Poco X3 NFC long-term review

Software version and updates

The Poco X3 runs MIUI 12 with Android 10 underneath, and that fact is a dead giveaway for how Xiaomi treats its phones in terms of software support. While all recent devices do get reasonably timely MIUI updates, which are the ones that add new features, when it comes to Android versions the affordable models are often stuck on older iterations for a very long time. Such is the case too for the X3, still on Android 10 even though Android 11 has been out for more than half a year.

An update to Android 11 will probably reach the Poco X3 at some point, but it's very unclear when. As for Android 12, who knows if that will ever make it to this device. That said, as mentioned above, most of the new features are delivered via MIUI updates, and Xiaomi is good at issuing those even for old phones.

Current software

Security updates are another matter entirely, and one in which Xiaomi seriously needs to up its game. Competitors such as Samsung have been constantly upping the ante by working on delivering these in a timely fashion even to midrangers, whereas the Poco X3 is still on the February 2021 security patch level. That's three months old at this point, and hopefully we'll see at least trimestrial security patches for this phone.

Launcher, Recents

MIUI 12 is pretty much a known entity by this point, for us as well as, we assume, for you. It's been out for a long time, and we've long-term reviewed a bunch of phones running it already. On the Poco X3 the experience is incredibly similar to that found on any other device running this version of Xiaomi's Android skin, with a few small differences here and there.

As all Poco devices, the X3 has the Poco Launcher built into the software, and not Xiaomi's nameless option - although that one has started to become very similar to the Poco Launcher in recent months, with the addition of an app drawer and auto-categorization of your apps. Those features obviously also exist in the MIUI for Poco version found on our X3 review unit. The Poco Launcher also defaults to round icons (which we much prefer), like Google, and not to the almost square-ish ones that MIUI comes with on other devices. There is support for third party icon packs, though, if you don't like the defaults.

Another thing that's been new to MIUI lately is the presence of Google's Feed to the left of the leftmost homescreen, replacing the Vault feature that was, at least for us, much less useful. Your opinion may differ, however, and unfortunately you can't get the Vault back. You can turn off the Google Feed, though, if it's not to your liking.

As usual in MIUI you can't simply tap on the brightness slider that shows up below the Quick Settings row and above the notifications, you have to swipe across it for whatever adjustment you intend to make. This is a minor usability niggle, but one that still doesn't make any sense to us.

Home screen, App drawer, Google Feed, Home screen settings

The Recents view is traditional MIUI fare, with two vertically-scrolling columns of apps presented side-by-side, albeit with an offset. On the Mi 10T Pro, as well as on other newer Xiaomi devices, you can now finally pick a horizontally scrolling list for Recents, but this unfortunately hasn't made it to the Poco X3 yet.

Hopefully it will, for those of us who, let's not say hate, but definitely don't love the way things are presented at the moment. Every other Android maker has opted for the horizontally scrolling list, and that looks better to us, so the option for it can't arrive soon enough.

Settings, Dark mode

The Settings menu is big and convoluted as always, and we're constantly thankful for the Search bar at the top. The System apps updater is still present, and it still only updates some of the system apps, while others get their new versions through the Play Store, and in all honesty we're done trying to understand this weird random behavior. Idiosyncratic? For sure. But hey, at least it's not an entire duplicate app store (cough... Samsung... cough).

Settings, System apps updater

There is of course a Dark mode, we'd be surprised if it was missing on a phone in 2021. Since the Poco X3 has an LCD screen, you're not really getting any of the battery savings that gives OLEDs (which have their pixels turn off entirely to 'show' black), but this theme still looks better to us than the default light one, so we set it and forgot it.

As is par for the course at this point in time, you can schedule the Dark mode to go live (and then turn off) when you want it to. And as Xiaomi has gotten us used to, you can force it onto apps that still don't have a dark theme of their own. We have done that for Facebook, while shuddering in disbelief at the fact that it still doesn't have a widely rolled out dark mode built-in, years after dark modes became a thing in the mobile world. That's just so... Facebook.

Dark mode settings

Little word of caution here, though - the forcing of the Dark mode onto third party apps is on by default for all of them, which is very bad behavior in our book from MIUI. Since this may result in weird visuals (especially for those apps which do have a dark theme to begin with), it should have been an opt-in thing, not opt-out. Oh, and you can't batch disable, you have to go through the list of apps one by one and disable it for the ones you want individually. Thankfully there's at least a search box at the top to make finding a specific app more convenient.

