Poco F5 Pro review

Poco enters the global market in 2023 with its Poco F5 series, leading with the flagship Poco F5 Pro with a starting price of $449 regular price. The phone comes with the best display from the company so far, a very capable chipset, fast charging, and a premium design. There are also improvements to the camera system, and gaming-oriented features like a dedicated cooling system for improved gaming performance.

Let’s jump in to explore the full package of the Poco F5 Pro and see what it’s all about.

Unlike many other manufacturers, Poco is quite generous when it comes to the unboxing experience with its phones. Inside the box of the Poco F5 Pro you get the phone itself, which comes with a pre-installed screen protector, a 68W charger, and a charging cable. You also get a transparent case that’s rather thick, as well as the sim ejector tool and documentation.

There is much to like about the Poco F5 Pro’s spec sheet. Poco had to cut down on some areas, but overall it seems like it made good decisions and was careful not to downgrade too much where it had to.

It is obvious that the company focused most on offering a great viewing experience by adding a stellar display. Then again, most flagship phones already have one of those, so the thing that makes the F5 Pro stand out here is the fast wireless charging. The 12GB of RAM is also much appreciated. Can’t say the same for the choice to add a 2MP macro camera instead of a telephoto though.

Poco F5 Pro Design & Colors

Stylish and sleek

The design of the Poco F5 Pro is stylish and sleek. The back panel is made out of glass and curves as it reaches the edges of the phone, making it more comfortable to hold in the hand. It also helps that the phone is not too heavy, measuring at only 204g (not that much for a handset of this size). At the front, you have a large 6.67” flat display with very thin uniform bezels, resulting in an overall gorgeous look for the Poco F5 Pro.

When it comes to durability, however, it is not exactly the best you can get out there. The display is protected with Gorilla Glass 5 (which is still pretty good mind you), but the more disappointing part is that you only get an IP53 certification for dust and water protection, which will be enough to shield your phone from some splashes of water, but nothing more than that.

As for the color options, we got to test out the white model, which looks really classy and helps with hiding the fingerprint smudges left on the smooth glass back panel. There is also a black version.

Poco F5 Pro Display

The screen comes with an AMOLED panel and has a resolution of 3200 x 1440 pixels, with a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz and peak brightness of 1400 nits. With the Pro HDR support thrown in too, content looked beautiful and clear — even when outside in bright conditions.

If you enjoy playing competitive mobile games, you would also be happy to hear that it has a touch sampling rate of 480Hz. Now, I do like to dabble in some online mobile gaming from time to time, and I can say that the phone felt plenty responsive when I was saving my team from a defeat in Wild Rift or aiming at somebody’s head in Apex Legends.

The F5 Pro’s also has its fingerprint scanner embedded in the display, and I am glad to say that it is lightning-fast to use, as well as accurate.

Display Measurements:

It seems poco has focused most of its attention (and budget) to the main snapper when it comes to the F5 Pro’s camera system. Well, that’s how it should be, after all.

This 64MP camera seems to handle HDR like a pro (no pun intended), and offers vibrant, deep colors. Images are tack sharp and the shutter response is very quick. I have zero bad remarks for the main camera on the Poco F5 Pro. I would trust it to help me capture some awesome shots any time of the day.

I was very surprised with the night-time photos from the main camera. The sample image you see above was taken in near pitch-dark conditions, as you can probably tell from the photo on the left. Despite that, switching the Poco F5 Pro to night mode seemed to do wonders in this case.

The Poco F5 Pro does not have a telephoto camera, but it does have a digital 2x zoom that produces a very sharp image. That’s because the phone crops in on the main camera sensor instead of simply zooming in on the image.

Portrait mode on the F5 Pro looks very fake and doesn’t do a great job at separating the subject from the background. There are some edges that are blurred out but shouldn’t be. The silver lining here is that you can regulate how blurred out you want things to be in the background, but that doesn’t really help in this case.

I was a bit disappointed by the 8MP ultra-wide camera on the Poco F5 Pro. The photos that come out of it are lacking in sharpness and color accuracy, producing some washed out colors. That being said, unlike you will later find out about the video recording, images are usable for social media and quick snapshots.

The 2MP macro camera will give you good looking images that are plenty sharp. However, I noticed that you cannot really get very close to the subject, which kind of defeats the whole purpose. It is hard to call the photos you can get with this snapper macro.

The front-facing camera of the Poco F5 Pro comes with 16MP, and that shows. It shoots sharp images with good color accuracy (at least for my skin tone). One annoying factor is the face smoothing effect that is turned on by default when you open camera, but you can easily turn that off if you don’t like how it looks.

The Poco F5 Pro is capable of shooting video in 8K 24fps, but I wouldn’t recommend it, as it doesn’t really offer the best image quality and takes up a lot of space. More viable are the 4K and 1080p options.

One thing to note here is that you cannot shoot HDR video at 4K 60fps for some reason. You can only shoot HDR in 4K 30fps and lower. The image while shooting video in 4K is sharp and detailed, with great colors (albeit a bit oversaturated). Sadly, things go south when you start to move.

It seems the optical image stabilization (OIS) is not working very well here, as the focus seems to constantly when you are moving with the phone. This issue persists both with 60fps and 30fps.

Video from the ultra wide-camera is simply-put unusable. Unless you are okay with very low detail that is. It is hard to say that this is 1080p footage, even though it technically is.

Poco is a sub-brand of Xiaomi, so it runs Xiaomi’s MIUI 14 interface, which in this case is on top of Android 13. If you are familiar with both iOS and Android, you can think of MIUI as a mixture of both operating systems.

You get a control panel that is inspired by the one on iOS, but notifications are displayed similarly to other Android phones. I have to say that I quite like the Frankenstein-like approach between the two OS, but there are some issues with the software that might prove very annoying to some users.

More specifically, I am talking about the massive amount of bloatware that usually comes with Poco phones, which is no different for the Poco F5 Pro. You will find many examples of pre-installed games and apps that are completely unnecessary. You do get to uninstall most of them, however.

There is also the fact that MIUI 14 tends to be quite aggressive when it comes to killing background applications, which can make switching between apps a bit slower than usual. That being said, with our unit’s 12GB of RAM, I didn’t notice any such behavior.

Software support is another downside to Poco’s phones, which in the case of the Poco F5 Pro means just 2 years of major OS updates and 3 years of Android security patches. That is considered subpar for flagship phones and it means it will only go as far as Android 15.

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