Poco F4 long-term review

Conclusion

The Poco F4 is a mid-ranger with an SoC that smokes all the other mid-rangers out there. The Poco F4 is a flagship killer with an older than expected SoC, thus taking a performance hit compared to what you'd want from such a model. Which of these statements rings true? Both, actually. Thanks to the choice of including the aging, but top of the line in its heyday Snapdragon 870, it's hard to call the F4 a mid-ranger, since no other device in that category can hold a candle to its performance.

On the other hand, it seems like a stretch to call it a flagship killer, since those have always delivered top notch performance, and the Snapdragon 870, while still fine for most day-to-day tasks and definitely a step above any mid-range chipset ever made, isn't exactly high-end anymore either. So that's what you need to contend with most. If you want performance that's better than what a mid-range smartphone can offer but don't need it to be flagship-level, then the Poco F4 is just the phone for you.

Unless you already own a Poco F3, in which case it doesn't really make a lot of sense to upgrade - you get the same chipset, after all, and the improvement in charging time is welcome, but it's also exactly 14 minutes as advertised by the company (and 18 minutes as tested by us). That definitely doesn't warrant getting a new phone in our book, no matter how much we love ever faster charging. The screen is 40% brighter, and that may make a difference in your day-to-day life, if you find the F3's too dim. But otherwise, there isn't much to differentiate these phones, despite the fact that they were launched 15 months apart.

With that in mind, you might expect us to recommend getting an F3 (if you can still find one) instead of the F4, but the prices are so similar even today that we don't think it's worth it. The F4 has a real shot at running Android 13 someday, while with the F3 that's less of a given, considering Poco's track record on issuing such updates. And speaking of updates, definitely don't expect many of them if you buy a Poco. They are few and far between, and if you get lucky not to have any bugs that's fine (and was the case for us throughout our use of the F4). If the current software does have annoying issues, you'll be waiting multiple months for those to get fixed.

That's the price you pay for the affordability of these devices compared to the competition, so we'd look at all of this as a matter of what you want to prioritize - software updates at the expense of performance and especially smoothness (Samsung), or performance, smoothness, and a generally lower price (Poco). MIUI itself is, in our opinion, in dire need of a new coat of paint, but if you haven't used it recently you're more likely to find it refreshing and enjoy its liberal use of animations throughout.

The Poco F4's screen, aside from being bright, is also high quality, its speakers are good if not mind-bogglingly so, and battery life has been great, owing to the lesser requirements of the chipset at least in part, no doubt. We got better endurance from the F4 than from the F4 GT which has a marginally bigger battery, but also a notoriously hungrier SoC. It wasn't orders of magnitude better, just a bit, but still. Charging in less than 40 minutes is definitely going to be shocking for people who've only used iPhones and/or Pixels, and a nice improvement for those who previously had a Samsung.

Camera-wise the Poco F4 is good during daytime, with both its main sensor (now aided by OIS) as well as the ultrawide, which was a nice surprise. Don't expect its photos to be on par with the main camera, however. But for what it is, an 8 MP sensor, it delivers pretty good results. At night the main one continues to churn out respectable shots, while the ultrawide shows its limits.

The Poco F4's design may be rather bland, but that also means it's easy for it to blend into its surroundings and not stand out too much, which a lot of people may prefer. The value proposition of this phone is really weird, though. It's got a ton of pluses compared to a lot of the competition, but at the same time it's incredibly similar to its predecessor. This probably just goes to show what an outstanding deal the Poco F3 was when it came out.

Clearly, the same can't be said about the F4, since it's hovering at around the same price, with the same chipset, coming out more than a year later. But the F4 is also not a bad deal, even today - you get the basics covered pretty well, and the only thing you're really missing from a flagship killer type device is a little bit of extra performance.

And yet, the F4 is the smoothest phone we've ever reviewed long-term that's powered by the Snapdragon 870, and in 90 to 95% of the time it doesn't feel lesser than a flagship. Only when you go nuts with gaming or multitasking, or when the Google Play Store is installing or updating apps, will you notice that the SoC inside isn't top shelf anymore, even though it used to be.

Hopefully this review has drawn a comprehensive enough image of what the F4 is like to use in late 2022 so that you can make an educated decision on whether to buy it or not. It's not perfect, but it's better than any mid-ranger, and close to a flagship killer while cheaper. That's a hard combo to pull off, and yet it does.