clean during gameplay and makes light work of any casual titles.
After longer stints playing the more demanding games like Call of Duty or Genshin Impact, I did notice it got warm to the touch, particularly down the right side of the phone. Not uncomfortably warm, but warmer than most other phones I’ve used in the past few months.
Software
- Xiaomi HyperOS 2 based on Android 15
- Can be difficult to get used to
- Plenty of bloatware
It’s safe to say that Xiaomi’s HyperOS is something of a divisive Android skin. There’s a lot you can do with it, but at the same time, there are decisions that frustrate just in daily use.
Simple things like changing ringtones, wallpapers and Home Screen layouts can be a chore. The options will either be hidden away somewhere that’s hard to find, or trying to change them will whisk you off to a theme store to download.
That would be fine if the theme store was well organised, with only quality options available. But sadly, there’s seemingly no form of editorial oversight or curation to ensure quality, or even easy discovery. It’s a chaotic mess.
And if you do want to change the app grid on your Home Screen to fit more apps in, it’ll throw your widgets and apps all over the place, sometimes putting them on a completely different screen, even when there’s still plenty of space on the current one. A lot of it just boggles the mind.
That’s without mentioning the additional bloat. Mi Browser is full of ads, as are other preinstalled Xiaomi apps, many of which you can’t uninstall.
Once you take time to tame it, it’s not so bad. There’s a lot of versatility, and lot of options to play with. And it’s software that has one of my favourite wallpaper features called Super Wallpaper.
Think of it as a pack of graphics for your Lock Screen, Home Screen and the always-on display. As you move from one mode to the other, it animates and blends between them seamlessly, making the whole experience feel tied together.
Battery life
- 6000mAh battery
- All-day battery life, but not as long as rivals
- 90W charging is almost as fast as F7 Ultra in real-world use
As for battery life, the generous 6000mAh battery capacity is big enough that I can’t imagine it’d be a struggle to get through a day, even for the most demanding user. For a light user like me, there’s the possibility of getting through two days, but for a battery this size, it should be easier to do that than it was.
Possibly down to the brightness of the display and the lack of LTPO tech for super low frame rates when the screen is static, it felt like battery drain both in active use and standby, with the always-on display enabled, was higher than it should be.
I still managed to get to the end of a full day with between 40 and 50 percent left over, having taken it off charge at 8am, but that’s no different to most other flagship Android phones with much smaller batteries.
The OnePlus 13, as an example, has a similarly sized battery, but can get through two days for me without too much trouble at all. So it’s another reminder that the spec sheet doesn’t always tell the whole story, if nothing else.
That said, charging speed is a particular highlight of the Poco F7 Pro. Despite featuring a pretty big 6000mAh battery, the 90W charger can refill the whole thing in about 35 minutes. In our tests, it did the first 50% in about 15 minutes. It’s the kind of speed that means I never had to plug it in overnight.
You do need to enable the fastest charging speed in the settings to ensure it’s always delivering its top refill time, which does lead to the phone getting warm, but doing so leads to the phone refilling quickly, consistently. In fact, I found it more consistent than the charging on the more expensive F7 Ultra.
That phone is fitted with 120W charging, which should comfortably outpace the 90W charger on the F7 Pro, especially given its smaller battery. But it doesn’t in real use. After three tests, that phone was only about 2-3 minutes faster to completely refill than the F7 Pro.
With that, and the intermittent connectivity issues I had with the Ultra, it’s led me to believe that, unless you really want that zoom camera and the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the F7 Pro is the phone I’d go for.
Should you buy it?
You want solid performance on a mid-range budget
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was the chipset of choice of top-end phones in 2024, with impressive performance, particularly for gaming.
You want the best camera performance
The F7 Pro is a powerful phone that’ll last you all day, but it’s clear that photography isn’t a priority here.
Final Thoughts
At the price point where the Poco F7 Pro sits, there are definitely more balanced phones with cleaner, more intuitive software and better cameras. But you’re not likely to find one that’s as fast or powerful. And that has always been the beauty of the Poco flagships.
It’s not one for those whose top priority is a good camera, but it is one for those who want a phone that can cope with absolutely anything, lasts a solid chunk of time on a full charge and then refills quickly when you need it full again.
Personally, I’d take a slightly lower-powered phone with a more balanced feature set and cleaner, less bloaty software. But for the right person, this might just be the dream £500 phone.
Trusted Score
How we test
We test every mobile phone we review thoroughly. We use industry-standard tests to compare features properly and we use the phone as our main device over the review period. We’ll always tell you what we find and we never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
- Used as a main phone for over a week
- Thorough camera testing in a variety of conditions
- Tested and benchmarked using respected industry tests and real-world data
FAQs
Despite offering support for 90W fast charging, you’ll need to source a compatible fast charger separately.
Yes, it offers full IP68 dust and water resistance.
Xiaomi has committed to four OS upgrades and six years of security patches for the Poco F7 Pro.
Test Data
| Poco F7 Pro | |
|---|---|
| Geekbench 6 single core | 2216 |
| Geekbench 6 multi core | 6560 |
| 1 hour video playback (Netflix, HDR) | 6 % |
| Time from 0-100% charge | 35 min |
| Time from 0-50% charge | 15 Min |
| 30-min recharge (included charger) | 88 % |
| 15-min recharge (included charger) | 50 % |
| 3D Mark – Wild Life | 4627 |
| GFXBench – Aztec Ruins | 60 fps |
| GFXBench – Car Chase | 60 fps |
Full Specs
| Poco F7 Pro Review | |
|---|---|
| UK RRP | £499 |
| Manufacturer | Xiaomi |
| Screen Size | 6.67 inches |
| Storage Capacity | 256GB, 512GB |
| Rear Camera | 50MP + 8MP |
| Front Camera | 20MP |
| IP rating | IP68 |
| Battery | 6000 mAh |
| Fast Charging | No |
| Size (Dimensions) | 75 x 8.1 x 160.3 MM |
| Weight | 206 G |
| ASIN | B0DSG6582N |
| Operating System | HyperOS 2 (Android 15) |
| Release Date | 2025 |
| First Reviewed Date | 28/04/2025 |
| Resolution | 1440 x 3200 |
| HDR | No |
| Refresh Rate | 120 Hz |
| Ports | USB-C |
| Chipset | Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 |
| RAM | 12GB, 16GB |
| Colours | Black, Blue, Silver |
| Stated Power | 90 W |
The post Poco F7 Pro Review appeared first on Trusted Reviews.
Source Trusted Reviews ,Home Appliances Reviews
About Products Reviews
No comments