Poco M4 Pro/Redmi Note 11T 5G review

Display

The Poco M4 Pro 5G packs a 6.6-inch IPS LCD screen of 2,400 x 1,080 pixels. It has a small punch-hole to make way for the selfie camera and is protected with a Gorilla Glass 3 sheet against scratches and cracks. The phone also arrives with a thin plastic film for additional display protection, but it's so cheap and impossible to clean, so we peeled that off immediately.

The Poco M4 Pro 5G display supports a dynamic 90Hz refresh rate, DCI-P3 color space and offers a 240Hz touch sampling rate. The Poco M3 Pro 5G also had a 90Hz screen, but it had a slower 180Hz touch sampling and lesser sRGB coverage.

There is no HDR support whatsoever, not that we expected such a thing.

Xiaomi has listed the screen's expected typical brightness as 450 nits. We measured 410 nits when controlling the brightness manually and 510 nits when the sunlight mode kicks in. In both cases, we captured deep blacks, which made for an excellent contrast ratio of 1500:1.

The minimum brightness we measured at point white was just 1.3 nit!

The MIUI for Poco offers two Refresh Rate options - High (90Hz) and Standard (60Hz). The High setting is advertised as dynamic - it should auto-switch between 50Hz, 60Hz and 90Hz depending on the shown content.

The UI is supposed to be drawn at 90fps for scrolling and kept at 50fps when static. The same goes for other static content across compatible apps. 60Hz should be used in games and streaming/local video playback. Unfortunately, we cannot confirm this as the integrated Refresh Rate indicator always shows 90Hz, even when a static image is shown. The only exceptions are 60Hz for the file manager, games, and some video apps (Mi Video, Netflix).

Note that we cannot be sure that the screen is not working as advertised. There is a chance that MIUI and Android are miscommunicating things, and the refresh rate indicator could be displaying wrong numbers.

Refresh rate • Color options

One of the screen updates over the Poco M3 Pro 5G includes expanded colors - the M4 Pro 5G display now supports DCI-P3 color space. MIUI for Poco supports three different Contrast settings - Vivid (default, DCI-P3), Saturated (DCI-P3), and Standard (sRGB).

In the default Vivid mode, we noticed a noticeable blue tinge, and the colors aren't that accurate, though punchy. The same goes for the Saturated option. The Standard color has good accuracy within the sRGB color space, and we captured an average deltaE of 3.

Finally, the Poco M4 Pro 5G supports Widevine L1 DRM out of the box, and you will be able to enjoy streaming content at the maximum Full HD resolution.

Battery life

The Poco M4 Pro 5G has the same large battery as the M3 Pro 5G - a 5,000 mAh cell. It now supports 33W fast charging, an improvement over the 18W charging for the M3 Pro.

Quite expectedly, the Poco M4 Pro 5G aced our battery life test and scored similar results to the Poco M3 Pro 5G. It posted a 123-hours Endurance rating - the same as the Redmi Note 10 5G and Poco M3 Pro 5G. It did an outstanding job across all test scenarios - calls, web browsing, video playback and demonstrated decent standby performance.

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.

Charging speed

One of the major updates over the Poco M3 Pro 5G is the faster charging. Now, the new Poco M4 Pro 5G supports 33W fast charging and is advertised to achieve a full charge in 59 minutes.

The retail bundle contains the 33W charger and a proper 3A-rated USB cable, so you don't need to buy anything to enjoy the speedier battery charging.

So, we've plugged our dead Poco M4 Pro 5G into its original charger, and it recharged 54% of the battery in half an hour.

30min charging test (from 0%)

Higher is better

• Realme 7 Pro
  94%
• Xiaomi Mi 10T Lite 5G
  68%
• Realme 7 5G
  57%
• Poco M4 Pro 5G
  54%
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro
  50%
• Poco M3 Pro 5G
  33%
• Realme 8 5G
  29%
• Xiaomi Redmi 10
  26%
• Samsung Galaxy A22 5G
  23%

Poco advertises a full charge in 59 minutes. We got ours in 67 minutes, which is in the ballpark. The battery charging is often affected by ambient and battery temperatures, as well as network connection and background services such as automatic app updates. Still, 67 minutes is a great result for a budget device!

Time to full charge (from 0%)

Lower is better

• Realme 7 Pro
  0:37h
• Xiaomi Mi 10T Lite 5G
  0:58h
• Realme 7 5G
  1:06h
• Poco M4 Pro 5G
  1:07h
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro
  1:21h
• Poco M3 Pro 5G
  2:00h
• Xiaomi Redmi 10
  2:13h
• Realme 8 5G
  2:20h
• Samsung Galaxy A22 5G
  2:29h

It seems the Poco M4 Pro 5G does not support reverse wired charging.

Speakers

The Poco M4 Pro 5G has two standalone speakers on its top and bottom sides behind two dedicated grilles - an upgrade over the M3 Pro 5G and its single speaker. The top stereo speaker also acts as an earpiece - the reason why sound is coming from both the front and the top grilles.

Top speaker • Bottom speaker

The bottom speaker is more powerful than the top one, but when playing music or video, the output seems well balanced.

The speakers scored a Very Good mark on our loudness test. The audio quality is not that good - while we can hear bass and the high notes are well presented, there is a serious lacking in mid-tones. Still, for a budget offer, we liked what we heard, and most people will be happy with the stereo sound and the audio.

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.