Overview smartphone Xiaomi Pocophone F1: extreme speed at a reasonable price

Table of contents

• Specifications
• Packaging and appearance
• Display and Audio
• Performance
• autonomy
• Camera
• Software
• results

Xiaomi Company is able to make unexpected moves that are fundamentally changing the landscape of the mobile market. This time she has released a gadget that completely overturns the established notions of what should be a mainstream smartphone. The device turned out so unusual that it has no place in any of the company's many model lines. Therefore, especially the brand new child Poco was recorded for him, and a smartphone called Pocophone F1.

Main feature of this smartphone - an unprecedented combination of performance and price. Prior to that, no one even dreamed that the smartphone is a little more expensive 300 dollars may possess such characteristics. We have carefully studied Pocophone F1 and ready to tell how good the new flagship killer actually. Current price and a discount coupon - at the end of the article.

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Specifications

In Pocophone F1 installed the most powerful to date, mobile chip Qualcomm Snapdragon 845. It contains four productive Kryo kernel 385 operating at a clock frequency of 2.8 GHz and four "cost" of the core with a frequency of 1.8 GHz. But it's not the frequency of the nuclei - this chip has an extended system cache, which allows you rarely access the RAM. Due to this, smartphones Snapdragon 845 demonstrated a significant increase in performance as compared with competitors.

Over the three-dimensional graphics accelerator Adreno 630 answers - top solution that allows you to run mobile games with the highest picture quality setting. Also, thanks to his excellent work VR- and AR-applications.

The memory subsystem does not cause any complaints. The line Pocophone manufactured devices 6 and 8 GB of RAM. Whichever model you choose, problems with multitasking, you will not. Roughly the same can be said about the built-in storage: 64, 128 and especially 256 GB should be enough for installing programs and storing user data.

The only drawback - the lack of NFC module. This year, it began to appear even in low-cost smartphones the second tier, so the lack of support contactless payments in the device claims to be the "flagship killer", at least surprising.

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Packaging and appearance

Pocophone F1 comes in a neat black box with yellow labels. Her inner portion looks livelier: Here designers used bright yellow.

The package includes a battery charger, USB Type-C connector cable, a protective silicone cover, Clip and accompanying documentation. Complete cover made of thin plastic quality, its size corresponds exactly body. Its presence in the smartphone very quickly get used to it and soon cease to notice at all.

The main part of the front surface is the screen. He has a small frame width on each side is about 2 mm, and the bottom - 7 mm. Top - quite a wide neckline, which houses the front camera, earpiece, and an infrared sensor for Face ID function in low light conditions. If "monobrov" someone does not like it, then it can be hidden by a special option in the settings.

Rounding angles are fairly large radius, that the first time can be annoying. However, this does not do anything - will have to get used to.

Side faces Pocophone F1, like the entire housing is made of plastic. On the right side is the power button and two separate buttons volume. They sit firmly in place, press clear, with a little click.

On the left side placed two combined tray nanoSIM card format, or one sim card and an external memory card.

In the center of the bottom face is a USB Type-C connector. At the sides of it has an external speaker and microphone, hiding behind a row of round holes. Headphone jack can be found on the top side of the device. It is very commendable that the developers did not deprive us of the opportunity to use a wired headset.

The back cover looks simple and unassuming, especially when compared to modern flagship smartphone, iridescent. It is made of high quality plastic gray. Despite the modest appearance, the material is much more practical in everyday life than spectacular glass or metal lid. Surface Pocophone F1 completely insensitive to fingerprints and minor scratches, so the phone is quite possible to use and without a protective cover.

In general appearance and assembly Pocophone F1 we ​​liked. This smartphone is not presented as a piece of art, but it is convenient to use.

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Display and Audio

The smartphone is equipped with Pocophone F1 screen with 6.18 inch diagonal and a resolution of 1080 × 2246 pixels, which gives 403 dots per inch. With such characteristics to talk about any pixelation is not necessary. Icons and fonts are displayed perfectly.

Image on the screen looks crisp and contrast. The display shows the rich colors, correct color balance and brightness of a good stock. If the default settings for any reason you do not like, you can tweak the colors on screen to your liking. There is an automatic adjustment of the backlight depending on the ambient light. The upper limit of brightness allows you to easily use your smartphone even in bright daylight.

For lovers of reading is a special illumination mode, which does not adversely impact on the eye. It can be activated manually or automatically at a specified time.

The audio subsystem Pocophone F1 has its own characteristics. Together with external speaker, which in itself is not bad, also has spoken. It works a bit quieter, so about the full stereo effect can not speak. But the additional volume is introduced, so that the overall smartphone sounds Not bad.

Unfortunately, Pocophone F1 is not equipped with a dedicated DAC, so when you connect wired headphones demonstrates quite normal for devices on a chip Snapdragon sound picture. Clean, loud, but nothing more. But the owners of modern Bluetooth-headset can rejoice: Pocophone F1 is able to broadcast the signal using aptX codec, which guarantees excellent quality of wireless sound.

