Xiaomi Poco f2 Pro Review

Poco F2 Pro:

This is the poco phone f2 Pro the successor one of the successors to the super super hyped poco phone from 2018 so this phone like the first one will not be on sale in the US but in markets like India and the Philippines this phone is fire for about 500 bucks when you translate it so it's not quite the same thing as the original which was like the maximum value for $300 but hey I'm okay with that and they also have the regular poco phone f2 if you want that but this phone is really interesting from the inside out this one checks a lot of the boxes you'd expect to find in a high-end phone and I guess basically they're adding the word pro here add that just kind of means better so from the overall build quality to all the specs.

All the numbers on paper and all the included features it looking pretty complete not only is it a pretty big phone but you pick it up and you immediately notice it's it's built well it's solid to the point where it's actually a little heavier than I expected and it's made of metal and glass so it doesn't creak or flex at all and then you get plenty of extras a little accent color for the power button is sweet and once last time you saw a phone with both a headphone jack and an IR blaster that is a rare combo for 2020 the top of the phone also has that pop up camera with an LED notification light.

You get this sweet emerald color which you know I know pretty much every high-end phone now is a glass sandwich so it's kind of getting predictable but at least it still feels good in the hand and then of course the piece de resistance so hey say it is this this huge full screen corner-to-corner uninterrupted display and gives you haven't noticed there are a lot of hole punch cameras out there now and so this doesn't have a hole punch doesn't have a notch and it's doing my favorite method of getting rid of the hole punch camera and the selfie camera so we'll pop oh so now you have a full screen corner-to-corner display six point six seven inches of 1080p AM OLED and it's a flat display too no fancy curved glass which I am totally fine with its HDR 10 plus certified and it gets up to a comfortable but not in credible 500 nits I'm just happy we have displays like this on a phone of this price though it is 60 Hertz. 

I think if I was spending any more I would definitely be looking for high refresh rate but aside from that it's clear that the standout feature of this already great hardware package is the screen the fingerprint underneath is pretty good too at this point it's also kind of cool that this is pretty much standard you know this used to be a high-end only feature but now it's started to trickle down and it seems like the optical fingerprint reader under the glass is cheap enough that almost any phone can include it and then the pop up camera here has just a little extra little little extra flair to it it's got the LEDs on the module itself and actually if you go into the special features section in the settings you can configure the front camera effects and really customize the the sound effects.

The light color for every time you open that front-facing camera oh it also gives you a warning if you're doing it too many times anyway on top of all that it comes with this clear case which I'm learning people really like especially for getting rid of that little camera bump on the back but if you're not into that which I'm usually not then you can always grab a skin from our channel sponsor D brand to mix it up with the color or the back texture finish you know this matte black skin has never done me wrong so I'll link it below but honestly I think holding this phone you know knowing I know it's 500 bucks but if I didn't know it was 500 bucks the only thing that would tip me off that this isn't a $900 phone is there's a little bit of rainbow banding on the display from off axis and then also these rounded corners I just noticed the lower end phones for whatever reason just usually have more swooping bigger corner radius while the higher-end phones can tighten that up make it sharper more boxy other trade-offs. 

You can't tell just from holding it there is no wireless charging despite the glass back and there's also no IP official IP water and dust resistance rating those things cost money oh and I just the vibration motor as it buzzes in my hand I'm reminded about it now you can't necessarily tell that it is a cheap phone because of a bad vibration motor because our expensive phones with bad vibration motors too but it's just it's never something you unnotice unless you turn haptics off you'll constantly be reminded about a bad ratalie vibration motor petition for everyone to just work on those just just make those better there is a single mono speaker at the bottom of this phone which is bad news on the spec sheet but honestly it gets surprisingly loud and crisp and doesn't even really distort that much at all at high volumes i was listening to a youtube podcast maximum volume from across the room and it was doing great this might be the best single mono speaker i've ever heard in a phone now it is you can still block the whole thing with one finger that's the downside of a single mono speaker but they made it work here i've been using this phone for a couple days and it's got a lot of similarities from the oneplus 8 pro I was just coming from including the same chip snapdragon 865 which means it's also 5g enabled it's about the same size as that phone. 

