Xiaomi Poco X4 Pro 5G 

 For the last week, I've swapped out my1200 iPhone 13 pro max for this 250  budget phone this. This thing costs five times less and yet somehow It keeps up. This is the poco x4 pro. It's a successor to the poco x3 lineup that took the internet by storm over the last two years but this time around. They've taken that secret formula and pushed it to the next level and it's off to a flying start with this packaging. you get a clear squidgy case a screen protector the phone itself a 67-watt turbocharger apparently and a usbc cable.

 I'm going to tell you why this phone in particular, is so ridiculously impressive but then I also want to tell you. How it is the epitome of every single thing that is wrong with the budget phone market right now. So the very first thing that you'll notice is how well designed. It is not luxury per se, It lacks the density of a flagship but the glass back gives it a touch of elegance. There's zero flexing or signs of sloppy construction and the fact that the phone is not too heavy combined with the tight corners means that I think. It pulls off the completely flat look without feeling jabby or leaving marks in your hand but even more so than the design pockets just. They've just nailed the feeling of using the phone. You get the impression that they've agonized over the details.Which is not something, I thought. I'd be saying about a pocophone the side-mounted fingerprint scanner means that by the time. You've tapped your power button. You're in the haptics are so good that they took me off guard every action you take is rewarded with a soft reassuring vibration every time. You tap a button in the UI every time. You push a slider to the end every time. You turn the phone on standby plus. This phone just ticks boxes. It's got a dual speaker one firing at the bottom one firing at the top an IR blaster to use as a tv remote a headphone jack and even ip53 splash proofing. I'm like me but if I had to isolate one thing about this. One thing that's just too good for less than three hundred dollars because it's the easiest place to cut corners it's this screen. You wanna know. Why this barely feels like a downgrade from my iPhone it's because of how bright and fluid this display is. The only interruption is this tiny little hole punch up top.

There is a bit of a chin at the bottom but that's quite significantly countered by the fact that the panel itself is a 120-hertz AMOLED 1200 nit almost perfectly color-accurate experience the latter being a treat. I was not expecting but I can confidently edit my photos on this phone and be rest assured that.When I post them. They're gonna turn out the way that they look on this screen. You know that battery test. We made it recently. I made the final edit to the thumbnail of that video on this phone. The display quality was the Achilles heel of the poco x3 but this time, they've genuinely taken that weakness and turned it into a strength and so now I've been handing this phone to person after person over the last few days asking them to have a flick through the UI and then guess how much this thing costs. I've had 399 400 450 even 500 not a single person was close mind you. I don't have an exact price for this right now all. I've been given is a ballpark figure of between 250 and 300 but you can see the point right and poco has somehow managed to do all of this while still overdelivering on the power experience. It doesn't feel quite a flagship. There is some like hesitation. When you're rapidly flicking between abs. It does take an extra half a second to load photos but the fact that you are getting a strong mid-range chip in this case. The fairly recent snapdragon 695 means that for scrolling and browsing and, to be honest even 90 of gaming. You might not even realize the difference coming from a flagship phone. I wouldn't call myself a hardcore phone gamer but I have imported my entire repertoire of go 2 games and they all run perfectly at high settings while playing them I haven't had to think once about battery with what I would say are average days of playing scrolling and photo taking. You know about five hours of screen time. I'm ending these days with a minimum of 30 left and that is with 120-hertz refresh rates enabled and then from that 30. It takes 25 30 minutes with this fast charger until I'm back to 100 again wow. Now all of this begs a very obvious question. How on earth did budget phones just a few years ago look like this with poor LCD screens puny looking cameras and laggy performance and yet now you can get the full flagship shebang for just 250.I'll tell you and I would say this is the problem with 90 of budget devices. Nowadays see smartphones are getting more and more complex. We've now got 5g.We've got three plus cameras on the back. We've got advanced software features and ai but with a cheap phone. You can't possibly implement all these things properly and at the same time.It's become easier than ever to just pretend. So this is what most of these companies resort to because an average consumer isn't going to know any better most of the real progress being made.

