Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro Review: Mixed value

The Poco F6 Pro is exceptionally good value for money… except when it isn’t, leaving me with very mixed feelings about it.

Score: 3/5

In this review

Poco F6 Pro Specifications
Poco F6 Pro Design
Poco F6 Pro Camera
Poco F6 Pro Performance
Poco F6 Pro Battery
Poco F6 Pro Conclusion

For a very long time, if you wanted a Xiaomi phone in Australia, you could have one, but it would be a grey market import, complete with the potential challenges around network compatibility and warranty support if anything went wrong or broke. That’s now changed with a local supplier picking up the distribution rights for Xiaomi phones under the name Xiaomi Tech, starting with select Redmi models, and now expanding into a couple of Xiaomi’s Poco models, the Poco F6 and today’s review subject, the Poco F6 Pro.

It’s a genuinely interesting phone, providing some best in-class features, while skipping out on others entirely. The resultant phone will certainly be decent value for some buyers who favour speed above all else, though some of what the phone does really left me either annoyed or simply wanting more.

Also, I can’t ignore that the Poco F6 Pro can be had somewhat cheaper from international sellers than we’re seeing here. Xiaomi Tech’s contention there is that Australian models have specific features like local warranty, the inclusion of NFC and full support for Australian 5G bands, which some international models may omit.

End of statement. On with the review.

Design

The Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro is built around a 6.67 inch 120Hz capable AMOLED screen with a resolution of 3200x1440, nice and sharp and also very bright, with a stated peak brightness of 4,000 nits, though that’s actually only typically 700 nits with brightness up to 1200 nits in high brightness mode. Numerical claims aside, visibility is very good, even in direct sunlight.

In Australia, the Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro is available in either black or white; the white model is the one Xiaomi Tech sent me for review. It has a pleasing pearl style finish topped with a rather dominating array of lenses sitting in a clear glass block.

Adding googly eyes to the Poco F6 Pro makes it look like it's quite happy about its glass lens hat.

The design is somewhat chunky, with thick metallic sides and a carrying weight of 209 grams, on the chubbier side for a smartphone. The challenge here is that it’s also somewhat slippery at the back, which makes it very easy to drop. Yes, I know that because it happened to me more than once while testing it.

My classic solution to that dilemma is a case, because I’m firmly of the belief that all phones deserve phone cases. Xiaomi does provide one in the box, but my goodness it’s a ugly beast. Maybe I’m a little too used to the clear cases that most manufacturers bundle in with phones, but one of the first steps I’d advise any Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro buyer to do would be to pick up a better looking case than this one. Thankfully that isn’t hard, with Amazon for example listing numerous options.

Controls are kept simple with power button and volume on the left hand side, with a rapid biometric fingerprint reader on the front display for unlocking. The Poco F6 Pro supports dual Nano SIM via a tray at the base of the phone, but there’s no onboard support for eSIM.

At $999, the Poco F6 Pro sits just below where I typically split out flagship and high mid-range phone pricing, and that’s a space where you can generally expect to see some level of lab-tested IP rated water and dust resistance.

The official Australian specifications don’t note a level of IP-rated water resistance, though some international sources suggest it might be IP54. Even if that’s the case, I’d be wary of letting the Poco F6 Pro get particularly wet.

Camera

At the $999 price point, you’re starting to tip up into the premium space, so you should expect premium camera performance from the Poco F6 Pro, right?

Well… maybe.

Some rather interesting choices were made when putting together the Poco F6 Pro’s camera array, some of which do play into its premium status, while others feel distinctly more mid-range at best.

At a technical level, around the back you’ll find a 50MP wide lens, 8MP ultrawide lens and 2MP macro lens… which can’t help but feel like a camera recipe from a mid-range circa 2022 smartphone, back when everyone had 2MP macro sensors of dubious viability to play with. At the front there’s a 16MP selfie camera.

That’s an interesting mix to put into a phone at $999, and the results I got from it were equally mixed.

