The Poco F1 was all about its high-end processor and made no apologies about lagging in other departments. With a new focus on the youth market, Poco has chosen a slightly different approach for the X3 Pro. The ultrawide can take some usable shots, but images lack sharpness, and there’s a color temperature disparity. For what it’s worth, there is a dedicated night mode for the ultrawide (which most Poco and Redmi phones don’t have) that does deliver a slightly better image. The macro sensor is borderline unusable, and you’ll have to take a ton of photos to get a single serviceable shot from it. While I’m not sure how much the flagship-level ISP of the Snapdragon 860 is responsible for this, the images from the 48MP camera are pretty good in daylight scenarios.
The design is also fetching, and the phone includes 50W charging support. In a sea of similar devices, the X3 Pro is laser-focused on performance and there is a noticeable skew in the spec sheet towards that end Stock Firmware. The Snapdragon 860 chipset powering the phone gives it a considerable leg-up over other phones in the segment. So if you have no problem with its decent camera setup, you can go with this mobile in 2022 because it comes under a 20k budget with flagship killer performances.
The stereo-speakers on the X3 can get really loud and you can feel the rumble across the back. The audio quality via speakers is better than what we have on Realme 7 Pro. Our ringtone when we receive calls, however, plays very feeble. At times we missed calls when our phone was in another room and the ringing volume wasn’t set to 100 percent. Poco X3 has a macro camera as well, but we doubt the majority would be using it very often. The selfie camera on the front performs well in proper daylight.
The X3 Pro is the first handset to offer Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 860 platform. This is almost identical to the last-gen 855+ – same number of cores, same clock speed, same graphics – but without an X50 modem and, therefore, it’s 4G/LTE only – no 5G. The Poco X3 Pro for the 6GB RAM +128GB storage option is priced at €249 (~$296), but you can expect an early-bird price of €199 (~$237). Its 8GB RAM + 256GB storage variant will cost €299 (~$356), with an early-bird price of €249 (~$296). The Poco X3 Pro also comes with 6 or 8 GBs of LPDDRX RAM and 128 or 256 GBs of superfast UFS 3.1 storage. While the Poco F3 comes with faster 6 or 8 GBs of LPDDR5 RAM with the same 128 or 256 GBs of UFS 3.1 storage. Both the Poco X3 Pro and Poco F3 have displays of the same size and resolution.