Mid-range smartphones have come a long way. These days, mid-range smartphones offer enough power to take on high-end or flagship devices. iQOO Neo 7 (Review) was the first mid-range performance centric smartphone of this year and it quite impressed us with the level of performance achieved by the smartphone. Now, Poco F5 has been launched in the country to take on iQOO in the mid-range performance segment.
The Poco F5 comes from a lineage of proper powerhouse smartphones like last year’s Pocophone F1 or the Poco F4 5G. It also holds a lot of promise considering the specifications. The Poco F5 is the first Qualcomm Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2-powered smartphone, and comes with a “segment first” 12-bit display with over 68 billion colors. Now, we know the specifications hint at a proper performance champ, but just how good is the Poco F5? let’s find out:
Poco F5 review: Design
Design is something that has become somewhat stagnant in the smartphone industry. Almost every smartphone apart from the fold and flip is our traditional glass sandwich, and OEMs are doing their best to keep things interesting. We do not see anything interesting in the Poco F5. But its not bad at all. I like how the smartphone looks and feels. It’s basic, it’s lightweight coming in at just 180 grams (measured), and it has a proportionate form factor.
On top of that, the Poco F5 also looks super sleek from the front. The smartphone has minimal bezels which gives it a nice edge-to-edge look. It has a hole-punch cutout for the selfie camera. There are other design bits to like here, including the return of the 3.5mm headphone jack and Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection.
At the back, we get a polycarbonate back panel, and the cameras also pop out from the back panel, instead of a separate module that houses them. We got the Carbon Black color variant of the Poco F5 for review, which has a glossy finish, which makes it a great fingerprint magnet.
Poco F5 Review: Display
The display of Poco F5 is great. This is the first time we are getting a 12-bit display with over 68 billion colors on a mid-range smartphone! Furthermore, the 6.6-inch pOLED display features FHD+ resolution and 120Hz refresh rate. If it is not in these specs, then let us tell you that the display is nothing less than amazing. We rarely get displays this good on a mid-range device, and the Poco F5 more than delivers.
Colors are accurate, image quality is vibrant, and responsiveness is as good as it gets at 120Hz. There were also times when the display looked a bit faded in terms of colour. For example, in several videos on YouTube, colors appeared slightly washed out. Now, I’m not sure if this was a compatibility issue or a hardware issue, but sometimes things felt sluggish on YouTube.
However, move to other apps like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, the image looks super sharp and crisp. Here, this might also be HDR kicking in, as not all videos on YouTube are capable of HDR playback.
Talking about the brightness, it is one of the brightest displays we have tested in this segment. With the lux meter, we were able to record a highest luminance of 899 nits on the Poco F5 with a minimum brightness of 19 nits. Like the maximum, the minimum brightness we tested on the Poco F5 is also the highest among all smartphones in this range, which means that the brightness range on the Poco F5 is not the best we have seen in this segment.
Poco F5 review: Display
Poco’s F-series of smartphones is all about performance and gaming, and the Poco F5 is no different. With DNA shared with powerhouses like the Poco F1 or the Poco F4, the Poco F5 is also a beast when it comes to performance. This is the first smartphone in India to come with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 chipset, and the performance jump is astonishing to say the least.
Using the latest Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2, the Poco F5 has been able to achieve one of the highest scores of 936,155 points on AnTuTu – higher than any sub-Rs 30,000 smartphone we’ve tested so far. Not just AnTuTu, but other CPU-based benchmarks such as Geekbench 6, the Poco F5 is the highest scoring mid-range smartphone to make it to Digit’s test lab here in Noida. proper key area.
When it comes to getting things done and multi-tasking, the Poco F5 again blows the competition out of the water. In the Mobile XPRT 3 benchmark, which measures the time it takes to perform daily tasks like scanning, scrolling, taking screenshots, and more, the Poco F5 scored the best with a few exceptions in tasks like encrypting personal content and detecting faces. Showed speed.
Apart from this, the storage speed is also the highest on the Poco F5 as compared to the rivals. The only storage metric where the Poco F5 lagged behind a typical competing device is random write speed, where the iQOO Neo 7 does better, but the difference is only marginal.
Talking about the battery, this is another thing that impressed me a lot on the Poco F5. While we have seen mid-range smartphones outperforming the big players in the past too, at times the battery isn’t great. Not so with the Poco F5. The smartphone packs a 5,000mAh battery, which lasted 766 minutes (12.76 hours) in our video loop test. This is great battery backup.
In other battery tests, the Poco F5 only drained 3 percent of its battery while playing Call of Duty: Mobile for 15 minutes. Also, the smartphone lost only 4 percent battery while watching content on YouTube at full resolution and around 70 percent brightness. However, the smartphone seemed to drain the battery a bit faster when using GPS, as it drained 12 percent of the battery in just 1 hour of GPS navigation. Charging is also super-fast at 67W. While this isn’t as fast as the 100-120W fast charging we’ve seen on the likes of the iQOO Neo 7, it still charges the smartphone from 0 to 100 in around 45 minutes.
Poco F5 Review: Camera
Speaking of cameras, this is something a lot of people would be waiting to read about. With the Poco F5, we get a triple rear camera setup that includes a primary 64-megapixel shooter, an 8-megapixel ultrawide angle shooter, and a 2-megapixel macro lens. The camera performance on the Poco F5 impressed me again. For a smartphone focused around gaming, the Poco F5 has pretty decent cameras.
The primary shooter’s images are particularly nice. Be it dynamic range, color accuracy or the amount of detail, the pictures from this primary shooter are very good. Even at 2x optical zoom, images don’t lose any detail or colour. Even in low light, the primary shooter does well to retain details and keep colors accurate. However, the camera really struggles in confusing lighting conditions.
Images from wide angle shooters lose a bit of sharpness and detail when you talk about the ultrawide-angle lens. However, even if the picture is slightly dimmer than the primary shooter, the colors are completely consistent. Poco F5’s portraits are also good, but not the best in this segment. The smartphone’s edge detection isn’t as smooth, and images in portrait aren’t very detailed, with images in portrait mode also lacking in detail.
The front camera is also great in terms of detail retention and colours. Although the color tone may be a bit flat for many users, but the pictures come out quite well. In higher light, though, images are blown out and there’s an abundance of light, and not in a good way. Still, if you want, you can take a very good photo from this front shooter.
Poco F5 Review: Verdict
So that was the Poco F5. The smartphone has entered a highly competitive mid-range segment with some already high-end smartphones like the Vivo V27 Pro and the iQOO Neo 7. However, the Poco F5 is still holding its own. When it comes to performance, the new Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 chipset further narrows the gap between flagship and mid-range smartphones, resulting in the Poco F5 showing us the highest CPU benchmark scores ever.
The Poco F5 also looks and feels good, and we’ve got a stunning 12-bit pOLED display that looks super immersive. The camera is great too, and we get some other much-appreciated features like the Corning Gorilla Glass protection, 3.5mm headphone jack, and the very lightweight build. There are shortcomings in the camera and display department, but the raw power and speed offered by the Poco F5 make it a tough choice between it and the iQOO Neo 7 as your next mid-range gaming smartphone!
