Author: Stan Schroeder / Source: Mashable
Say you want a smartphone with top specs. Say you’re absolutely disgusted with the prices of flagship smartphones these days. Amazingly, this is not a problem without a solution.
Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer whose smartphones typically have top-notch specs and features while undercutting the prices of most flagships by a serious margin, has a new sub-brand: Pocophone. And the first smartphone to launch under the brand, the Pocophone F1, is all you’d expect from Xiaomi — even a little bit more.
Launched in late August, the Pocophone F1 (called the Poco F1 in some markets) has a very tough job: It has to make people buy it despite all the brand-new, ultra-powerful smartphones that closely followed it (Phonetober still isn’t over, so there’s more to come).
After spending nearly two weeks with the phone, I’m convinced that this won’t be a very hard task. The Pocophone F1 offers the best value on the smartphone market right now.
Crazy-good value
First things first: The Pocophone F1 starts at $285, but you can spec it up to $407. It comes in several different flavors, ranging from 6GB to 8GB of RAM and 64GB to 256GB of storage. My unit was somewhere in the middle: an Armoured Edition, with a Kevlar back, 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.
However, visual details and storage aside, the unit I tested performs exactly like the cheapest Pocophone F1, as it has the same amount of RAM and the same chips.
Keep that in mind while reading this review; the performance I’m describing can be had for $285.Beautiful in Kevlar
Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
I’ve only held the variant of the Pocophone F1 coated in aramid fiber (Kevlar), and I love the design. The back of the phone feels soft and is extremely grippy — you won’t be dropping this phone much unless you’re really clumsy. The dark gray pattern on the back is simple but very effective. I love the modern-yet-somehow-also-retro look it gave the phone. Among the many Androids I’ve tested, this is the one that I’d wear around without a case, just to show off that back. The phone comes with a simple soft-plastic case which completely obscures the pattern on the back, making the device look a lot less exciting.
The phone’s plastic frame is also dark gray, which sounds boring, but somehow it isn’t. Perhaps it’s the red accents around the camera lenses on the back or the silver “Pocophone” logo on the bottom that complement the design so well.
I’ve only got two qualms about the design. The fingerprint sensor is a bit too close to the cameras; I smudged the lower lens all the time while navigating my finger to the sensor. And the phone’s chin on the front is a bit bigger than you’ll see on most newer phones. I won’t spent too much time on the notch given that basically every other phone has it these days. It’s very iPhone-like in size, which isn’t bad at all.
A surprisingly good display
Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
That notched, 6.18-inch, 2,246 x 1,080-pixel screen is an LCD, not an OLED, but it doesn’t make a huge difference. I compared the Pocophone F1 against the iPhone X and it’s only slightly dimmer on full brightness. I’ve watched some dark videos to see how the screen will handle very dark areas, and yes, the iPhone X has deeper blacks and better contrast. But had I not had such a superior screen to compare with, I wouldn’t have any issues with the Pocophone F1’s screen. I’ve seen a similar thing on several LCD-sporting Androids lately: LCD in general has gotten really good, and OLED screens simply aren’t that much better anymore.
The way content is shown on that screen is another matter. On YouTube, extending the video to full screen will make the video rounded on the right side, and cut off squarely below the notch on the left. Many apps will have important info obscured by the notch. These types of issues aren’t unique to the Pocophone F1 — most notched Android phones have them — but they’re annoying nevertheless.
Software that gets out of your way
I don’t spend too many words on brand-specific Android user interfaces these days. Almost every Android brand has one, and they’re all pretty similar, as most of them try to nab the best mix of the pure Android experience and iOS.
For the Pocophone F1, Xiaomi made a special, somewhat minimalist version of its MIUI interface. The experience is a tad more similar to stock Android — the app drawer is enabled by default, for example. Since I’m not a stock Android purist, this didn’t matter to me, but it might matter to some users.
Getting acquainted with the phone’s settings took some time. For example, to rearrange the shortcuts that show up when you slide your finger downwards from the notch, you have to go to Settings > Notifications & Status Bar > Toggle Positions, and the toggling itself is done in a horribly unintuitive way. But once I’d found everything I needed, using the Pocophone F1 was similar to using any newer Android phone. The phone came with some degree of bloatware — including some Mi software and a bunch of Microsoft…
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