Poco F7 Review: Another great midranger

Phone Arena

5 days ago

Lately, Poco has been trying to step out of the affordable shadow and venture into new, flagship-populated territories. The launch of the Poco F7 Ultra was clear evidence of that, and now we have another pioneer sent to fight for the affordable flagship crown – the vanilla Poco F7.There's no Pro or Ultra moniker tied to this model, but surprisingly the phone comes with the new Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chipset, a bright 3200 nits display, a huge 6,500 mAh battery, and 12GB of RAM.These specs, coupled with the interesting design, make the Poco F7 a contender for the crowded upper-midrange (or as we sometimes like to call it, affordable flagship) segment. The starting price of the Poco F7 is $399 for the 12/256 GB model, with early bird deals available in certain regions dragging the price down to $339.Poco phones aren't available in the US, at least not officially, even though the brand releases its models globally on its online store. So, you will have a hard time getting the F7 in the US, and even if you manage to get your hands on one, it might not work properly on US networks and carriers. With that out of the way, let's proceed with the review.
Our composite review score tries to encapsulate the most important areas of the smartphone experience, and the values in each category have their own weight. Trying to be absolutely objective, each category consists of subcategories, with the idea to give you an overall score that reflects the phone's strengths and weaknesses. In this case the Poco F7 scored quite high in charging, screen quality and performance, while software support, the lack of wireless charging, and the mediocre video quality dragged the final score down.
Table of Contents:
Let's start with an overview of the Poco F7 specs:
The Poco F7 employs a very distinct look, especially the Cyber Silver Edition, which is one of the three colors available (Black and White being the other two). There's a diagonal line splitting the back in two, with the top part offering a faux-transparent design.
There's the Snapdragon logo, textured elements, screws, a red arrow, and the "Limited Edition" branding as well. These aren't part of the actual internals of the phone but look cool nevertheless. The camera housing is pill-shaped and quite substantial, and it also protrudes more than a millimeter out of the body. The frame is made of machined aluminum alloy and feels quite premium in the hand.The footprint is pretty big, mainly due to the 6.83-inch screen, and the weight is also hefty, coming in at 215.7 grams.
That's a nice retail package right there | Image by PhoneArena
Inside the retail box there's a 90W charging brick, a USB-C cable, a grey silicone back cover (high-quality and similar to the ones in the Xiaomi 15 series box), some paperwork and the phone itself. The Poco F7 also comes with a pre-applied screen protector, so you don't have to buy anything extra in order to start using the phone right away. Good job. Moving to the big 6.83-inch display, we find a lot of things to like. First, the bezels are pretty thin, helping the phone to reach a screen-to-body ratio of 94.23%.
The display supports a high refresh rate, but it's not an LTPO panel – you can either let the phone choose between 60 Hz and 120 Hz or choose manually between the two. The resolution is 1280 x 2772 pixels (1.5K) which translates to around 447 PPI pixel density, pretty decent considering the size of the screen.
Poco rates this AMOLED panel at 3,200 nits peak brightness, and indeed we were able to achieve 3,291 nits at 20% APL (average picture level), a truly impressive result. The color accuracy is also top-notch with an average detlaE of 1.64, and the minimum brightness of this panel is great as well, coming in at 1.9 nits.In terms of biometrics, the Poco F7 relies on an under-display fingerprint scanner of the optical variety, and it works quite well. You can set up facial recognition as well, but it relies only on the front-facing camera with no fancy radar or ToF tech, so it's not as secure as a fingerprint scan.
The Poco F7 comes equipped with two cameras in its camera system. The main one uses a 50MP Sony IMX882 sensor under a lens with an f/1.5 aperture. The pixel size is 1.6 microns after 4-to-1 pixel binning. There's optical image stabilization on the main camera, as well as phase detection autofocus.
The ultrawide camera is the same as the one found on the Poco F7 Pro. It's an 8MP snapper with a rather small 1/4.0" sensor, a 15 mm focal range equivalent and an f/2.2 aperture. Finally there's a 20MP selfie camera in a hole-punch cutout on the front. In good lighting conditions, the main camera can snap decent photos. The colors look pretty accurate, and the dynamic range is also good. There are occasional overexposed images, but it's nothing too dramatic.
The ultrawide camera, on the other hand, is nothing to write home about. Its modest pixel count doesn't allow for too many details to be resolved, and the color tonality is also a bit off, compared to the main camera.
Here's a short sample video recorded with the Poco F7.