At this price you can get phones with telephoto lenses, even if they’re just 2x telephoto, but that’s not a feature of the Poco F6 Pro. Instead you just get digital cropping, capped at 10x. That 10x cap is a sensible stop point, because even at that range it doesn’t produce particularly good photos.

Here’s an example ultra wide shot taken of the clock at Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building:

And the same shot taken with the primary lens, all still good:

2x digital zoom of the clock does well enough, all things considered:

But 10x zoom does not:

The other feature that you start to see at this price range is some serious effort put into low light photography, an area where mid-range and budget phones often struggle. Here the Poco F6 Pro does rather well, albeit via a lot of colour and exposure manipulation that can lead to uneven results.

To be specific, it’s estimating colours and oversaturating them to build out detail in shots, a route that Google used a lot with its earlier Pixel phones. That can work well at creating detail in lighting situations where it’s otherwise dim, but it can also lead to some really weird, almost crayon-like coloured in tones. As an example, while out taking photos for my upcoming iPhone 16 Pro Max review (and accompanying video), I also took a low light shot with the Poco F6 Pro. No, I'm not comparing those, they're in very different price brackets. But it still does show how it gets low light at a decent level, but not always realistic colour.

It can work to discern detail in darkened environments and create some interesting pictures, but they're not necessarily all that true to life. Here's the train tunnel at Town Hall in Sydney, mostly dark to the naked eye, but not to the Poco F6 Pro:

Properly grimy and interesting, but also with a slight colour cast as a result of the way the Poco F6 Pro has post-processed the image. 

There are other oddities in play here, too. I wasn’t expecting much from the 2MP macro sensor, because it’s a 2MP macro sensor and I’ve had my fill of fighting those on much cheaper phones than the Poco F6 Pro. Still, I tried to use the macro setting on the phone, only to find that it wasn’t in the regular phone camera app’s menu. Instead it’s hiding in the drop down settings for… reasons? I don’t get the UI choices made here at all, but rather predictably anyway, the results weren’t too much to get excited about.

Getting good macro photos can be challenging with the Poco F6 Pro

The good part here is that for regular photo shots the Poco F6 Pro is absolutely fine for purpose. At this price I’d probably lean towards something like the Pixel 8a, or a phone with a proper telephoto lens, but otherwise it’s fair value, but not the best available for this kind of money.

Poco F6 Pro Sample Photos

Performance

The Poco F6 Pro is built around a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, AKA “last year’s flagship processor of choice for Android phones”. For the Australian model it comes with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, but there’s no capability for microSD storage expansion. Internationally, there are also 12GB RAM/512GB and 16GB RAM/1TB variants of the Poco F6 Pro, but that’s not what we’re seeing here.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is a very solid choice for a processor, and that shows in CPU benchmark terms, where the Poco F6 Pro absolutely dominates a field of similarly priced handsets. Here’s how it compares:

It’s much the same story in GPU terms, where the Poco F6 Pro has a definite power advantage. It’s basically last year’s flagships at a less-than-flagship price, and that’s not bad at all. Here’s how the Poco F6 Pro compares using 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme benchmark:

That adds up to a phone that’s noticeably nippy and responsive with just about any application that you throw at it. The model supplied to me for review was running Android 14, with Xiaomi Tech promising 2 Android OS updates and 3 years of security updates, which isn’t entirely keeping track with the best you can get from the likes of Google or Samsung, really.

However, this is far from stock Android. Xiaomi applies its own “HyperOS” launcher on top of Android 14, and… it’s a lot to get used to, frankly. I am very much someone who prefers stock Android, but I totally get why many phones, and especially Chinese market origin phones have reworked launchers and their own suite of apps, because Google simply doesn’t operate at an apps level within the Chinese domestic market.

There’s a definite learning curve to working out where in HyperOS certain settings reside, or how to change off some of the predefined settings if (like me) you want to customise Android to your own liking. As with many phones of this type, you can also expect more than a few slightly confronting permissions questions to hit you if you’re using the stock apps as well.