Here is happening on the inside and in other intangible ways but to keep selling phones these companies just have to keep exaggerating the more visible features further and further to the point where these phones are now. They quite often look like they do something without really doing it properly. So for example 5g, this phone technically has 5g. It's in the marketing material. It's on the back of the phone it's in the name.This phone is called the poco x4 pro 5g but just like pretty much every budget phone the 5g. Here is not reliable enough to make it worth spending the extra 10 a month to upgrade to a 5g contract and so I reckon that 95 of users will be impressed by the fact that it has 5g and might well be swayed by it as it likens. This phone to more expensive phones that do actually have better antennae and support more 5g bands but they'll never actually use it on this phone or for another example the software. This is not bad software for the most part. It is tactile fluid and feet ridge it just. It feels like it's built to mislead people a bit like how. This is never mentioned. You wouldn't know this before buying it but the poco x4 pro is rammed with bloatware.I counted up the number of apps the phone starts with they have a guess actually 30 40 nope 61. There are 61 apps pre-installed on this phone and that includes games shopping apps even travel agency apps littered with spammy offers. It looks like they've also created a new screen that pops up every single time. You install an app just so they can show you an ad. It's not a big deal. If you're in the know. It'll probably take you 10 minutes to get rid of all the bloat and disable the ads but I'm just trying to make you aware of how these companies are managing to make phones that are this good so affordable.They'll be getting paid to have these apps and these ads pre-installed on their phones but there's another catch like the skin that this phone is running on is called mini 13. and my best guess as to why they've called it mini 13 is to give people. Those who are less in the know the impression that it is running on the future of android 13. but it isn't doing that it's not even running on the current version of android 12.It is running on android 11 from 2020 then knowing Poco's track record. It'll most likely never get an android update beyond Android 13. Again it's not a deal-breaker especially given the more recent versions of android. They aren't as major an upgrade as they used to be but it's yet another slightly hidden way that the company's managing to squeeze out a little bit more profit. The most obnoxious example of this by far though is this camera system. It looks wild doesn't I'm pretty sure they've made it like this to remind you of the 1400 Xiaomi mi 11 ultras with that camera module that spans the entire back of the phone and it's got all the buzzwords. It's a 108 megapixel ai triple camera but only in the technical sense of the words to clarify the price. It is not bad in broad daylight, It's rather capable. You can get decent natural background blur and plenty of detail with that 108-megapixel mode but it gets completely demolished in anything even resembling low light the video quality is consistently poor and capped at 1080p and not to mention that these two other cameras the ultra-wide and the macro are not something. You're going to want to use it. They're grainy even in like a best-case scenario, oh and that other camera that's just the word ai for the second time it already says ai once here.

You've got two ais and neither of them can take a proper video. I'm just looking at the grain on my t-shirt right now considering. This is like broad daylight that's it's pretty rough to be clear. This is the kind of camera experience that you would expect for 250 the camera is fine. It's just the way, they're making this look and the way they're marketing it. I'd find it hard to believe that people won't feel misled. It's a bit like if someone released a car that looked like a Lamborghini was being marketed as a sports car on a budget but then you buy it and you realize it's just using the engine of a scooter. The poco x4 pro it's an awesome bit of kit and I 100 recommend it but just be aware that there are no miracles here for 250. You're not getting a thousand-dollar flagship. There are compromises with a budget phone and you just got to bear in mind that those compromises are becoming much harder to read nowadays than they used to be three-four years ago. You'd know the second you looked at a phone if it was budget but nowadays companies have got sneakier and the caveats are much less obvious to check out.

 

Poco X4 Pro 5G Specifications

NETWORK        Technology               GSM / HSPA / LTE / 5G

                                                                 

 

                                                                 

BODY                 Dimensions              164.2 x 76.1 x 8.1 mm (6.46 x 3.00 x 0.32 in)

                               Weight                         205 g (7.23 oz)

                              SIM                                Hybrid Dual SIM (Nano-SIM, dual stand-by)

                                                                     IP53, dust and splash protection

 

DISPLAY            Type                            AMOLED, 120Hz, HDR10, 700 nits, 1200 nits (peak)

                             Size                                6.67 inches, 107.4 cm² (~86.0% screen-to-body ratio)

                              Resolution                   1080 x 2400 pixels, 20:9 ratio (~395 ppi density)

                             Protection                    Corning Gorilla Glass 5

 

PLATFORM       OS                               Android 11, MIUI 13 for POCO

                             Chipset                         Qualcomm SM6375 Snapdragon 695 5G (6 nm)

                             CPU                               Octa-core (2x2.2 GHz Kryo 660 Gold & 6x1.7 GHz Kryo 660 Silver)

                             GPU                               Adreno 619

 

MEMORY           Card slot                   microSDXC (uses shared SIM slot)

                             Internal                          128GB 6GB RAM, 256GB 8GB RAM

                                                                     UFS 2.2

 

MAIN CAMERA Triple                          108 MP, f/1.9, 26mm (wide), 1/1.52", 0.7µm, PDAF
                                                                                8 MP, f/2.2, 118˚ (ultrawide)
                                                                               2 MP, f/2.4, (macro)

                             Features                       LED flash, HDR, panorama

                             Video                             1080p@30/60fps

 

SELFIE CAMERA                                 Single                16 MP, f/2.4, (wide)

                             Features                       HDR, panorama

                             Video                             1080p@30fps

 

SOUND              Loudspeaker            Yes, with stereo speakers

                             3.5mm jack                  Yes

                                                                     24-bit/192kHz audio

 

COMMS             WLAN                         Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, hotspot

                             Bluetooth                      5.1, A2DP, LE

                             GPS                                Yes, with A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS, GALILEO

                             NFC                                Yes (market/region dependent)

                             Infrared port                Yes

                             Radio                             Unspecified

                             USB                               USB Type-C 2.0, USB On-The-Go

 

FEATURES       Sensors                     Fingerprint (side-mounted), accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass

                                                                 

 

BATTERY          Type                            Li-Po 5000 mAh, non-removable

                             Charging                       Fast charging 67W, 70% in 22 min, 100% in 41 min (advertised)
                                                                     Power Delivery 3.0
                                                                Quick Charge 3+

 

MISC                   Colors                        Laser Black, Laser Blue, Poco Yellow