Poco F6 review

Fully equipped 6.67-inch OLED panel

The Poco F6 uses largely the same screen from last year, but bumps up the resolution to 1220 x 2712px. The 6.67-inch diagonal is retained along with the 120Hz refresh rate and HDR10+ and Dolby Vision support.

Other notable features include 1920Hz PWM dimming for people sensitive to PWM; up to 2160Hz peak touch sampling rate (480Hz nominal) for a faster response during gaming; and improved accuracy and responsiveness when using the phone with wet fingers.

In our brightness test, the panel achieved 545 nits in manual mode, and that number shot up to 1,218 nits in auto mode. That's more than enough to provide a comfortable viewing experience outdoors.

Refresh rate

As usual, the variable refresh rate control is quite simple. There are three modes - 60Hz, 120Hz and Default (read, Auto). The latter dials down the refresh rate down to 60Hz on a static screen or when launching a video app, including YouTube. Interestingly, the screen can go down to 30Hz when AoD is on or on the lock screen.

Battery life

The Poco F6 is equipped with a standard 5,000 mAh battery, a somewhat big 6.67-inch OLED panel and a brand new Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 SoC. All these play a big role in the phone's battery life, along with the software, of course, but we are disappointed to see the F6 duo struggling to keep up with the competition in this regard.

The Poco F6's 10:36h Active Use Score is far from ideal and its web browsing and video runtimes are poor. This seems to be a trend - maybe Xiaomi is targeting this sort of battery life as none of their phones released this year stands out with its battery life compared to the competiton (the Xiaomi 14 being the sole exception).

Charging speed

The Poco F6's charging department gets some love this year, and the phone is now capable of 90W charging using Xiaomi's proprietary charger included in the box. And as you can see from the chart below, the device posts some impressive charging times.

You can charge more than half the battery in just 15 minutes, while a full charge takes a little over half an hour. That's enough to overtake pretty much all of its competitors and is neck and neck with Xiaomi's high-end solutions in terms of charging speed.

Keep in mind that there are two options in the Battery menu regarding charging. One of them enables the phone's full charging potential, while the other speeds up charging in the first couple of percentages. Or at least that's what we got from the descriptions. We ran our tests with both of these options enabled (Speed up charging and Boost charging).

Speakers

Just like the F6 Pro, the vanilla F6 relies on a hybrid speaker setup. There's one bottom-facing speaker and one that acts as an earpiece as well.

When it comes to loudness, the handset is just about average with -25.2 LUFS score, but that's enough to rate it as "Very Good".

We were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the audio. The Poco F6 seems to have a full and relatively clean sound. At higher volumes, the vocals tend to take a back seat, but the bass is very prominent throughout all volume ranges. It's definitely more pronounced than other solutions, including the Poco F6 Pro. The handset takes on the Galaxy A55 even, and one could argue that the F6 sounds better.

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.