Then there’s the preinstalled apps. Lots of phones do this, installing apps such as Booking.com (yes, it’s here too!), but typically we’re talking three to six apps at most.

The Poco F6 Pro has more than 20 apps it wants to install by default.

It’s not a stretch to say that I didn’t really want many of them beyond the idle curiosity of discovery. There’s a TikTok clone called Mi Video that collects your browsing data (such as it is) unless you explicitly opt out in its settings (and this isn’t clear upfront). There’s half a dozen junk Android puzzle games preinstalled, none of which I wanted in any way at all.

The Poco F6 Pro also has its own app store, and again, I get why that’s needed for a phone that works in a market where Google Play isn’t available at all, but I don’t want it constantly notifying me that I really should be installing Pokémon Go every single day.

Google Play is present on the Australian models, so you can install apps in the way that you’re used to, and you can also uninstall all the crapware, but I do feel like you really shouldn’t have to for a locally sourced model.

Battery

The Poco F6 Pro has a 5,000mAh sealed battery, absolutely dead on average for Android phones right now, though just a touch surprising given this is quite a heavy phone that feels like it might be accomodating even more. Still, smartphone battery life is more than just a matter of having a big battery -- it's what you do with it that counts.

Here, the Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro accounts for itself very well. First stop was my standard YouTube battery test, where I pitted it against the same crew of similarly priced competitors.

That's an excellent result for the Poco F6 Pro, and it's one that does translate to quite easy all-day battery life unless you hammer it really hard for hours.

The Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro supports fast charging… or possibly I should call that LUDICROUS SPEED fast charging, because it’s technically capable of up to 120W direct fast charging.

That’s blindingly fast… but with a big catch for Australian buyers. International models of the Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro do come with a 120W charger in the box, but in Australian retail model boxes, you won’t find a charger at all. Xiaomi Tech are selling a 67W dual charger through its website – they sent me one along with the Poco F6 Pro for the purposes of testing – but if you want one, you’ll have to add another $49.95 onto the cost of your order to do so.

That does sting somewhat. Sure, plenty of flagship and mid-range phones ship without a charger in the box, but typically they do so because there’s never a charger in the box, not because it’s not available just in some countries. The 120W charger is rated (as per the markings on the side) for 100v-240V operation, and as long as that’s legit, it would work from an Australian power source.

Of course, I’m me, so I went the extra step, grabbed an international plug adaptor and tested this out, and sure enough, it did work, with the Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro recognising it as a 120W charger to boot. It’s always possible it’s missing some Australian certification that I don’t know about, what with not being an electrician by trade, but still, this feels like we’re missing out for no readily apparent reason.

Speaking of missing out, at the $999 price point, it’s not uncommon to start seeing phones with wireless charging built in. The Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro has very fast charging (if you pay extra for a fast charger), but Qi or Qi2 wireless charging is notably absent.

Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro: Alex’s Verdict

It's been a while since I've been quite so conflicted about a smartphone. On the one hand, the performance of the Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro is superb for the money, easily besting the competition in benchmarks and delivering real-world app performance that will please any buyer. The display is really nice, the battery life is great and charging can be very fast.

Conversely, the cameras aren't quite where I'd want them to be at the Australian asking price, there's no eSIM and the HyperOS overlay and preinstalled apps are a bit of a nightmare to deal with. Charging can be very fast, and it would be for models not purchased in Australia, but if you want that you'll have to pay extra for a charger that's not quite as fast as the phone can handle... and even after asking them about it I'm still not clear why that's so.

Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro: Pricing and availability

The Xiaomi Poco F6 Pro retails in Australia for $999 outright.

Of course, it’s more complicated than that, because you can also get one online from international resellers (look, here’s an Amazon link) for in some cases several hundred dollars less, though those models may omit features found on the local models such as specific 5G band support or NFC – so check specifications carefully if buying that way!

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