Poco X7 review

Poco smartphones tend to come with bold and oversized branding, and the X7 gets exactly that. A large, very visible Poco logo at the back comes alongside dual-texturing, and a similarly imposing camera module for the triple-camera setup. The rest is fairly straightforward, with curved edges at the front and back, a narrow frame, and a standard button and port layout. Worth mentioning is the IR emitter at the top of the phone - still a useful addition for many.

The Poco X7 isn’t a large phone by current standards, but it’s not too small either. The device has a 6.67-inch OLED screen, with a peak refresh rate of 120Hz and a resolution of 1220x2712 pixels. There’s also support for HDR10+ and Dolby Vision formats, and a claimed peak brightness of 3000 nits. Even in regular conditions without triggering the specific conditions needed for the peak brightness, it’s capable of getting quite bright.

 

 

 

 

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It’s a pretty good display for those who intend to watch a lot of video content on the phone, especially high-res HDR content from streaming services. The curved edges look and feel good, but I did experience a few accidental touches while holding the phone normally, because of the narrow sides. There’s also Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 protection, which will help in display durability.

An impressive spec for a smartphone in this budget, the Poco X7 gets IP66, IP 68, and IP69 dust and water resistance. The three standards cover different levels of water exposure, so it’s a useful set of features to have. You essentially don’t need to worry about the phone getting fully immersed in water, as well as handling splashes or spills of high-temperature liquids - don’t worry too much if you spill hot coffee on the phone.

Smartphones priced at under Rs. 20,000 obviously don’t get the more powerful chipsets, but there are some decent options that offer good performance for the price. The Poco X7 gets one of the best chipsets around for a phone in this price range, with the MediaTek Dimensity 7300 Ultra. 

There’s also 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM as standard, with the option to get either 128GB or 256GB of UFS 2.2 storage - pretty much par for the price segment. For connectivity, you get 5G and Wi-Fi 6 support, and dual-SIM - again, fairly expected on a device in this segment.

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On the software front, you get HyperOS (a specific version of it, made for Poco phones) running on top of Android 14. HyperOS is typically known for its additional customisations and specific way of doing things, which might appeal to many users over what different Android-based operating systems offer. There are three years of promised Android system updates and four years of security updates, although it’s disappointing that the X7 doesn’t start off With Android 15 from the get-go.

That said, HyperOS does feel a bit heavy and bloated, with oddball default settings that I found somewhat unintuitive on the whole. It’s possible to set everything straight and set up HyperOS to work a bit more efficiently and easily, but it does require some effort and a considerable learning curve nonetheless.

The more cameras at the back of your smartphone, the more specific features it’s capable of, including things like zoom, portrait shots, and ultra-wide photography. The Poco X7 delivers a reasonably interesting setup through three cameras at the back - a 50-megapixel primary camera powered by the Sony LYT-600 sensor, a 2-megapixel macro camera, and an 8-megapixel ultra-wide camera. At the front is a 20megapixel camera.

For video recording, you can go as high as 4K at 30fps, or 1080p at 60fps. The primary camera captures 12.5-megapixel shots by default and offers 2X in-sensor zoom, but you can choose to take full-resolution 50-megapixel shots if you like. 

While the additional cameras do give the Poco X7 some extra capabilities, results are quite average on the whole. The primary camera can take decent shots in good lighting conditions, in terms of detail and sharpness. However, I found the colours a bit oversaturated excessively processed, almost appearing washed out for shots taken even in good clean sunlight.

Portrait shots and ultra-wide shots are okay as long as you put some effort in framing and stability, but they also suffer from the odd colour tones that affect the standard images. 2X zoom uses more megapixels to get detail, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the images are decent.

You’ll also get workable images in low-light, but don’t expect better-than-average images from the Poco X7 on the whole. It’s fine for standard, everyday photography, but those who take a lot of photos or need to work with the results professionally (or even on social media) should look at better options even in this price range.

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The Poco X7 isn’t a high-end phone, and expectations need to be tempered as such. Although it is running a decent chipset for the price, the overall setup of the phone isn’t necessarily as optimised as it could be. While the MediaTek Dimensity 7300 Ultra chipset itself hits benchmark scores that are acceptable as compared to the competition and for the price, the Poco X7 is best used for standard tasks with only occasional use of more performance-oriented functions.

For one thing, the software package on the Poco X7 isn’t necessarily well optimised for the hardware. HyperOS is a bit heavy and loaded, and this showed whenever I’d boot up the phone. The phone was often sluggish for a few minutes after rebooting, before ti starting functioning at a reasonable level.  Eventually, things would be fine, unless I had too many apps running in the background; at that point, things would start to feel slightly slow again.

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Basic gaming is okay, and even more resource-heavy games can run with the graphics settings tuned to a reasonable level. However, you’ll want to keep other apps closed for this to work well, especially things like Google Chrome. It’s all as expected on a device priced at under Rs. 20,000, and most functions such as watching videos, messaging on WhatsApp, or doomscrolling on Instagram work fine most of the time.

Battery life is pretty good on the Poco X7, thanks to its efficient chipset and hardware. There’s a big 5500mAh battery with support for 45W fast charging, and the right charging adapter and cable are fortunately included in the box. Even with heavy use, you’ll be able to get close to two days of use with the Poco X7 - just be sure to keep check on resource-heavy apps and keep clearing things up to keep battery life and performance at optimal levels.

The Poco X7 definitely has some stuff going for it, including its excellent display, high water resistance standards, and decent battery life. If your usage largely focuses on content viewing, this is a phone that will work well for you for long watching sessions. It looks pretty good, and has fast charging, as well.

As is usually the case, there are shortcomings in the Poco X7; the camera has capabilities but falls short on quality, the software has its quirks and iffy bits, and the performance depends on you being particular in how you use the smartphone. All in all, it’s possibly worth it if its strengths meet your specific requirements.