Control Center, gestures

Something that is opt-in is the new Control Center, which - just think of it as the iOS Control Center. It's... that. But on Android. So if that's the one iOS feature you've always wanted on your Android device, well, here you go. We like Android to feel like Android in use and not iOS, so we kept it off and went with the traditional route of Quick Settings toggles instead.

Xiaomi's gesture navigation system is still among the best out there. It works very well, we've had absolutely no issues with swipes whatsoever. As always, you swipe up for home, swipe up and pause for Recents, and swipe from the sides (on the bottom two thirds of the screen) to go back. Swiping from the side in the top third of the screen triggers an app's slide-out navigation drawer, if it happens to still have one.

Control center and gesture navigation settings

It's perfectly thought through and perfectly implemented. The Poco X3 even still has the quick app switching function - you do that by swiping from a side more than you would for the Back gesture. This is probably going to be replaced when (or if) Android 11 hits, if other Xiaomi phones running that version of the OS are any indication. You'll then need to swipe across the bottom of the screen to achieve the same purpose, but that's always been less reliable in our experience.

Software bugs

While we wouldn't call the current MIUI version that the Poco X3 runs riddled by bugs, there still are some weird behaviors we've spotted that we hope are bugs and not 'features'.

For example, if you get a notification, swipe down the notification pane and simply ignore said notification (not tapping on it, not dismissing it), and then swipe down the notification pane again, the aforementioned notification will be gone, and yet the icon of the corresponding app will still be seen in the status bar. This doesn't happen for all apps, but it happens for WhatsApp every single time and that did manage to annoy us a lot.

Next up, the DND mode simply doesn't work at all, in our experience. We usually set a specific time period for DND (for when we're asleep), and allow all calls to come through but no notification sounds. Despite that, every single notification sound was allowed to come through without a hitch. DND mode literally had one job, and it failed at it miserably.

Speaking of DND, the entire Settings section dedicated to it is incredibly confusingly laid out and even more confusing to use. We've had a ton of experience with MIUI lately so we know our way around it, but some new users may not. The fact that DND and Silent mode share some toggles, but then when you select one the settings become different - this is the type of thing we haven't seen on any other Android skin, and Xiaomi's engineers really need to work on the presentation here. We've never been confused by what a Silent/DND setting would do on any other Android skin, and yet with MIUI it always takes us a few minutes to remember the very unintuitve way in which everything is presented.

Next up, background process killing - a recurring topic whenever we discuss MIUI, unfortunately. The weirdest thing is that this is not tuned to the same level of aggressiveness for all Xiaomi / Poco / Redmi phones, in fact we're starting to feel like the cheaper the device, the more aggressive the system is at obliterating any background tasks. That's fine for battery life, we assume, but then the cheaper models tend to have the bigger battery capacities on average, so this feels incredibly unnecessary.

We ran into this issue a lot, with previously open apps constantly needing to refresh when we switch back to them. The most frustrating was trying to keep our smartwatch (a Fitbit Sense) connected and showing notifications. In short, this was almost impossible. Despite turning on Autostart and turning off the MIUI battery optimization feature for the Fitbit app, the watch constantly disconnected.

Worse still, despite allowing Notification access for it, this would only work for a few hours before the watch simply stopped getting access to notifications. The only way to fix this, multiple times a day? Go to the phone's Settings, search for Notification access, turn it off for Fitbit, and then turn it on again. Rinse and repeat in a few hours. We haven't tested with other smartwatches so the situation may not be as dire for those, but we do have to mention that we haven't seen such behavior on any other phone we've long-term reviewed recently, and we have had the exact same smartwatch connected. Nor was this a bug in the Fitbit app, because we tried it on other phones while we were using the Poco X3, and everything worked fine.

To round off the connectivity issues, we were once again frustrated with Waze's behavior, which we also assume is because of the aggressive background task management in MIUI. The same thing happened here as it did on the Mi 10T Pro when we long-term reviewed that phone. Almost every time we start up Waze it initially fails to connect to the mobile network, requiring a restart. And while it's in use, if we switch to another app and then back to it, the same issue pops up. We've tried this on other phones too and none of this happens, so it's not the app's fault.

We understand these may be niche issues that you may not run into yourself, but wanted to share them even so, because they are part of our frustrations in our experience of using the Poco X3 day to day. Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that all of these things are easily fixable in software and have nothing to do with the hardware on offer here.