Poco X3 Pro long-term review

Software version and updates

The Poco X3 Pro runs MIUI 12.5 on top of Android 11, and as of now, it hasn't yet received the update to MIUI 12.5 Enhanced, which is supposed to alter a lot of under-the-hood stuff in order to make the user experience smoother and even less prone to random bugs. That's not to say we've spotted bugs in the current build, though - in fact, it's been smooth sailing all-round (aside from the odd stutter here and there - as described in the Performance section).

At the moment of writing, our European model Poco X3 Pro review unit is on MIUI version 12.5.3 (RJUEUXM), with the September 1, 2021 security patch level. In case you're double-checking your calendar - it is, in fact, already December when we write this.

Current software

We have, in previous long-term reviews of Xiaomi / Poco / Redmi devices, ranted at length about the state of security updates, so we'll keep it short here. The three brands are very bad at dispatching such updates in a timely manner, in fact, we don't think we've seen a device from these brands to be on the current security patch level - ever. It's one of the things you have to sacrifice to get that incredible value for money they're famous for, unfortunately, and we don't think this is likely to change anytime soon.

When it comes to big Android updates, the situation is similar, but there's a catch - with phones running MIUI, the interface is so far removed from what Google launches every year that waiting a few (or more) months to get the latest underlying iteration of the OS isn't that big of a deal. Almost all new features arrive with new big MIUI versions, and those do spread around reasonably fast after their announcement to a lot of devices that cover most price points.

MIUI 12.5

As we said, MIUI is about as far from whatever 'stock Android' means as you could imagine, so if you're desperately looking for that 'stock' look, you won't find it here. On the other hand, MIUI has its own design language that is mostly consistent and cohesive throughout the UI, Settings, and the built-in Xiaomi apps.

Of course, the Google apps, which are now all being updated to Material You elements, also have their own cohesive design language - it's just a different one. So you'll have to learn to live with such idiosyncrasies if you get a phone running MIUI, the Poco X3 Pro included.

MIUI 12.5

And while the MIUI design language is definitely its own thing, it's also been practically the same for a couple of years now, and so it's starting to look a bit stale. We're hoping that the upcoming MIUI 13 release will change things up a bit in 2022, updating the looks to be more modern. And maybe, in the process, the weirdly redundant System apps updater will finally be let go? Or perhaps it could at least be made to update all of the built-in apps, not just what seems like a random subset?

Dark mode

Don't get us wrong - this reviewer, unlike some of our commenters, doesn't think MIUI in its 12.5 incarnation is ugly, but it doesn't feel as fresh in late 2021 as it did before. All of the basics are covered very well in this release, however. You get a Dark mode that works very well (although there are no settings as to how dark it gets), and is also scheduleable - either to turn on automatically at sunset and off at sunrise, or through manually chosen hours.

Dark mode settings

Like in most other Xiaomi / Poco / Redmi phones we long-term reviewed this year, there's an annoyance in that Dark mode is automatically forced onto all installed apps, even those that have a dark theme of their own. Sometimes this can lead to weird visuals in specific apps, and then you need to jump into Settings to turn off the automatic Dark mode for those, and you have to do it one by one because there's no way to work with batches, nor the possibility to select all. Also, note that since the Poco X3 Pro has an LCD screen, you won't be getting any better battery life by using the Dark mode; it's just down to a cosmetic preference in this case.

Gestures

MIUI's gesture navigation system is still one of the best out there, and today it's probably the best-optimized one on any Android phone. Xiaomi's developers have been doing a lot of under-the-hood, behind-the-scenes work to make gestures feel more instant and more natural, and that has panned out even in the non-Enhanced version of MIUI 12.5 (and things should be further improved whenever that Enhanced build hits the Poco X3 Pro).

Gesture navigation settings

There's less perceived gesture lag in this phone than we've had in some flagships from other companies, and that's an amazing feat. As before, MIUI ignores Google's convoluted way of dealing with slide-out navigation drawers in apps and applies a much simpler solution: when you swipe from the side in the top third of the screen, you trigger that - otherwise, you go back.

Recents

The Poco X3 Pro doesn't give you any choice when it comes to the way the Recent apps screen is arranged, despite the fact that other handsets running MIUI have recently started to allow you to pick a horizontally scrolling list. That's in line with what all the other Android device makers are doing, and it feels more natural to us to use.

But on the X3 Pro, the Recent apps screen is a vertically scrolling two-column list, which, if you've never used a Xiaomi / Redmi / Poco device before, will take some getting used to. Even after having handled a lot of such phones, we still think we're less efficient at switching between apps in this way and would be more so if the list was horizontal. Perhaps a future update can finally bring that option.

New Control Center

What hasn't been kept from the Poco X3 Pro's MIUI 12.5 build is the new Control Center. This splits the notification area in two - if you swipe down from the left side, you get notifications and only notifications, no Quick Settings; and if you swipe down from the right, then you get the new Control Center, which looks eerily like Apple's.

Control center style options

You still have the choice to go with the traditional Android way of doing things, which gives you notifications and Quick Settings upon swiping down from anywhere. When the new Control Center came out, we used that a lot, but recently we decided to go back to the 2-in-1 approach, but we can't really say we favor one of these over the other in any substantial fashion. The nice thing is that neither is forced upon you, so you can try both and see what works best for you.

Poco Launcher

The Poco Launcher that's built into the X3 Pro is like MIUI itself - nice, feature-rich, but getting kind of stale. It hasn't received a big update in... we can't even say how much time, but it feels like ages. It still has an app drawer, of course, and it does work very well, with no bugs that we could spot, and we always thought it reached a good compromise between delivering customizability but not so much that it's overwhelming.

Poco Launcher and its settings

The Google Discover feed can be enabled to be shown to the left of your leftmost home screen, which we like but have noticed a significant drop in the quality of its news article suggestions recently. Maybe the algorithm got drunk for the holiday season, who knows.