Hey there, Alex here.
2 years ago when I reviewed the Pocophone
F1, the main selling point for me was the fact that
it was one of the cheapest brand
new phones that you could buy
with the Snapdragon 845.
The new POCO F2 Pro shares that same selling
point today, just that it’s for the Snapdragon 865.
I got the phone during a sale for just over
500 SGD, which is about the same price as
the Pixel 4a, and much cheaper than the OnePlus
Nord.
So let’s take a closer look at the phone,
and see what it has to offer.
Unlike its predecessor which was just using
a plastic body, the F2 Pro actually has a
surprisingly decent build quality and design
that reminds me of the Mi 9T.
Still no water resistance here, but it has
metal on the side, glass on the back with
a slight matte finish, nice design touches
around the phone, and it even has a notchless
and almost bezel-less display on the front
of the phone thanks to the use of a pop up camera.
Because of that, the viewing experience is
really good.
It is using an AMOLED screen with good brightness
and colour reproduction.
Viewing angle might not be the greatest, but
I do like that it’s a flat display.
It lacks the smoother 90Hz refresh rate, but
that’s not a deal breaker for me at this
price point.
The fingerprint sensor under the screen works
well for me as well, and in case you haven’t
noticed there is no IR face unlock here anymore.
But considering the situation that we’re
in, I’ll take the nicer display any day
of the week.
The only unfortunate thing here is just the
lack of stereo speakers.
The bottom firing speaker is pretty loud,
but can sound a bit thin.
On the bright side, we still have a headphone
jack here.
As mentioned earlier, the POCO F2 Pro is using
the Snapdragon 865.
As expected from this chipset, performance
is pretty great.
Apps launches quickly, games perform well,
and the phone doesn’t really heat up much.
Battery life has been pretty great too with
the 4700mAh battery and modest display setup.
Even after a day of heavy use, I would end
the day with around 30% battery remaining.
It supports 30W fast charging as well, and
a full charge takes only about an hour.
Camera hardware is fairly decent as well with
the main camera being the Sony IMX686.
The image processing might be a tad aggressive
for my taste, but if you don’t pixel peep,
it is a pretty capable shooter.
Other than the edges looking a little soft,
the 13MP ultra wide angle camera looks decent
in good lighting, but is pretty much usable
in lowlight since Night mode only works for
the main rear camera.
The 20MP front camera is able to capture nice
details but dynamic range isn’t the best.
Overall, it’s not as good as the Pixel 4a
for sure, but camera performance isn’t really
the main selling point of the Poco F2 Pro.
So I think it’s decent enough.
I’ll have a link in the video description
with everything I took with the phone, so
you guys can check it out if you want to.
At this point, you might be thinking it all
sounds too good to be true, there must be
a catch somewhere.
And well, you’re right.
The catch is that you have to be okay with
using MIUI.
The amount of features built into MIUI is
impressive for sure, and I find a number of
them pretty useful.
But the UI feels a little rough around the
edges with minor stutters and dropped frames
in the animation every now and then.
It also comes with quite a number of bloatware
out of the box as well, along with ads in
some of the built in apps.
The good news is, there are things that you
can do to improve the user experience.
Using a third party launcher makes it feel
a little smoother to me, a lot of the bloatware
can be uninstalled, and there are ways to
remove ads.
If this sounds like way too much work for
you, then maybe the POCO F2 Pro is not for you.
But if it’s something that you can live
with, the phone does have a lot to offer.
Just being able to get the Snapdragon 865
chipset at this price point is already incredible
enough, but on top of that the phone still
has a nice design, good build quality, nice
display, solid battery life, as well as decent
enough cameras.
If camera performance and software experience
are more important to you, I’ll still recommend
the Pixel 4a.
But if not, POCO F2 Pro with Snapdragon 865
is a pretty good deal,
as long as you can live with MIUI.
Thanks for watching this video, and see you
guys on the next one.