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Performance

As we have noted above, Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 - this is the most productive to date chipset. The results of synthetic tests, screenshots which are presented in this section are fully confirm this.

Write a lot of words about the speed Pocophone F1 absolutely no reason - suffice to say that it is in the top ten most powerful devices on the market. Smartphone copes with any tasks assigned to it, and does it much faster than any competitor. This applies to launch applications, display web pages, switching between tasks and absolutely any actions that you perform. The difference with smartphones on other chipsets is visible to the naked eye, and it is impressive.

Fans of gaming must love with all my heart Pocophone F1. In the 3D Mark test, he scored 4159 points, which is the best result among the 98% of the other devices. This smartphone copes with even any games at the maximum setting graphs demonstrating no significant heating enclosure or processor. On the market today there is no other gadget that would have a similar playing characteristics at a cost.

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autonomy

The smartphone is equipped with a battery capacity of 4000 mAh. We never expected that this would be sufficient for continuous operation of the gadget, but the test results have convinced us otherwise.

In the test PC Mark Battery battery, which measures the time of the device during normal user tasks, Pocophone F1 withstood 11 hours 30 minutes. All the time there was a smartphone-enabled screen. This means that a full charge should last for two days.

Practical use fully confirmed the results of synthetic benchmarks. In normal operation (calls, surfingReading books, music, educational programs, few games) by the end of the second day has always been 15-20% charge. In this case, we had the feeling that the more economical approach of the device you can squeeze at least another day.

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Camera

The smartphone main camera installed with two modules. the first resolution is 12 Mn (Sony IMX363), and the second, used in portrait shooting time - 5 Mn (Samsung S5K5E8). Needless to say, the second module in the smartphone really works, allowing to get beautiful photos with blurry back background.

The Internet now there are fierce battles, one side of which extols photos Pocophone F1 to the heavens, and the second one does not hide his disappointment. Our opinion is somewhere in the middle: the picture quality is very good, but it is not clear breakthrough. Work chambers satisfy the vast majority of ordinary users, but to the level of the flagships until nedotyagivaet.

When shooting operate intelligent algorithms that are able to recognize objects in the frame and automatically sets the best settings. Result AI effects on photos like a game of roulette: sometimes it turns out well, sometimes - bad, but most of the effect is almost imperceptible. Therefore, an experienced photographers This assistant is better to disable, and beginning to be hoped that in future updates artificial intelligence will become more intelligent.

Inspires hope that the smartphone is initially available Camera2 API. Now you can without any problems to install one of the mods google CameraThat makes it possible to significantly improve the quality of photos. There is no doubt that in the future the native and third-party software will be modified, so the final verdict regarding PhotoChances Pocophone F1 stand still early.

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Software

"Out of the box» Pocophone F1 running MIUI 9 based on Android 8.1. You can update to the test version of the MIUI 10, which we did, if desired.

In general, the software filling Pocophone F1 resembles any other Xiaomi smartphone production. The only difference - a new shell Poco Launcher with a common menu for all applications. This launcher fast, but still very far from perfect. Poor has an automatic categorization of programs, there is no number on the notification icons, little appearance settings, and so on. However, in the Google Play catalog you can choose a different launcher to his liking.

The smartphone can be unlocked fingerprint or via facial recognition. Both of these methods work almost flawlessly. fingerprint Scanner very fast, it recognizes the fingers at any angle. A function of Face ID, which becomes available after changing the region setting, recognizes the owner's face, not only in daylight, but even in low light.

The operating system runs smoothly and without a brake, which is quite natural for a device with such a powerful stuffing. During the testing time smartphone has received several updates, fixes various bugs and improve stability. Given the time and status output Pocophone F1, we can assume that in the near future, the smartphone will receive the upgrade to the new version of Android 9.0 Pie.

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results

Five years ago, the company BBK Electronics has created a brand for the release of OnePlus advanced smartphones with low cost. Many then tried to claim the title killer championsBut all these attempts have failed. Exactly as long as the game will not run the new Xiaomi c Pocophone F1. Today, it is a device offering the best price-performance ratio, forcing all competitors hastily to revise plans for the future.

Pros Pocophone F1

• Good build and materials.
• Record-setting performance.
• Amount of RAM and internal storage.
• USB Type-C, 3,5-mm audio jack.
• Great sound.
• Autonomy.
• Current software updates.
• Low price.

Cons Pocophone F1

• Plastic case (for some it is a minus).
• No NFC.
• AI camera work needs to be improved.
• Poco Launcher.

At the time of this writing, the price of the smartphone is Pocophone F1 20 676 rubles for the version with 64 GB of storage and 23 344 rubles for 128GB. The price for an older model can be further reduced with a coupon GBMPPOCOF1.

The author expresses his gratitude to the company GearBest for providing the test device.