Poco F7 Ultra review

6.67-inch OLED with QHD resolution

The Poco F7 Ultra's display is similar in most ways to the one on the F6 Pro - it could very well be the exact same panel with minor tweaks here or there. That means a 6.67-inch panel with 1,440x3,200px resolution for a pixel density of 526ppi. It's an OLED unit with a 120Hz maximum refresh rate, up to 3,840Hz PWM dimming, 12-bit color depth (68B colors), and Dolby Vision support - not bad, Poco, not bad.

The phone's press materials promise up to 1,800nits of brightness in high brightness mode and up to 3,200nits of momentary local peaks. Under our standard test conditions, we got 1,506nits - plenty bright and an improvement over the F6 Pro (yes, that's the one obvious tweak compared to the old model).

With the adaptive brightness turned off, we were looking at 792nits when maxing out the slider with the Sunlight mode enabled (594nits with it disabled). Excellent numbers across the board.

Refresh rate

The setting for refresh rate in the menu is typical Xiaomi - there's a 'Default' (full auto) mode and two Custom modes (120Hz and 60Hz ceilings). Since it's not an LTPO panel, there's not a whole lot of adaptiveness to the behavior either way - in Default and Custom 120Hz modes you can count on it to switch down to 60Hz when idling to preserve battery, but that's about it. We never saw a 90Hz mode in action and we didn't get anything below 60Hz.

There's a small but potentially significant difference between the auto and 120Hz modes in that the 120Hz mode allows you to set per-app refresh rate values. You can, hence, try to force some apps and games to use high refresh rates or alternatively limit others at 60Hz to save power. When it comes to games, we had a relatively hiccup-free run with our usual selection of titles - the phone maintained a 120Hz refresh rate and the in-house gaming utility reported fps numbers well above the 60fps mark.

Streaming and HDR

The F7 Ultra supports all major HDR standards, including HDR10+ and, more importantly, Dolby Vision. YouTube served our Poco HDR content, as did Netflix, which reported HDR10 and Dolby Vision compliance. The Widevine L1 certification ensures high-res video playback of DRM-protected content.

Xiaomis tend to be pretty solid at implementing the Android Ultra HDR standard for photos. The Poco F7 Ultra also plays nicely with compliant metadata-enhanced images in Google Photos, Chrome, and the in-house gallery, delivering the characteristic local highlight boost that the OLED tech brings.

Poco says the F7 Ultra has a VisionBoost D7 Chipset - a dedicated piece of hardware that's meant to improve visuals in gaming and video playback. It mostly works under the hood (in the sense that it's not abundantly clear what and when it does), though there's a toggle in the display settings for the video enhancement functionality, called Dual-core visuals.

Poco F7 Ultra battery life

The Poco F7 Ultra uses a 5,300mAh silicon carbon battery - you can view that as an upgrade over the F6 Pro's 5,000mAh capacity if that's how you think of the lineup's progression. 5,300mAh isn't a lot these days - it's more than a few potential competitors but others pack 6,000mAh cells - so let's call it average in terms of capacity.

The Poco does a reasonably efficient job of converting this battery capacity into actual use. The web browsing and video playback times are solid, the voice call result is very good, and it's only in gaming that's a bit behind the curve.

Our new Active Use Score is an estimate of how long the battery will last if you use the device with a mix of all four test activities. You can adjust the calculation based on your usage pattern using the sliders below. You can read about our current battery life testing procedure here. For a comprehensive list of all tested devices so far, head this way.

Charging speed

The Poco F7 Ultra is specced to support 120W charging using Xiaomi's proprietary adapters. Our unit arrived with one inside the box, but you should know not to expect to see one in your package if you're shopping in the EU.

Using that 120W adapter, we clocked a full charge from flat at 30 minutes, with the battery indicator showing 60% at the 15-minute mark. It's ever so slightly slower than the F6 Pro's result, but still a solid showing. We had a 90W Xiaomi adapter to try on the F7 Ultra as well, and that was only marginally slower in our testing so you'd be fine getting that adapter too if it's cheaper or easier to find.

Without going into very extensive testing, we also tried our luck with a third-party 100W Power Delivery adapter (PPS support up to 80W - 16V/5A). That took 57 minutes to get the phone to 100% (59% at the half-hour check point). Do know that your mileage will vary depending on the exact PPS profiles your charger supports.

The Poco F7 Ultra also supports wireless charging - only the second phone from the brand to have that after the F5 Pro from 2023. And it's not just any wireless charging, either - it could go as high as 50W (with proprietary peripherals, of course). There's no mention of Qi 2 support in the press materials so don't expect magnetic attachment or alignment.

The usual Hyper OS provisions for extending the lifespan of the battery are available in settings. You can limit the fast charging, you can enable Smart charging (the phone charges up to 80% and then waits for the final top-off just before you typically use it, based on your usage patterns), or you can just set a hard cap on things at 80% in all situations by enabling the Battery protection toggle.

Speaker test

The F7 Ultra has a stereo speaker setup of the usual kind - one bottom-firing unit and an earpiece that's also a speaker. Somewhat outside the Xiaomi norm is the strict channel separation - each speaker only plays its own track, without an attenuated version of the opposite track. We don't necessarily find one approach better than the other - it's just an observation.

Bottom speaker • Top speaker/Earpiece

In our testing, the F7 Ultra earned a 'Very Good' rating for loudness - essentially on the same level as the competition. It's not the bassiest of the bunch, but it's got decent lows still, plus some of the least in-your-face mids - we'd call it very nicely balanced, if that hadn't almost entirely been stripped of meaning.

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.