Poco F7 Ultra review

Android 15 and HyperOS 2

The Poco F7 Ultra runs Android 15, with a layer of Xiaomi HyperOS on top (with 'for POCO' added here and there for good measure). The company promises 4 major OS version updates in the future, while the security patch coverage should be 6 years.

HyperOS as seen on the F7 Ultra is very much like what we got on the Xiaomi 15s recently. The usual version continuity can be observed and the general sense of being in a familiar place if you've used a Xiaomi or a Poco in recent times. A few of the icons are Poco-specific, but that's about all the Poco-ness. The full suite of new Xiaomi AI tricks is on board as well.

HyperOS 2.0 on the Poco F7 Ultra

The Poco F7 Ultra gives you the option for an app drawer, but you can also choose to have everything on the homescreens. Some software branches don't let you have the app drawer - more often on Pocos of the past, but we appreciate seeing that option here. The third, "Lite" UX option that makes icons bigger and things a bit more accessible seems to be missing though.

HyperOS 2 has separate Notifications and Control center pages with no option for a joint interface for the two. The homescreens support apps and widgets, as well as two flavors of large folders. The -1 homescreen can be Google Discover, but also Xiaomi's App Vault (that last one was missing on the Xiaomi 15).

More HyperOS 2.0

Then there's the AI functionality, and the Poco doesn't appear to be missing anything we saw on the Xiaomi flagships.

Sure enough, there's Google Gemini. You can ask Gemini a lot of stuff to do and even make entire conversations. You can also have it create images for you. Circle to Search is available system-wide as well.

Gemini • Gemini • Circle to Search

Beyond the generic Gemini stuff, there are plenty of in-house AI features. They're all neatly organized and bundled together in the Xiaomi HyperAI menu in Settings for explanation purposes. You still have to access the features themselves from their respective apps and locations, but it is very convenient to actually have a central location where everything is nicely laid out.

AI stuff

The Notes app can transform text in many ways. You can do translation, proofreading, summary and AI layout. The gallery app can do object deletion as well as generation for the sake of background expansion and similar tasks.

The Recorder app can do automatic transcription with speaker detection and separation, and you can translate the transcriptions. You can enable system-wide AI subtitles for multimedia consumption. There is also an AI interpreter that can do both face-to-face translation and call translation.

More AI stuff

There's a whole lot of AI based image editing features in the gallery. There's an object/people remover, you can remove reflections, do content-aware expansion, or change how the sky looks in your shots.

AI image editing features

Performance and benchmarks

With the F7 Ultra, Poco is aiming high, and it’s trading blows with the big players when it comes to performance. Indeed, one of the F7 Ultra's key selling points and a major part of the reason for being named this way is its chipset - the Snapdragon 8 Elite. No last-gen flagship SoCs, no Dimensities - only the current Qualcomm best.

There are two memory configurations - a 12GB/256GB base version and a more Ultra-grade 16GB/512GB alternative. We wouldn't be surprised if only one of those will be available in certain places, and then there could be other versions depending on the region.

The F7 Ultra posted generally excellent numbers in our usual benchmarks, even if it wasn't the most Elite of showings - other phones with the same chipset had a bit of an advantage under most loads. Conversely, the Poco has the upper hand against non-Elite competitors like the OnePlus 13R (SD 8 Gen 3), the vivo X200 (D9400), or the Xiaomi 14T (D9300+).

Under prolonged load, it was a relatively standard steep decline in performance what we witnessed from the Poco. The CPU graph is perhaps slightly worse than average, while the 3DMark stress test may be a little above par - overall, not a standout showing, but not really a troubling one either.

CPU Throttling test • 3DMark Wildlife Extreme stress test