Poco F2 Pro in for review

The hugely-anticipated second coming of the Pocophone is finally here at HQ and we’ve started work on its review. There’s a lot to go over with the Poco F2 Pro, but here’s a brief hands-on and key features video to get you started.

Now let’s open that box. The Poco F2 Pro comes with a 30W charger, a USB cable and a complimentary case.

The Pocophone F1 was Xiaomi’s first go at a flagship with a midrange price and it was unbelievable value at the time. We expected a Snapdragon 855/855+ powered Poco F2 to arrive in 2019, but Xiaomi had their hands full with the Redmi K20 Pro and its Mi 9T Pro doppelganger. So here we are in 2020, Poco’s sabbatical is over an the Poco F2 Pro is poised to top any list of affordable flagship-grade phones around.

The Pocophone formula is very much the same as two years ago – put in the fastest chipset (for Android that’s the Snapdragon 865), cram in as many flagship-worthy specs, a good design and slap a reasonable price on it – in this case €500 if you pick a 6/128GB model (€100 more for a 8GB/256GB version).

The Poco F2 Pro is actually a rebadged Redmi K30 Pro, but seeing how only China gets the K-series phone that hardly matters for most. The phone is built around a 6.67-inch Super AMOLED screen and has a motorized pop-up 20MP selfie camera. On the back you get a 64MP main camera, while inside the 4,700mAh battery supports 30W charging.

The affordable flagships also share the same styling. Our Poco F2 Pro is the Cyber Grey model and it looks nice and premium. We’d recommend using it with the supplied case, as it’s a very slippery phone.

The Poco F2 Pro unsurprisingly runs smooth thanks to the combination of a Snapdragon 865 chipset, UFS 3.1 storage and MIUI 11. But we can’t help but lament the lack of any sort of high-refresh rate on the screen – a 90Hz panel would have made this device all the more tempting, but then again it would have pushed the price even higher.

The Poco F2 Pro looks promising. We expect good results from the camera (its 5MP macro is especially interesting – more on that in the review), great battery life and solid display scores. Stay tuned for our full review.

Special thanks to GearBest for providing the review unit.