Poco F5 Pro review

Flagship-level 120Hz OLED panel

The Poco F5 and F5 Pro share mostly the same display specs, but the latter has a higher 1440 x 3200px resolution in the same 6.67-inch diagonal. The OLED panel also features 12-bit color depth, 120Hz refresh rate, high-frequency 1,920Hz PWM for less strain on your eyes and last but not least; it supports HDR10+ and Dolby Vision content. That's a flagship-grade feature set right there.

Our tests show that the F5 Pro's display is top-tier, not just on paper. In manual mode, the screen reached 520 nits, and in Auto mode, the maximum brightness shot up to 1,059 nits. This is in line with the advertised 1,000 nits peak brightness. According to the OEM's specs, the screen can also reach 1,400 nits when watching HDR-enabled content.

Color accuracy in the default mode isn't great, though, as the panel produces blue-ish whites and grays. Opting for the so-called Original color mode fixes that and posts an impressive average dE2000 of just 0.8. That's near-perfect color accuracy. The maximum deviation was also pretty low, just 1.6. That's against the sRGB color space.

HRR control

The high refresh rate control is quite simple but effective. Leaving the display untouched for a while will bring down the refresh rate to 60Hz to save energy and will shoot up to 120Hz when you start interacting with the screen again. That's the standard behavior in the auto mode.

We haven't noticed any incompatibility issues and the most commonly used apps saturated the full 120Hz. However, if you find some of the apps you use running at 60Hz, you can always force 120Hz refresh rate, as MIUI allows you to set a refresh rate limiter on per app basis. Unfortunately, that would turn off the automatic refresh rate switching.

Battery life

The Poco F5 Pro offers a slightly above-average battery capacity of 5,160 mAh - a significant bump coming from the Poco F4 GT. Battery life, on the other hand, is solid though the web browsing time could be better.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating denotes how long the battery charge will last you if you use the device for an hour of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. More details can be found here.

Compared to similarly priced options, the Poco F5 Pro is doing just fine. The overall score is often higher than the alternatives in the same price bracket, but it's hard to ignore the web browsing runtime, which is lower than most in the category.

Video test carried out in 60Hz refresh rate mode. Web browsing test done at the display's highest refresh rate whenever possible. Refer to the respective reviews for specifics. To adjust the endurance rating formula to match your own usage patterns check out our all-time battery test results chart where you can also find all phones we've tested.

Charging speed

The Poco F5 Pro uses the supplied wired 67W fast charger but can also be wirelessly charged at 30W. And while the 67W charging is adequate for the Poco F5's class, it doesn't seem to be competitive enough in the Poco F5 Pro's price category, even if we don't take the Realme GT Neo3 150W into consideration since it's an outlier. As it's usually the case, only Samsung's and Google's competitors are at the bottom of the chart.

Speakers

The Poco F5 features stereo speakers with the usual down-facing grille, while the left one has two openings - one for the earpiece and one on top of the frame. Sound seems to come out from both grilles.

To our surprise, the Poco F5 Pro's loudspeakers are not as loud as on the Poco F5, earning it a "Good" score with -26.2 LUFS. The sound quality isn't impressive either, but you do get a bit more bass out of the F5 Pro compared to the F5. The vocals and the highs sound clean enough, even at higher volumes. But when stacked against the competition, there are many better-sounding options.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.