Poco F6 review

The Poco F6 is not designed to impress. The design doesn’t offer anything special with a classic minimalistic single-colour finish with a plastic body. The highlights of the design are two large lenses at the rear with a ring light. The back surface has a neat matte finish. You get an IR blaster on the top. The device is available in Titanium and Black colours. The power and volume buttons are on the right side. Unlike the Neo version, this doesn’t come with a headphone jack.

The Poco F6 uses a 6.67-inch 1.5K (2712 x 1220 pixels) AMOLED display capable of delivering 120 Hz of peak refresh rate, which has become a standard in mid and high-end phones, and 2400 nits of peak brightness. The panel can display 68.7 billion colours. It is HDR10+ and Dolby Vision compatible and offers 1920Hz PWM dimming to make it more energy efficient. The screen is protected by a Gorilla Glass Victus panel. The screen is indeed a pleasure to use even in bright sunlight with a legible display and sharp image rendering.

The dual camera at the rear is what makes this device stand out in this crowded segment. While it’s hard for a brand not to fall for the triple camera temptation, Poco has shown the maturity to limit the cameras to the most useful minimum. The main camera is a 50MP unit offering a combination of optical and electronic image stabilisation, aided by an 8MP ultra-wide unit.

The main camera delivers sharp portraits and picks up fine details with natural colours and skin tones without oversaturating. Portraits are rendered with natural-looking circular bokeh. Images in bright outdoor lighting have good details. The camera offers plenty of creative options like tilt-shift effect. It also provides motion tracking, which we found somewhat erratic in latching on to subjects. The 20MP front camera is good for selfies in most situations, though it shows a tendency to misjudge edges if you choose wide simulated apertures. We found the shadow areas noisy.

The Poco F6 comes packed with bloatware as expected from a mid-priced phone in this class. However, the smooth Xiaomi HyperOS experience makes up for this in terms of experience. The interface is responsive and navigation intuitive with apps categorised under various tabs. You get plenty of widgets to personalise the experience. 

The phone is powered by the 4nm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 processor and is geared for gaming. The device uses an IceLoop cooling system, which Poco claims, is three times more efficient than a common vapour chamber, though the device runs a bit warm with intense FPS games. We found the display pushing the frame rates to the maximum with high graphics setting in shooter games. The Poco F6 is available in RAM / storage combinations of 8GB+256GB, 12GB+256GB and 12GB+512GB with LPDDR5X RAM and UFS 4.0 storage. RAM is expandable virtually up to 8GB. 

Poco bundles a 120W charging adapter with the F6, though the 5000mAh battery supports only up to 90W, which is quite fast by any standards. But why is there a 120W charger inside? Well, we are not sure of the brand’s intentions, but surely, the extra juice can help top up your laptop while travelling without carrying an extra adapter. And it’s a compact one for a 120W adapter.

The Poco F6 competes with the likes of Realme GT 6T with significant skills in gaming and photography. Gamers will love this phone unless they are looking for an over-50k device. The camera is not perfect, but it delivers excellent details and near-perfect colours in favourable lighting and holds itself well even in low light.

The F6 might be overflowing with bloatware, but this doesn’t hamper the experience much,  thanks to the way the apps are categorised under tabs.