The phone can record video with up to 4K at 60 fps, and it does a decent job at that resolution and framerate. However, there's some loss of detail, especially at lower resolutions, and the image stabilization isn't perfect when you use 4K. You can zoom in and out during recording, but as there's no telephoto camera on this phone, it's all digital and looks... well, like digital zoom.
All in all, the video recording capabilities of the Poco F7 are nothing to write home about but if you're not a heavy vlogger the phone can get the job done.
Poco has decided to equip every single model from the F7 series with a different silicon. The F7 Ultra features a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, the F7 Pro comes with the last-generation Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and now the vanilla Poco F7 completes the Snapdragon showdown with the latest Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 processor.Where does this chip stand in the Snapdragon ecosystem? This octa-core platform features 1x3.21 GHz Cortex-X4 core, 3x3.0 GHz Cortex-A720 cores and 2x2.8 GHz Cortex-A720 and another pair of Cortex-A720 cores clocked at 2x2.0 GHz.
That's a very different configuration in comparison to both the Snapdragon 8 Elite and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 . The phone also comes with 12GB of RAM in every storage configuration. Let's see how the silicon performs in our benchmarks.
Looking at the benchmark scores, we can see that the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 slots somewhere around the regular Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 .
There's still around a 5% difference in favor of the flagship Gen 3 silicon, but it's not a big difference. GPU Performance The GPU scores paint a similar picture with the difference to the Gen 3 almost nonexistent. For what it's worth, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 was able to sustain its performance a tad better than the Gen 3. When it comes to the cream of the crop, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, it's way ahead of both.
In terms of storage, there are two memory configurations, one with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage, and a step-up with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. There's no microSD card slot. Poco F7 Software
In terms of software, the Poco F7 comes pre-installed with Android 15 with HyperOS 2 on top. There is some bloatware on board, but you can simply delete it and customize the UI to your liking—dynamic wallpapers, drawer or no drawer, layout changes, and so on. When it comes to AI, which is all the rage nowadays, the Poco F7 features the same Xiaomi HyperAI as its bigger brothers, as well as the Xiaomi 15 family. The system has some useful AI features, such as AI Interpreter, AI Editor inside the gallery, AI search, AI speech recognition, and AI writing assists.
You can also use Gemini; it's available and also the default system set for the long-press action on the power button.
The software update scenario is still far from the seven-year support that Google and Samsung provide. You get four major Android updates and six years of security patches with the Poco F7, which at this price point is pretty decent. There's a massive 6,500 mAh silicon-carbon battery on board of the Poco F7. Unsurprisingly, we expected an impressive result in our battery benchmarks. However, things didn't pan out as expected.There's something fishy here, and it's probably down to poor optimization of the new Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chipset, as in real-life conditions, the phone is capable of doing two days on a single charge easily.
We'll redo the tests, so for now there's an asterisk near these scores. In terms of charging, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that the wired 90W charging is pretty fast and able to fill the hefty battery in about 40 minutes.
The bad news (you've guessed it) is that there's no wireless charging on board. The Poco F7 comes with a stereo speaker system, and it's a very loud one at that. You won't have issues with missed calls. However, the high frequency is a bit harsh, and at maximum volume, it's borderline unpleasant.The haptic feedback is tight and quite precise, but it's not the strongest out there. There's a slider for adjusting the level of the vibration, but even at the maximum setting, it feels a bit weak.
Finally, there's no 3.5 mm headphone jack on this phone, so you have to rely on Bluetooth headphones if you want to use a pair. The Poco F7 slots nicely in the F7 series lineup. It offers snappy and fast performance thanks to the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4, a gorgeous and very bright 6.83-inch screen, and a main camera that gets the job done.On the other hand, some corners have been cut to achieve the starting price of $399 ($339 with an early bird deal). There's no wireless charging on board, the ultrawide camera and overall video quality are lacking, and the battery life is unimpressive given the huge battery.
At the end of the day, the Poco F7 will have to go against phones such as the Pixel 9a and Galaxy A56, as well as its own kin in the face of the Poco F7 Pro and Poco F7 Ultra. It's cheaper than all of the above and gets the basics right, so if you don't mind the aforementioned cons, you can get a lot out of this guy.