Poco F4 long-term review

Display resolution, brightness, quality

The Poco F4's screen is flat, since it launched in an era when mid-rangers didn't really get curved screens, for obvious cost-cutting reasons. Although its chipset doesn't let us call this a flagship killer, those too generally come with flat displays. And the resolution is the same 1080p+, which we'd still wager no sane person can, in real life, without magnification, differentiate from 1440p+. In other words, we don't think the resolution will ever be an issue for you if you go with this phone.

We can say a similar thing for brightness, as this panel has an impressive four-digit maximum level according to our tests, which is not something seen very often at this price point. To put it into perspective, it's 40% brighter than the Poco F3's screen in our tests, and that's one of those commendable upgrades that are hard to spot if you only look at spec sheets.

Minimum brightness is fine, too, although it's on the fence where even a little more could be too much for a lot of people when using the phone in pitch darkness. Having Dark mode on definitely helps not get a retina-searing feeling, but we wish MIUI would incorporate Google's Extra Dim feature sooner, rather than later. That would allow for fine tuning of the minimum level, and we're sure everyone would be able to find their perfect spot. Maybe that's coming in MIUI 14? We hope so.

Throughout our time with the Poco F4, we found the auto brightness algorithm generally decent, although by no means among the best we've experienced recently. And that's because it has a tendency to always keep the screen brighter than it should be for a given level of ambient lighting. It's almost like the auto brightness is set up to constantly advertise the high brightness capabilities of the screen to everyone around you. Joking aside, this meant we had to constantly do manual adjustments for the first week or two of using the phone. Those got remembered as they should be, and after that, it was all smooth sailing in that regard.

Display settings

We also found that the phone was rather slow to react when we went from a bright place to a dimmer one, sometimes taking almost a minute to lower the brightness. It's not the same the other way round, though - aided in part by the fact that it has an extra ambient light sensor on its back, it reacts very quickly to going from dim surroundings to brighter ones. Note that if you like your screens incredibly bright at all times, you'll love what auto brightness is doing here right out of the box.

Quality-wise, the panel is very good too. The default Vivid color profile is very accurate to the DCI-P3 color space, albeit with blue-tinted whites and grays, while Original color reproduces sRGB to a T. Confusingly, there's an Advanced settings option which lets you manually specify P3 or sRGB, which seems very redundant to us.

Color scheme settings

Since most content on the internet is still sRGB, we went with Original color and Warm for the color temperature, as whites were still a bit too blue to our eyes. The good thing though is that there's ample room for customization of the color profile to your heart's content.

Reading mode, Always-on display

And speaking of that, MIUI's Reading mode remains by far the most customizable blue light filter in the mobile world, with an order of magnitude more options on offer than what its competitors give you. Aside from the Classic mode, with its color temperature slider, which is similar to every other blue light filter out there, you also get the textured effect Paper mode, complete with an extra texture slider too, and options to go for 'full colors', desaturated 'light colors', or black and white. Naturally, there's also a scheduling feature if you want this to go live at sunset and turn off at sunrise, or you can set custom hours.

Reading mode settings

Finally, on the display-related customization options front, the Always-on display is also among the most flexible out there, with a lot of stuff you can have just right. We're talking text, analog and digital clocks, kaleidoscopes and other backgrounds, scheduling, and setting whether you want it to be truly always on or just appear for ten seconds after you tap the screen. We used to be huge fans of the former yet recently, we're gravitating more towards the latter, but of course, you may have different ideas, and the point here is that you can surely find some setting combination to suit your tastes.

Always-on display settings

Refresh rate

The Poco F4 has a 120 Hz refresh rate screen, but it's by default set to dynamically adjust based on usage. If you want it to be at 120 Hz more often, you need to switch to Custom mode and then pick 120 Hz. This doesn't make everything run at that level all the time, mind you, since it goes down to 60 Hz when showing static images, as well as for video playback. There are also some apps that are capped at this rate, and when showing the Always-on display, the refresh rate goes to 30 Hz.

