Pocophone F1: How is this even possible?
August 2018 was a strange month for tech enthusiasts. We all stood in awe and watched Xiaomi launch their most ambitious project of all time, “Pocophone F1”. I still don’t understand how they can provide flagship quality hardware at just under $300. By introducing Pocophone in a time when premium quality phones can cost you up to $1000, they paved the path for a phone that can provide you almost identical performance at fraction of the cost. That’s why we must dig deeper to understand what the hell is really going on. But before that let’s take a look at what the Pocophone F1 is really offering and I can assure you it’s offering a lot.
Design and Build quality
The overall design and build quality of the Pocophone F1 is decent but comes nowhere close to another premium phones. Though that should not be a deal breaker for anyone. The back is made of polycarbonate material and it feels cheap even when compared to some cheaper smartphones.
Pocophone F1 comes in 3 colour variants, Graphite Black, Steel Blue, and Rosso Red.
The “Armored Edition” model comes with a back made of Kevlar fabric and will cost you a lot compared to the normal versions.
The notch on to of the display looks good. Though it was not a well thought out process from Xiaomi.
Display
The Pocophone F1 features a 5.99-inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of 1080 x 2246 pixels (18:9) and a dpi of 416. It’s a decent quality display with good colour reproduction. Pocophone F1 has a max brightness of 500 nits. The Pocophone F1 lacks the always-on feature.
Specs and features
The Pocophone F1 comes in three variants 6GB/64GB, 8GB/128GB, and 8GB/256GB. All the variants feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset with Adreno 630 GPU. So the overall performance is much better than most other phones. On paper, it beats the Galaxy S9 and other flagships.
The Pocophone F1 has a 4000 mAh battery and it gives an outstanding battery performance. It will last a whole working day without any problems.
It has one of the best fingerprint sensors I have ever used and it’s very fast and accurate.
The Pocophone F1 also comes with an IR based face detection feature which is really nice to have.
The Camera
This is the place where I was very sceptical. I thought they must have cut some slack on this department but that is not the case. This is arguably the best camera Xiaomi had ever produced. The camera unit is pretty identical to the Note 5 pro but the superior processing unit makes the picture quality much better when compared to the Xiaomi note 5 Pro.
The Pocophone F1 comes with a decent rear 12MP main sensor and a 5MP secondary one for depth information. 20 MP shooter at front. Though the camera on the Oneplus 6 is slightly better than the one used in Pocophone. But at this price range, we really can’t complain.
Conclusion
Without any doubt, the Pocophone F1 is the best phone for the performance geeks. The performance to price ratio is unbeatable for now. The battery performance is also top notch. No other phone with the same chipset provides this much battery backup. Other than that it performs average in comparison to some other budget phones like Oneplus 6 but then again it is significantly cheaper than the $500 Oneplus 6.
If you are on a tight budget then this should be the go-to phone for you. Xiaomi can still make the camera a little better by pushing some software updates. Other than that this phone is just phenomenal.
What is your thought on this phone? will you buy it? let us know your thoughts on this product.
Originally published at Nextworm.
