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With six years under its belt, POCO is still seen as a young brand Despite that, it’s been a brand that consistently delivered affordable phones packed with features. Over the years it has also managed to refine multiple aspects of its hardware and software to become more appealing. I’ve been using the latest POCO F6 5G smartphone, and here’s my take on how it fared.
Design
Out of the box, the POCO F6 feels premium in hand. The plastic frame runs well-tapered around the sleek body and flat screen design. At 179 grams, the phone feels light and just about the right weight while carrying it around.
The rear panel of the POCO F6 looks premium despite the plastic build | Photo Credit: Bijoy Ghosh
Measuring in at 160.5mm x 74.4mm and a thickness of 7.8mm, it’s easy to operate with one-hand. The black colour variant looks and feels quite premium despite a plastic rear panel.
Display
The POCO F6 sports a 6.67-inch OLED display with up to 120 Hz refresh rates. It also supports a peak brightness of up to 2,400 nits, ensuring clarity under bright sunlight. While the display is quite bright, both indoors and outdoors, the auto-dimming adjusts brightness a little too fast for my liking.
While watching both Laapataa Ladies and the TV show Ultraman on Netflix, the vivid colours as well as the deep blacks come through nicely!
The dual speaker system in the POCO F6 allows for distinct audio separation between vocals, instruments and ambient sound in tracks like TM Revolution’s Meteor and Euphoria’s Maeri, without any distortion at higher volumes.
The smartphone features Corning Gorilla Glass Victus which is a happy surprise as most smartphones in this price range only offer Corning Gorilla Glass 5. The screen was able to hold out to more than enough scratches and bumps during the review.
Camera
The POCO F6 features a 50 MP main camera with a Sony IMX882 sensor and an 8MP ultra-wide camera with an IMX355 sensor. Photographs taken with the primary lens were sharp in daylight. The night mode too captured ample details even in low light conditions with minimum noise as well as loss in terms of subject sharpness.
The primary setup includes a 50 MP main camera and an 8 MP ultrawide camera. | Photo Credit: Bijoy Ghosh
Despite featuring two cameras, as compared to the three cameras on the POCO X6 Pro, the POCO F6 delivered a lot of mixed results when it comes to colour tones. The difference in white balance between the photos of the same scene captured by the primary and the wide camera were evident with different colour tones in similar lighting. If it had been more consistent in terms of colour tones, it would be a winner.
Performance
The POCO F6 features the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 processor. This is the latest offering in the Snapdragon’s 8th Gen processors, and the benchmarks are there to show the raw power that this processor had to offer on this smartphone. On AnTuTu, the device scored 13,54,017 placing it at number 18 on the charts, ahead of the POCO X6 Pro but behind the Xiaomi 13T Pro. Despite having a plastic body, the device was mostly cool during intensive tasks such as gaming or taking pictures and videos.
On Call of Duty: Warzone, the POCO F6 was easily able to churn out 105 frames per second consistently without throttling, making this a near-perfect smartphone gaming experience for me in recent times.
The unit I reviewed was the 12GB+512GB version of the POCO F6 which handles daily tasks smoothly. Out of the box, the POCO F6 runs smoothly on Xiaomi HyperOS 1.0.2 based on Android 14. Other than the bloatware notification from time to time, the device ran smoothly during animations and switching between apps. The pre-installed bloatware apps took away a bit from the charm of using the phone.
Battery
The POCO F6 comes in two variants - 8 GB RAM + 256 GB storage and 12 GB RAM + 512 GB storage | Photo Credit: Bijoy Ghosh
The smartphone had decent battery life with its 5,000 mAh battery. It was easily able to last 5-6 hours of screen-on time with 2-3 hours of video playback, up to two hours of gaming, some video calls, messaging and emails over the course of a working day. At the end of a typical workday, it would still have around 20-25 per cent charge. Using the supplied 120W charger, though the phone only supports 90W turbocharging, I could charge the smartphone fully from zero in about 45 minutes.
Verdict
The POCO F6 gets it right with a great screen, powerful performance and sound quality. But it faces competition from its own stable with the POCO X6 Pro, and from the likes of Realme 12 Pro+ launched at the beginning of the year. If you’re looking for the latest and best specs in an affordable smartphone, but are willing to compromise with average battery life, this deserves to be on your shortlist.
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