Poco M6 5G hands-on review

Software

The Poco M6 ships with MIUI 14 running on Android 13. The version of MIUI on Poco phones seems similar at first glance but has some differences. Most notably, the launcher is different as are the stock icons. The notification area is also different and instead of a separate notification and control center on Xiaomi phones, the UI here is reminiscent of older MIUI versions.

The M6, being a budget phone, also has a cut-down version of MIUI that the company reserves for its lower-end devices. It lacks certain animations and effects such as transparencies, which would take a greater hit on performance on these cheaper devices.

MIUI 14

That aside, the UI should be familiar to anyone who has used a Xiaomi or Poco phone in the past. It's reasonably customizable and you can download additional themes, wallpapers, ringtones, and fonts through the built-in theme store. However, the default Poco launcher does not support icon packs.

Unfortunately, all the downsides of MIUI are also present here. The Settings app can be a bit frustrating as most settings are not where you'd expect them to be if you're coming from any other Android phone and the search function doesn't work well. There are a bunch of duplicate apps such as two app stores, two image galleries, two file managers, and so on and you often cannot uninstall the spare.

Customization

But the bigger issue is bloatware, and the Poco M6 is chock full of them. We counted at least 18 third-party apps before accounting for clutter from Poco and Google. The app drawer out of the box looks like you've been using the phone for a year and not something you'd expect from a brand-new device. And when you open the company's own app store, you are prompted to download even more apps right away.

Then there is the issue of ads and notification spam. Many of the first-party apps from Poco can show ads and the option to disable them is buried deep within the settings. Almost all of the first-party apps will also bombard you with notification spam throughout the day in a way we rarely come across on devices from other brands.

Bloatware and notification spam

Ultimately, that's the experience you sign up for when you choose a Poco or Xiaomi phone and while things are less severe if you purchase the more expensive models, for budget devices like the Poco M6 things can be pretty dire unless you take out time to clean up all the bloatware and annoyances manually.

Performance

The Poco M6 runs on the MediaTek Dimensity 6100+ chip with an octa-core CPU. You get a choice of 4GB, 6GB, and 8GB LPDDR4X memory and 128GB and 256GB UFS 2.2 storage with microSD expansion. You can pick the storage you like but we would highly recommend avoiding the 4GB memory option in 2024. Our review unit had 8GB memory and 128GB storage.

Considering the budget nature of the phone, the performance on the Poco M6 wasn't too bad. The biggest detractor is the display, which routinely drops down to 60Hz in apps, making the phone feel choppier than it is. The apps where you get the full 90Hz run fine but they are few and far between. The phone feels reasonably responsive but once again we had the 8GB model and performance on the 6GB and especially the 4GB variants is going to be notably worse.

One good thing about having a low-power chipset is that the phone rarely even gets warm, let alone hot. Even when running games the skin temperature barely rose noticeably. Then again, this isn't a gaming phone and you shouldn't expect much in terms of gaming performance.