The results of our standard battery rundown test are less favourable for the Poco F4, serving up the lowest result out of this selection and coming in roughly 10% less than its predecessor. To be clear, a score of over 19 hours isn’t bad by any stretch – you’ll happily get two days of moderate use out of it – but when most new iterations improve upon the battery life, this two-hour downgrade is still disappointing. The Poco F4 5G has been confirmed to launch with the Snapdragon 870 chipset. The smartphone has been confirmed to launch with 256 GB of UFS 3.1 storage and 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM. It is yet to be seen if there are lower model variants coming too. Talking about the camera in detail, the Poco F4 5G might sport a triple-camera setup with a 64MP primary lens with OIS. The smartphone could also come with an 8MP and 2MP camera lens. There is a possibility that these could be ultrawide and depth sensors. You could also expect to get a 20MP front-facing camera. Triangular indents sit in the camera housing, the finish on the rear cover, while the camera flash LED sits inside a lightning strike-shaped cutout. Xiaomi’s processing does some heavy-lifting here, and its colour science is pretty punchy. Those vibrant colours are calling out to be shared, but they’re not exactly what you’d call authentic or natural.

Recently the smartphone was also spotted on Geekbench which provided more insights into the variants launching soon. The results were those of the 12GB RAM model and we expect it to come with 256GB of internal storage. Other reports also hint that an 8GB model with 128GB storage is also slated to arrive in India. It’s a great idea, and zones are set per game. I played Fortnite, using them to jump and shoot, and retro favourite Hill Climb Racing to control the entire game. They work well and feel sturdy. That they retract into the body avoids accidental presses, and you can set them to act as shortcuts when not playing a game. That said, the ergonomics here aren’t even at the same level as something like the Razer Kishi, which plugs two halves of a gamepad onto your phone.I had to factory reset the Poco F4 GT to solve this problem. And after letting the battery run down completely, the problem returned —this is something Xiaomi urgently needs to fix. Camera Peak gaming performance is fantastic, netting 10140 points in 3D Mark’s Wild Life benchmark. This is even more abstracted from real-world than a benchmark score usually is, though, as power is massively throttled during successive runs. It’s capable of standing up to a day of use with 4hrs 45mins of screen-on time – what I’d term a moderate-to-intensive day – with just under half a tank left. Like the F3, the Poco F4’s battery life isn’t worth shouting about. The F4 uses a 4500mAh cell, and the battery struggled to power the phone through an entire day when set to the max refresh rate, playing plenty of games and using it out and about with 5G. The 8-megapixel ultrawide camera seems to be business as usual – which translates as not particularly great. Detail drops off significantly compared to the main sensor, particularly at the edges; dynamic range is limited, and I noticed blue sky artifacts when shooting on a clear day.

Xiaomi has changed up the design of the Poco F4, but it’s left the display alone. Considering this 6.67-inch AMOLED screen was one of the standout components of the Poco F3, it’s tough to paint that as a negative. That’s pretty reassuring, especially when you consider that I switched the display to a permanent 120Hz almost straight out of the box, as I always do. If you keep the phone set to its default Auto state, you’ll buy yourself even more battery headroom. Not that the Poco F4 looks radically new. It’s just a different shade of generic, with dual flat-glass surfaces, a flat-ish plastic rim, and a stepped camera module that may remind you of the Redmi Note 11 line to which the Poco is a not-so-distant cousin. There’s also something of last year’s Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite to the design, minus the attractively curvaceous camera module. The processor’s peak gaming performance is terrific, but you only get to experience it for minutes at a time. Well, unless you were to play outdoors in the snow.The Poco F4 GT is made in the style of dedicated gaming phones, like those from the Asus ROG series. It is not what many would define as attractive, but for those in for the ride, Xiaomi has nailed the style.

Unfortunately there is a serious software issue that appears to affect some Poco F4 GTs at launch, which makes the phone cycle between recognising and not recognising the SIM card when inserted, causing it to crash so hard the phone resets after a handful of seconds. You still get an FHD+ resolution, as well as flagship-echoing specs of a 120Hz refresh rate and HDR10+ support. It still gets nice and bright, too, to the tune of 900 nits in high brightness mode and 1300 nits at its peak. Gamers will appreciate the 360Hz touch sampling rate, which ensures that it’s responsive to inputs. Its general performance is just as great as you’d hope, with apps and multi-tasking transitions being far faster than those of the OPPO Find X5 Lite I used before the Poco, getting you the flagship experience I’d expect from a phone with this kind of power. A few months ago I used a couple of MIUI phones in a row and got used to this style. Having used a couple of others phones since then, this change seems annoying and unintuitive all over again. Still, you will get used to it in time.Its macro camera is bad, just like all tertiary cameras of this spec. The ultrawide is mediocre too, producing images with washed-out mid-tones and significantly different colour character to the main camera’s photos. There’s a very noticeable step down in quality from the main camera, and images don’t hold up too well when you zoom in. Stamina wasn’t one of the strong suits of the Poco F3, but we had few complaints at the time. I don’t have any with the Poco F4 either. The Stress Test version of Wild Life runs the same GPU-maxing scenes 20 times to see how the results change. They drop almost immediately, down to 45.6% of its peak power (4628 points).