Poco F5 Pro review: Upper Mid-Range Value

Worth When Reviewed

Unavailable within the US

Poco is a sub-brand of Xiaomi, and its newest Android flagship telephone the F5 Professional – to not be confused with the F5 itself, or the X5 from the identical firm – packs some severe specs for a extremely fairly affordable value.

The Poco F5 Professional comes with a set of specs that had been innovative only a few brief months in the past. It shares a processor, the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, with the Asus ROG Cellphone 6, OnePlus 10 Extremely and even the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 – all high-end telephone.

There’s little in the best way of chopping corners elsewhere with 256- or 512GB storage choices, whereas the 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM within the top-end mannequin is greater than you’ll discover in an amazing many laptops.

All this comes packaged in a fairly skinny black plastic case, which is without doubt one of the telephone’s drawbacks: it feels low-cost and flimsy compared with glass or ceramic fashions, however a very good stable case ought to put this sense to mattress.

Design & Construct

• Light-weight for its dimension
• Buttons within the normal locations
• Can really feel flimsy

From the entrance, the F5 Professional is unremarkable, a black slab (white can be accessible) punctured solely by the small gap of the front-facing digicam, which is excessive sufficient up the display to not get in the best way of net pages and video content material.

The plastic body and glass sandwich development helps to maintain the telephone pretty mild for its dimension at 204g however feels flimsy, so a sturdy case will doubtless be high of the checklist for brand spanking new house owners – a gentle silicone one comes within the field.

Ian Evenden / Foundry

There’s Gorilla Glass 5 on the entrance, nevertheless, so no qualms in regards to the solidity there, however the again of the telephone is toughened glass with kevlar detailing down the perimeters and, dealing with the naked telephone with out a case, it might slide by way of the hand moderately simply. It’s additionally shiny and attracts mud and fingermarks.

The whole lot else is strictly the place you’d count on it to be, with an oblong digicam bulge angling up from the highest left of the telephone’s again, lock and quantity buttons on the correct, and a USB-C port on the bottom alongside the SIM tray. There’s no headphone socket, however there are two audio system, one every on the high and backside of the telephone.

Display screen & Audio system

• Good AMOLED show
• Responsive fingerprint reader
• The same old poor audio system

The audio system are small traces of 5 holes minimize into the plastic of the telephone physique, however there are two and so they’re intelligently positioned, with one at every finish of the telephone so you possibly can at the least get some try at stereo sound when watching movies with the telephone in panorama mode.

As is commonly the case with telephone audio system, we’d suggest a pair of the perfect wi-fi headphones, or a Bluetooth speaker, as an alternative of truly utilizing them, however for speakerphone functions, they’re usually fantastic, the low high quality of the audio in such conditions being properly inside their capabilities.

Ian Evenden / Foundry

The display is a 6.7in AMOLED panel with a QHD+ decision of 3200 x 1440 for a pixel density of 526ppi – nearly precisely the identical as that on the OnePlus 11. It might probably address HDR within the Dolby Imaginative and prescient and HDR 10+ flavours, with a peak HDR brightness of 1400 nits, although it extra sometimes sits at 500 nits.

The max refresh price of 120Hz means the animations and transitions of Android are utterly clean, one thing that provides to the sensation of responsiveness you get from the telephone. 

It’s a very good display to have a look at, and has rounded corners with a bigger radius than I’ve seen on different telephones, which contributes to a pleasant look. You can find brighter fashions on the flagship telephones of different producers, however it’s acquired sufficient brightness output for a typical spring day in Britain, and use in vivid daylight shouldn’t be an excessive amount of of an issue.

The fingerprint reader buried below the display can be fast to react, recognising my thumb immediately and with out having to resort to a number of tries. 

Specs & Efficiency

• Highly effective chipset
• Loads of RAM and storage
• Good for gaming

With a sizzling chipset just like the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 inside, and loads of RAM to again it up, you’d count on affordable efficiency out of the Poco F5 Professional, and that’s precisely what you get.

Ian Evenden / Foundry

The Geekbench multi-core benchmark sees it stage with Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 telephones such because the Xiaomi 12S Professional and Extremely and outpaces equally priced telephones. Sadly, the GFXBench assessments wouldn’t work on the telephone.

Solely the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 telephones, such because the Samsung Galaxy S23 household, and (rarer) MediaTek Dimensity 9200 fashions provide higher efficiency on Android.

This naturally carries over to on a regular basis dealing with, as apps and video games spring open and, simply as importantly, disappear shortly. Picture modifying, similar to Google Images’ modifications to the sky in a picture, are nearly immediate, whereas 3D graphics in XCOM: Enemy Inside are clean.

Poco is advertising the F5 Professional as a telephone to play video games on, and with its well-liked 6.7in display dimension, it’ll slot in many sport controllers. There’s additionally a sport mode that auto-detects video games and boosts the telephone’s pace while you’re taking part in one.

Cameras 

• Good important digicam
• Others much less spectacular
• Digicam app filled with options

With a big 64Mp unit with picture stabilisation as its important digicam, you’d count on wonderful outcomes from the Poco F5 Professional.

What you get, nevertheless, is a combined bag. That important wide-angle digicam – which is predicated on the Omnivision OV64B 1/2in sensor, has an f/1.8 aperture and bins its photos all the way down to 16.1Mp recordsdata – is ok however does its finest work in good lighting situations like some other telephone digicam, with low light-shots receiving a number of seen processing. There’s a 2x digital zoom and the power to shoot 8K video at 24fps if that’s your factor.

