Poco X3 Pro long-term review

Performance, smoothness

The Poco X3 Pro's Snapdragon 860 is a very rare beast, one which we haven't really seen in any of the phone's competitors. It's basically a renamed Snapdragon 855, which was the flagship Qualcomm chipset in 2019. Sure, that's two years ago, but a flagship SoC is still a flagship SoC - and you can definitely feel this on the Poco X3 Pro. It's miles ahead of the competition in performance and speed, so much so that it's not even funny. This phone feels like it's in an entirely different, superior class to something like the Poco X3 NFC or Redmi Note 10 Pro with their Snapdragon 732G. But it's not, as the pricing makes clear.

So that's a huge win for Poco, and the X3 Pro specifically. Obviously, the Snapdragon 860 can't touch the Snapdragon 870 in the Poco F3, but it's closer to that than it is to the Snapdragon 720/732 class, for what it's worth. Of course, it's also missing 5G support, which may or may not be relevant to you depending on where you live and how much you care about better mobile speeds. The 870 does have 5G, but the 720/732 don't, so if we're comparing the Poco X3 Pro to phones with those 4G chipsets, it's a clear winner on all fronts when it comes to performance and sheer speed.

Smoothness is similarly much improved, too, while not reaching the levels seen in phones with the Snapdragon 870. The Poco X3 Pro is a big step forward in smoothness compared to the X3 NFC and Redmi Note 10 Pro, but it's still not as smooth as the Poco F3. There are random stutters and lags here and there - not constantly, and much less than we saw on the Redmi Note 10 Pro, but they're still present from time to time.

None of this is surprising, considering the hard spec numbers. Still, it is interesting to use the Poco X3 Pro after the X3 NFC - they look the same, they almost feel the same, they have the same size and weight, and yet, in use, they are very different phones, the X3 Pro being faster at anything you throw at it, and also noticeably smoother. For this price point, that's a considerable achievement, and one that we commend Poco for.

The 120 Hz screen refresh rate and 240 Hz touch sampling rate obviously help with the perceived smoothness, but this 120 Hz doesn't exactly feel like the 120 Hz on a Mi 11, for example. Some of that difference is down to the Mi 11's better touch sampling, surely - maybe all of it, even. We're not saying 120 Hz on the Poco X3 Pro doesn't feel smooth enough, it certainly does for this price class, but don't expect it to feel identical to 120 Hz on a high-end 2021 flagship. There's still a difference, even if the numbers are the same.

Battery life

Battery life is a rather mixed bag, depending on your expectations. Don't get us wrong, it's not bad by any stretch of the imagination - and it definitely shouldn't be, given the big 5,160 mAh cell at work. It just feels slightly worse than what we saw in the Poco X3 NFC, and that's probably one of the tradeoffs of the higher-end chipset.

We still managed to get around 6-7 hours of screen on time on a regular basis, as we did with the X3 NFC, but not as much, and 8 hours, while still doable, was less likely. We never got to match the X3 NFC's record of 5 hours with 50% capacity left, nor did we get anywhere close to that.

Battery life samples

We would call this a very worthy tradeoff, though, considering the added performance you're getting, and the fact that even these numbers are very good for this day and age. They're not record-breaking, for sure, but we'd wager a guess that most people would be able to go through a day without needing a top-up, even those with a more intensive use-case than ours.

If you do need a midday top up, that can happen reasonably fast - the phone charges at 33W and goes from zero to full in around an hour, which given the size of the battery, is nothing to scoff at. As you'd imagine by the price point, there's no wireless charging here.

As always, our usage involves about 12-16 hours off the charger in a day, with mostly Wi-Fi connectivity but an hour or two of mobile data, Bluetooth always on, about an hour or two of calls via Bluetooth, and half an hour or so of GPS navigation (with location always on, including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi scanning).