The battery life here was actually better it's got a hefty 47 hundred million power cell and it's only powering at 1080p 60 Hertz display so you'd expect great battery and it delivers great battery and for bonus points it comes with this hefty boy in the box this is a 30 watt fast charger comes with the $500 phone now as you can tell this is not a u.s. plug so I've been charging it at regular speeds with the charger I already have but good battery life plus fast charging in the box means I'm fine with no wireless charging okay so this phone has quad cameras on the back and cameras here are where it becomes a little more obvious especially to me if you're pretending to be a high-end flagship versus actually being a high-end flagship phone now when you hear 64 megapixel quad camera array capable of 8k video I mean that's a pretty good set of numbers on paper now that I've used it I'll say this camera system is capable but it's not quite the crazy high-end you might expect just from the numbers the main camera it's solid it is a 64 megapixel sensor but it's gonna spit out 16 megapixel images by default. 

You can see they look fine you know I'm not complaining they aren't amazed photos they're not particularly sharp or great with colors or dynamic range or anything like that but nothing's terrible about them either until you get to low light so that's fine you wouldn't be buying this phone you shouldn't be buying this phone for impressive image quality at a low price you know that would be you'd be looking along the lines of pixel 3 or iPhone X but unlike those phones this one also has an ultra wide camera which is you know cool to have it's a lot softer and not nearly as good of a camera as the main one but at least it's fun it serves its purpose for larger subjects and that wider field of view and then there's two more cameras there is a 5 megapixel macro camera and a 2 megapixel depth camera now you might have been ready to write those off you might have thought I was gonna write those off but I use them expecting to write them off and I was actually fairly impressed the depth camera seems to be doing at least something for portrait mode shots I don't use portrait mode much but the cutouts here look good maybe a little artificial if anything and the 5 megapixel macro camera is actually decent now I've been shooting down all those 2 megapixel macro cameras pretty hard this year because they're just bad they look bad but somewhere I guess between those 2 megapixel macros and this 5 megapixel the shots got a little more usable. 

Now macro shooting is actually fun you can get some interesting results colors are a little muted but overall I'm not mad at them for including this one and then the selfie camera is again fine it's about it on par with the main camera it's funny they don't they don't watermark the selfies by default but they do watermark everything else but yeah look at the details look at the fibers the soft cotton shopped item can be a few calm it's beautiful even the 8k video is usable on this phone now it's kind of funny it actually lags pretty hard when recording and playing back that 8k video on the phone which I thought was a pretty bad sign but then I imported it and looked at it on the computer and it looks fine so overall this is a capable camera system it's fun it's not gonna give you the best quality images and you should look elsewhere if you want that but as far as a decent quad camera setup for 500 bucks this phone nailed that really the software is probably the only reason I couldn't rock this phone every day my UI like I said isn't my thing. 

Even performance to me because of my you I didn't feel high-end like snapdragon 865 should feel smooth with a 1080p display pretty much always but it doesn't always here part of that is the software part of that is also probably that I'm spoiled at this point getting used to all these high refresh rate displays but I just generally felt like it should be stuttering less and should be smoother and there was of course some cool features like theme selectors and the always-on display with the customizable clock and things like that but there's also occasionally ads inside the UI and the stock apps but if I'm just evaluating this whole phone as a package for 500 bucks it's a deal they did a really good job here it's the real deal you know they have the the non Pro poco f2 they have the poco f2 and then there's just a whole ton of other competition in this space if you like different things about different budget phones and I talked about that in the poco f2 video so this phone is a good sign of a lot of action in that space we might think and see that a lot of the improvement at the very high end now is pretty incremental lots of minor updates this year but there's a lot of action down here so this is exciting good to see thanks for watching catch you guys the next one peace