Ian Evenden / Foundry

The ultrawide digicam is one other matter. It’s an 8Mp f/2.2 mannequin with a extremely huge 120° subject of view however wants good mild to supply a viable picture and tends to smear particulars. The 2Mp macro digicam is a little bit of a head-scratcher too – it’s good to have and is ready to focus shut sufficient to point out you all of the crumbs littering your pc keyboard, however the fairly low decision photos it produces aren’t a lot good for something apart from displaying on the telephone’s display.

You should use it like a magnifying glass to examine beetles and uncommon cash chances are you’ll come throughout in the middle of your adventures, however that’s about its solely use.

On the entrance is a 16Mp digicam that’s good for video calls and selfies. It doesn’t do any pixel binning, so that you get a bigger file from the entrance than the ultrawide on the rear.

It may be used for video too, together with the twin video mode that layers one shot over one other for actual time response photographs and vlogging. All the usual Android video modes are current, similar to time lapse and slow-mo, plus portrait and night time modes for nonetheless photos, and a Professional mode that offers you management over the digicam settings.

There’s additionally an AI toggle on the high of the digicam app that lets it intelligently change between PASM modes relying on the scene you’re photographing. 

Battery Life & Charging

• Quick 67W charging with included charger
• 30W wi-fi
• All-day battery and past

With a 5160mAh battery on board – bigger than that within the Pixel 7 Professional or Galaxy S23 Extremely – you’ll get respectable battery life out of the Poco F5 Professional, and given the slender profile of the telephone it’s a outstanding factor that Poco has managed to engineer house for all that energy storage.

Ian Evenden / Foundry

It might probably simply go all day, with the period of time you spend earlier than charging it the following relying in your utilization. There’s an extremely battery saver mode to actually eke out the utilization to a few days or extra, however it lowers efficiency and restricts 5G connectivity.

Charging comes through a 67W wired charger which is included within the field and there’s additionally 30W wi-fi charging too – a uncommon discover on a mid-range telephone.

Full-speed wired charging is extraordinarily quick, with a 15-minute cost providing you with 35% cost from zero and hits 50% after 30-minutes. The battery life benchmark in PCMark took a complete of 12 hours and 32 minutes, which is a stable effort.

Software program & Apps

• Responsive Android 13
• MIUI has some issues
• A number of pointless apps

Android 13 is a superb cell working system, however the skins telephone producers wish to put excessive of it might differ in high quality. Poco makes use of Xiaomi’s MIUI as you’d count on, and in contrast with the OS it’s layered over it might really feel like a downgrade.

Firstly, by default it swaps the positions of the again and app-switcher buttons both facet of the house button on the backside of the display, which means it’ll take a short while to your muscle reminiscence to adapt and cease swapping apps while you need to go to the earlier net web page. 

It’s a UI that may be customised very simply with themes through a devoted app. These themes differ from moderately lovely wildlife and nature pictures to graphic patterns, cityscapes, animated flowers and butterflies, and even smiling shiba inus, however a few of them have completely dire icons and the change stopping a theme from altering residence web page icons didn’t seem to work for me.

Ian Evenden / Foundry

Quite a lot of time may must be spent customising the interface to your liking. One factor that’s additionally value noting is that the corporate guarantees solely two OS updates and three years of updates. Examine this with the three years of OS patches, and 5 years of safety fixes, for the newly introduced Google Pixel 7a and much more for the Samsung Galaxy A54, and it doesn’t look so good.

Alongside all this come the pre-installed apps you’ll most likely by no means use and are simply taking over house: video games like Bubble Shooter, Jewels Blast and Mud Settle 3D, filled with adverts and IAPs. There’s the ever-present Reserving.com app, plus Qeeq automobile rental and Asia-Pacific on-line journey agent Agoda.

Poco has its personal app retailer, plus a Group and Video app – a half-hour spent Googling the names then uninstalling slims down the default app drawer properly however is an undesirable chore.

Worth & Availability

You should purchase the Poco F5 Professional in its 12/256GB guise for £559, which is absurdly low-cost – tons of of kilos lower than the OnePlus 11 Professional and Pixel 7 Professional.

That is the model most generally accessible on-line and is obtainable from the official Mi retailer. Alternatively, you possibly can import different fashions from AliExpress together with the 512GB storage choice.

Availability might grow to be an issue, nevertheless, because it’s not presently accessible from a variety of retailers. Even the Poco X5 Professional is a extra widespread sight on the pages of on-line retailers than its F5 cousin however that may change over time together with Amazon.

See extra choices in our greatest mid-range telephones chart.

Verdict

There’s one factor that may instantly entice potential telephone purchasers to the Poco F5 Professional – its value. For the form of cash, it’s an amazing cut price.

The specs are in-line with 2022 flagship fashions, and greater than succesful for the on a regular basis makes use of we put our pocket supercomputers to. That you just get lengthy battery life, a pleasant important digicam, and really quick charging tops off an amazing deal. 

There are, in fact, some caveats. I’m not too troubled by the plastic body as more often than not this telephone goes to reside in a case, however the UI’s points and brief replace life (a telephone like this could simply stay helpful past the three years of safety patches which can be being supplied) imply the attractive {hardware} is let down by its software program.

Specs

• Android 13 with MIUI 14
• 6.67in WQHD+ AMOLED show with fingerprint reader
• 120Hz max refresh price
• Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 octa-core SOC
• 8/12GB RAM
• 256/512GB storage
• 64Mp important digicam with OIS
• 8Mp ultrawide digicam
• 2Mp macro digicam
• 16Mp entrance digicam
• 5160mAh battery
• USB-C port
• 67W charging
• 30W wi-fi charging
• Twin-SIM
• Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, NFC, IR blaster
• IP53 splash-proof
• 163mm x 75mm x 9mm
• 204g