Refresh rate settings

Overall, it's a decent system but obviously has nowhere near the flexibility that an LTPO panel would provide. Then again, the whole point of that is to save battery, and as you'll see in the relevant section, the Poco F4 has great endurance as it is. More importantly, despite the switching to lower refresh rates, the phone never felt hindered, it never felt like its screen couldn't go past 60 Hz, for example. Having only a few refresh rate steps and not going more dynamic is probably what made this screen cheap enough to be included in this handset, and we can't condemn the decision of going with it - it has amazing brightness for the price, and it's very good quality too.

Performance, smoothness

The Poco F4 is probably the smoothest phone we've ever used, of those powered by the Snapdragon 865/865+/870 triplets. That said, it can't compete in this regard with the newer SoCs. The differences aren't huge, but they are there, and they are noticeable. The Snapdragon 870 is getting pretty old these days, and yet it still allows for smoothness to feel almost on par with its successors for most casual usage scenarios on the Poco F4.

Where it really falls down is when the Play Store is updating some apps, and you try to do anything else at the same time. You'll see choppiness that is simply not present on a phone with a newer chipset but is reminiscent of what happens on devices with various Snapdragon 600-series mid-range SoCs, although the extent of the choppiness on those is heightened.

Performance-wise, the phone is in a very similar boat. It can handle most things you throw at it, but heavy multitasking with heavy apps will get to a point where it starts to feel choppy. Likewise, with casual games versus big, heavy titles. It's still probably better at all of this stuff than any dedicated mid-range chip because it was the top dog in its day, but it can't really live up to the ones that came after it.

And that's perfectly fine - if you approach this handset as a mid-ranger with a better than average SoC, which is basically what it is at this point. If you come from the other direction and think of it as a flagship killer with performance on par or incredibly close to that of current flagships - it won't deliver. Expectations are important.

Battery life, charging

Unlike some other high-end chipsets from Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 870 never had any issues with battery life, and it still doesn't. In fact, we got some great results from the Poco F4's decidedly not very impressively sized 4,500 mAh cell capacity. These numbers are on par with a lot of devices using 5,000 mAh batteries, which is a testament to the 870's efficiency.

On an average day, we could get about 6 to 7 hours of screen-on time with our use case (detailed below). That's above-average performance for sure, which we'd call great, but not record-shattering. Still, it's impressive, given the capacity the phone has to work with. Our best-ever result was 8 hours and 46 minutes of screen on time with 22% of the battery still remaining, but this was an outlier, keep that in mind.

Battery life snapshots from different days

We never saw under 6 hours (if you factor in the remaining battery capacity at the time the screenshots were taken), and we'd go as far as to say 7 hours is easily achievable on a regular basis with a usage scenario close to ours. This is better battery life than we got from the Poco F4 GT, which has a slightly larger 4,700 mAh cell.

Our use case involves 12-17 hours off the charger each day, with mostly Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, about half an hour to an hour on 5G, location always on, and about half an hour of navigation via Waze, Bluetooth always on and an hour or two of listening to podcasts or music via TWS earbuds, and an hour of phone calls via TWS earbuds too.

Obviously, if your personal use case is much more demanding (say, spending a lot of time on mobile data where the signal isn't great), then your screen on time numbers won't be as high as ours. Conversely, if you are a lighter user than this reviewer, you'll get more.

One of the very few upgrades in the F4 compared to the F3 is the charging capacity, which went up to 67W from 33W. This means going from zero to full in 38 minutes. That's still nothing to scoff at, but other devices from the same stable, like the Poco F4 GT, manage to impress even more with 17 minutes, thanks to 120W support.

That phone is in a higher price tier, too, so we're not saying the F4 should have gone as high, but this is definitely going to be an important differentiating feature for its successor if it can pull it off. There's nothing that comes close to the peace of mind you get knowing it takes less than 20 minutes to fully charge your phone. And yes, 38 minutes isn't all that much either, but it's not as impressive as it used to be anymore. Unless you're coming to this from an Apple or Google device, in which case it's probably going to be mind-blowing in comparison.