Poco X3 Pro long-term review

Display quality

The Poco X3 Pro has the exact same screen as the Poco X3 NFC, and so everything we said about that one applies here too. The only difference is the glass on top - the X3 Pro gets the newer (but not newest) Gorilla Glass 6, whereas the X3 NFC had to make do with Gorilla Glass 5.

The display quality is exactly the same, though. This means it's good for an LCD, but nowhere near the best ever - that title, to this day, is still held by the panel inside the Mi 10T Pro from last year. It being an LCD means it comes with the disadvantages of that technology compared to OLEDs, namely lesser blacks and some backlight bleed. These are inescapable because of the tech, so you need to keep them in mind. If you're thinking of switching to the Poco X3 Pro from a device with an OLED panel, make sure you won't be missing those inky blacks too much before you pull the trigger.

Since this isn't the brightest LCD, it will struggle when exposed to direct bright sunlight. You can just about barely make out what's on the screen, but it doesn't make for a very good experience. Indoors or anywhere where you're not in direct sunlight though, brightness levels aren't a problem at all.

The screen is invisible through polarized sunglasses when you hold the phone in landscape orientation. Everything is fine in portrait, but if you want to take pictures outside, holding the phone in landscape mode, and you are wearing polarized sunglasses - you'll have to either take those off. We're assuming this was a cost-cutting measure, and we only found it annoying in this specific use case described above, but it's something to keep in mind, definitely.

Another slight hassle is that you may have to constantly adjust the brightness manually since the auto-brightness curve isn't very good, constantly favoring a darker look than we'd like. This is especially prone to happening in dimly lit environments, where the screen constantly wants to go to the minimum brightness - and that is, in fact, incredibly low.

Display settings

This is a praiseworthy thing, in our opinion, because it makes using the phone in pitch darkness much less eye-straining than we've recently seen from a lot of OLED panels, especially the ones that aren't on flagship phones. This LCD can go darker than all of those, but the fact that the phone wants to do that even when there is still some dim lighting around you is annoying, as it's dim enough to be barely legible in such conditions.

We're not sure whether the software auto-brightness curve is to blame here, it may just be that the ambient light sensor isn't very good, or that the Poco X3 Pro is missing a second ambient light sensor on the back. We've gotten used to Xiaomi / Redmi / Poco phones all packing such a secondary sensor, and this device definitely doesn't seem to - or if it has one, then it's not using it very well.

Whatever the exact cause(s), expect a lot of manual fiddling with the brightness. The good thing is that once you've manually set a specific target, it will be remembered for when you encounter the exact same level of ambient light in the future, although it may not seem so at first because the ambient light levels are incredibly minute.

As with any other Xiaomi / Redmi / Poco phone released recently, there's a good deal of customization you can apply to colors, with three presets of which the default, called Vivid, should automatically adjust colors based on the content displayed.

Color scheme settings

Additionally, for every preset, you can pick between three color temperature presets or go custom and choose your own from the color wheel provided. While this isn't as much customization as we've seen on some other phones with OLED panels, it should still do the job for most people.

LED notification light

Because this is an LCD screen, there's no Always-on Display, as that would drain a lot of battery since unlike OLEDs, LCDs need to have the backlighting on at all times while they're showing things on the screen, even if said things only occupy a small portion of it. Instead, the Poco X3 Pro has a notification LED at the top, which is tiny but decently visible in dark or dimly lit environments, and very easy to miss in brighter conditions. Unlike the LED notification lights of years past, it has one color and one color only - white, and you can't customize what it does save for whether it should be on while charging or blink for incoming notifications.

LED light settings

So it's more than nothing, but not a whole lot more, to be honest. You may miss the Always-on Display, as we did, but keep in mind that for whatever reason some cheaper Redmi devices with OLED screens don't actually let you make the AOD be truly always-on - it turns off after a few minutes. So at this price point, if looking at handsets from the Xiaomi / Redmi / Poco stable, it looks like you have to contend either with a crippled AOD or a very basic notification light. Hopefully, this can be improved for future generations.

Proximity sensor

Interestingly and unexpectedly enough, the Poco X3 Pro's proximity sensing is very good, better than a lot of more expensive phones we've used in the past year or so. Either this is an actual hardware sensor, as all of them used to be back in the day, or if it's a software solution (and Xiaomi especially seems to love those), then it's incredibly well-tuned, because we've had no issues with it turning off the screen when we're talking on the phone and turning it on again when we move it away from the ear.

This is not something that can be said for a lot of other Xiaomi / Redmi / Poco phones, including the Poco F3, which had an atrocious proximity sensing implementation. We'll let you decide how much sense it makes for the cheaper device to outdo the more expensive one from the same brand when it comes to such a basic phone feature.

Reading mode

Xiaomi's blue light filter, called Reading Mode, is present and is still the most customizable one we've ever used. It has two modes, Classic and Paper, and while the former is basically identical to what you may be used to from other phone makers, Paper takes things to a new level with the ability to add some paper-like texture (through a customizable slider), as well as pick between "full colors", desaturated "light colors", and black and white.

Reading mode

And, of course, all of this is schedulable too, either automatically based on sunrise/sunset or manually with hours of your choosing. A very well-executed feature overall.

Refresh rate

Perhaps the reason why the panel in the Poco X3 Pro is an LCD is its high refresh rate - we're guessing a 120Hz OLED would have been much more expensive. So while you sacrifice the deep blacks that OLEDs are known for and some sunlight legibility, you get a refresh rate that's on par with every mainstream non-gaming flagship out there. That may well be a worthy tradeoff for you - it is in our book, when factoring in the price, of course.

The high refresh rate makes things nicely smooth, as we'll cover in the Performance section, but it's not one of those very adaptable ones - again, understandable at this price. You pick between 60 Hz or 120 Hz, and if you go with the latter (and why wouldn't you?), then you get 120 Hz whenever you're touching the phone and throughout the UI. It reverts to 60 Hz a couple of seconds after your last interaction with the screen and then ramps back up again.

Refresh rate settings

It doesn't do this always, but we've never noticed it to lag in the switching, which is good. Unfortunately, some video apps like YouTube and Netflix are displayed at 60 Hz, which makes their UIs noticeably slow compared to every other app you have on the phone. We've seen such behavior before and still can't fathom why it would be like that - we do a lot of scrolling in YouTube, for example, in the feed, and this could very much benefit from 120 Hz. Same goes for Netflix, but for some reason, in Prime Video everything runs at 90 Hz. We wish we knew what the reasoning for all this seemingly random behavior would be.

In the ideal world we're envisioning, the video apps' UIs would be displayed at 120 Hz, and when actually playing video that would go down to 60. Sounds entirely reasonable to us, but that's not how things work here. Thankfully though, the Poco X3 Pro does unlock the full 120 Hz to many popular games, so at least your gaming experience should be better.

Like the Poco X3 NFC's screen, this one too shows traces of ghosting / smearing when scrolling quickly while in 120 Hz mode, and that makes sense since the two phones have the same display panel. As we said in the X3 NFC's long-term review, this hasn't been a problem to quickly get used to and then simply ignore, but that's us - you may have a different perception.