Poco X3 NFC long-term review

Conclusion

The Poco X3 is the best mid-range device at its price, despite obviously not being perfect. That's what we think after having spent a lot of time with it as our one and only smartphone, but even if we did use it for an extended period, you shouldn't necessarily take our word as gospel. That's because what we value in a phone and what you value in a phone may turn out to be different things, however slightly. And even minor differences there could make for an experience that feels very different to you than it did to us.

That said, of course we can't speak for you, so we'll do what we usually do, and give you the most overused caveat of them all. The Poco X3 is the one to buy if your budget isn't bigger than its price, provided you can live with its downsides. That's the key right there.

Even flagships have downsides (and seem to be adding new ones every year for some reason), no phone is actually perfect, so when you're making a buying decision you need to figure out what's most important to you, and what you can overlook. We aim to help with that, by listing some pros and cons.

All of the pros here take the pricing into account, because we really can't not do that. There are better phones than the Poco X3 out there on the market, much better ones too - it's just that none of them are as cheap. So, for its price point, the Poco X3 has very good performance, unexpectedly good smoothness, a decent set of cameras, and great but not amazing battery life in 120 Hz mode.

The screen is good but not great, and the ghosting when scrolling might put you off. It didn't deter us from enjoying our time with the phone, but your mileage may vary. There are software bugs, as has unfortunately become traditional for MIUI, especially MIUI on anything but the numbered Mi series of flagships. The software updates are few and far between, which means that you'll have to live with a given set of bugs for at least a few months and then hope the update you're getting quashes all of them without introducing any new ones.

That's wishful thinking most times. Because of this update cadence, the security patch level of the phone will probably always be older than you might be comfortable with, but then again that's something not a lot of companies care to be more timely about for mid-range handsets. Speaking of software, MIUI is fine overall, but the general design language is getting a bit old, and some of the functional quirks have been in need of ironing out for a very long time. Hopefully that will all happen at some point this year with either MIUI 12.5 or MIUI 13.

Okay, that's about it for the pros and cons. If you don't mind getting nighttime shots that aren't the best in this price class, and are mainly happy to shoot during the day, especially from the main sensor, but don't mind the ultrawide being there for some framing flexibility, you'll like the images that the Poco X3 produces.

And if that's okay and you want a phone that performs very well and is incredibly smooth for the price, then you found your match. That is, of course, if you can stand the design (especially of the back), and the heft, and the weight, and the use of plastic all-round. Oh, and if you're not one of those people who scoffs at an LCD screen.

Only you know how many of these things accurately describe you. For what it's worth, we enjoyed our time with the Poco X3 much more than we were expecting to, informed in our expectations by our time with the Redmi Note 9 Pro that we long-term reviewed last year.

The Poco X3 is a much friendlier and nicer to use phone day in, day out, than that one was. It's also faster and smoother, so comparatively the only thing it loses at is the rear end - both the way it looks, and the fact that it's plastic. We're comparing to that Redmi because we consider the new Redmi Note 10 Pro with its 108 MP main camera and high refresh rate OLED screen to be playing in a different league (including price-wise), although if we will decide to long-term review that one, we're interested to see how the Snapdragon 732G will feel in a Redmi compared to this Poco, if at all different.

We'll end by saying that Xiaomi has created a very intriguing Poco lineup in the past few months, with this X3 at the ~200 euro level, followed by the X3 Pro at ~50-100 more, and then the F3 at ~50-100 more than that. All three seem like very good options for their respective aggressive prices, and we assume a lot of people had been waiting for the Poco brand to feel 'alive' again in this way. We're excitedly looking forward to its next offering. Will that slot in above the F3, ~50-100 euro more expensive? Only time will tell.