Poco F3 long-term review

Conclusion

The Poco F3 uses the traditional, time-tested 'flagship killer' formula to a T. That can be viewed as both a good thing since you pretty much know exactly what to expect, as well as a not-so-great thing, as there are definitely no surprises here. And after so many years of flagship killers left and right, perhaps it's finally time for them to grow up a bit and improve the areas where they have historically been lacking. Or not - maybe if that happens, they would compete too much, and too head-on, with the proper flagships each company makes, and that would mean bad things for overall profitability (and thus future R&D investments and innovations, indirectly).

All of this is to say that like every other good flagship killer before it, the Poco F3 does the performance aspect very, very well, even though it breaks with tradition in that it's not using the year's top of the line chipset. But that may be a blessing in disguise, given how the Snapdragon 888 has been rather iffy on the sustained performance/heat production metric. Also, the Snapdragon 870 may just be a rebranded 865++ or something like that, but for most tasks for most people, it's perfectly high-end even today.

Going hand-in-hand with the great performance is the Poco F3's perceived smoothness, a measure that's inevitably subjective, but while it's not the top performer, it comes really close to that, and at a literal fraction of the price. We wouldn't have expected more, but we weren't disappointed in any way either.

Battery life has also been very good, if not record-breaking (spot a trend here?), and for most people, we'd call this easily a 'one full day' phone, although it would go further than that only for those with the least demanding use cases. Still, endurance is pretty much on par with every good new flagship coming out this year, so that's something to celebrate.

Where things become less rosy is in the camera department, where all flagship killers usually take a shortcut. This is one of those areas that will be neglected in the service of hitting an attractive price point, and that's exactly the story here. The cameras on offer are decent, for lack of a better word, but don't really shine in any task.

The main camera, for example, is okay, but the slightly cheaper Redmi Note 10 Pro has a much better one, all things considered. Then again, compared to that phone, the Poco F3 is miles ahead in performance, so between these two, it's a tale of picking what your highest priority is - the better main camera and slightly better battery life in the Redmi, or the better performance and smoothness of the Poco. We've pretty much made the same point in our Conclusion of the Redmi Note 10 Pro's long-term review, and it still stands.

Next up, we have the screen, which is the other area where flagship killers have always been found wanting compared to more expensive offerings, and this is once again the case here. The Poco F3's display is fine, and that's about the best thing we can say about it. Unless you're really sensitive to glare and reflections, it will probably not disappoint you in day-to-day use (even if some squinting is required to see it in bright sunlight), but it won't impress either.

It's a decent panel, and the high refresh rate is very welcome (especially considering that last year's Poco F2 Pro skimped on that) and aids in the perceived smoothness. But overall, the quality of this panel is very proportional to the price you're paying for the phone, it's not really punching up in any way.

This is basically the story of the Poco F3 in a nutshell. There are some other more minor things to mention too. On the plus side, the fingerprint sensor is amazingly fast and accurate if you set it up correctly, the speakers are perfectly adequate for the job in most scenarios, and the vibration motor is slightly above what you'd expect in quality at this price, but not much more so.

On the flip side, the proximity sensor seems to be of the software kind, and it's just really bad software at that, resulting in a lot of frustrating accidental face-touches while on calls if anyone even does voice calls without headphones anymore. Speaking of headphones, the 3.5 mm jack is gone, being relegated to the even cheaper Poco series like the X and M families, at least for now. Who knows when, but we'd wager its disappearance from there is inevitable also.

The software doesn't really fall into either "plus" or "minus" categories neatly because MIUI has pretty much always been polarizing. And while we get that about earlier versions, we're sort of baffled by why a lot of people still seem to hate it overall. Yes, it's a pretty big design departure from anything 'stock'-like, but it has its own design language, and at least that has some internal logic that's (almost) never broken.

It also comes with a lot of customization options and a Settings menu that's comprehensive while only slightly random-seeming in its order. This reviewer doesn't love MIUI, but likes it very much and enjoys the small touches popping up recently, like the nudge vibrations here and there and the seemingly growing attention to detail of the team behind it.

That said, it's not perfect, and perhaps the biggest objective point of contention with it is the update cadence, which is best defined as "not great" even for flagships, not to mention cheaper phones. The Poco F3 did receive the update to MIUI 12.5 Enhanced while we were using it for this review, and that new software version does deliver on its promise to make everything smoother and more bug-free. But the security update is old and will probably never be current.

So, in the end, the Poco F3 is a flagship killer through-and-through. Nothing less, but also nothing more. It is, thankfully and perhaps surprisingly, cheaper than its predecessor, the F2 Pro, and that fixes one of the problems people seemed to have with that one. It also has a high refresh rate screen, which rectifies another of the F2 Pro's failings, but the cameras seem slightly worse, the motorized pop-up selfie camera is gone, and thus the F3 doesn't have any real issue that stands out in any way.

But perhaps that's the point. This is a workhorse phone you get for not a lot of money to do most of what devices 3-4 times more expensive do, and it's a very reliable day-to-day companion if you can live with its downsides like the average-at-best camera quality, proximity sensor issues, and just how little it stands out from the crowd of lookalike devices we have these days. At its current prices, it's definitely a best-buy unless you want a better main camera and are willing to sacrifice performance to get that in this price segment.