Poco X7 Pro review: a new budget benchmark?

Introduction

A few names should spring to mind when value for money is a top tech priority – but Poco should be somewhere near the top. Xiaomi’s budget arm regularly delivers cheap smartphones worth getting excited about, and often with features or design trends you’d normally have to splash out a lot more for.

The Poco X7 Pro (from £309 at launch) is the latest, bringing the flat screen and sides made popular by Apple flagships to an Android phone costing a quarter of the price. New MediaTek silicon, an optically-stabilised camera, and a vibrant OLED display panel should also help redefine your cut-price handset expectations. This is just half the story, too – an even more affordable Poco X7 (from £249 at launch) is doing the rounds, with its own distinct looks and set of specs to pore over.

So which one is worth a spot in your pocket – and can either claim to be a true smartphone steal?

Design & build: swell for leather

Plenty of Chinese phone brands rebadge home market handsets for the global market, and Poco is no exception. The Poco X7 Pro is effectively the China-only Redmi Turbo 4 with a fresh coat of paint – or should that be vegan leather, given that’s what covers the rear of my review unit.

In fairness, I find the Poco’s two-tone design and textured materials a lot more interesting than the Redmi’s plain glass rear (even if I’ve only seen the latter in photos). The yellow and black colour scheme mark the X7 Pro out as a Poco handset long before you spot the subtle logo in the corner. The faux leather resisted fingerprints throughout my testing, too. The flat frame is black plastic, but the kind that doesn’t feel super cheap.

There are black and green versions that use plastic rear panels; they’re slightly thinner and weigh a little less, but honestly I’d pick the vegan leather every time. It adds a sense of character that’s missing from a lot of phones right now, including ones at the other end of the price spectrum.

The 6.67in X7 Pro has a reassuring heft; your fingers naturally gravitate to the power and volume keys at the side; and the relatively small distance the two rear camera lenses protrude from the handset meant I had no issues sliding it in and out of my trouser pockets.

I’m glad Poco went with an under-display fingerprint sensor instead of a side-mounted one, which to me is the first sign a phone was made for a shoestring budget. It worked well enough, recognising my digits as quickly and accurately as any rival in its price range. There’s face recognition too, but just for the lock screen – it won’t work with more secure banking apps.

The IR blaster is more of a nice-to-have here in the West, where apps and connected kit now rules supreme, but top marks to Poco for managing to add IP68 dust and water protection – a first for the firm. Many value-oriented handsets still top out at IP65, whereas here you’re protected against accidental dunkings as well as rain showers.

Interestingly the Poco X7 Pro has more in common with the current Redmi line-up than Poco’s own handsets. It sticks with curved-edge glass a polished silver frame (plastic, of course) and metal effect rear panel. The four lens camera array looks impressive, but the underlying hardware is less so – more on that later.

Screen & sound: flat’s magic

I’m pretty sure Poco has been in Xiaomi’s parts bin; the X7 Pro has a very similar display setup to the Xiaomi 14T Pro, at 6.67in and with a better-than-Full HD resolution. I’m not complaining if it’s true, as it means you’re getting an OLED screen with adaptive 120Hz refresh rate, for impactful images and smooth scrolling.

The Poco actually goes one better with Gorilla Glass 7i protection, so it should withstand most scrapes and scratches. I didn’t have any lasting marks after my few weeks of testing, though the pre-fitted screen protector undoubtedly helps.

It doesn’t get as bright, with a peak 3200 nits falling short of the 14T Pro’s 4000 – but neither figure is reflective of real-world brightness. In my testing, it shone enough that I could use it outdoors without squinting, even for the few minutes a day this part of the world gets sunshine during winter. The Poco X7 tops out at 3000 nits, but is otherwise largely on par with the Pro.

I did notice the Poco was more muted than many of the OLED screens I’ve seen lately. Colours were still accurate, just not quite as punchy. The Vivid option in the settings menu can boost colours if you like things with a little extra saturation. That there’s any customisation at all is a win at this price, and with some tweaking you’ll be very happy with the image quality, which is comfortably on par with similarly-priced rivals.

I’m glad Poco didn’t skimp on sound, fitting stereo speakers that get decently loud and don’t sound too shrill when you crank the volume. The main driver is louder than the earpiece tweeter so the balance isn’t quite perfect, but it won’t have you scrambling for your headphones just to play a podcast or YouTube clip.

Cameras: steady hands

The Poco X7 Pro’s rear cameras are a tale of two halves. The lead lens has a 50MP Sony sensor with impressively wide f/1.5 aperture and optical image stabilisation – in other words, it’s punching above its weight in terms of hardware. The ultrawide, on the other hand, is a more modest 8MP unit with f/2.2 aperture.

Unsurprisingly it’s the weaker of the two in all lighting conditions, having less dynamic range and a generally softer presentation – though colours and exposure are otherwise a good match for the main snapper. With no macro focusing abilities it’ll just come in handy for squeezing more of your subject into frame, and the results are good enough for social media sharing. A Nothing Phone 2a‘s 50MP ultrawide is much better overall, though.

The main camera does a better job across the board, with more dynamic range and better HDR processing, a good amount of fine detail once you start zooming into your snaps, and authentic colours. A new Motion Capture setting makes shooting moving subjects that little bit easier, and 2x shots put sensor cropping to good use. I even got some convincing depth blur with close-up shots; though they weren’t quite as ‘close up’ as I could’ve gotten with a phone that had macro focus, I’d take them every day over the low pixel count macro lenses still found on rival cheap phones.

Speaking of which, the regular Poco X7 adds a 2MP macro to the mix. I didn’t bother with this token inclusion once after I’d finished my testing; it feels included to impress people who just care about lens counts, not picture quality.

You’ll want to lay off the zoom at night, and keep a steady hand to maximise the Poco X7 Pro’s light-gathering abilities. Finer details drop off faster here than they do on phones in the price bracket above, and noise creeps in a lot sooner. A Google Pixel 8a remains my top pick for a sub-£500 smartphone shooter, but the gap is closing at an impressive rate.

Software experience: family values

It might say Poco on the back but parent company Xiaomi is largely to thank for the X7 Pro’s software. Its HyperOS skin behaves pretty much identically to the Xiaomi 14T Pro I tested at the end of 2024, complete with lots of iOS-inspired features. Think notifications and quick settings being divided into two pull-down menus, not having an app drawer by default (you’re offered one during the initial setup but it’s not selected) and a bunch of own-brand apps.

I was a little overwhelmed by the number of shortcuts when I first powered on the phone; the amount I’d consider bloatware was in the double digits, though thankfully they didn’t eat up a lot of the generous 512GB of on-board storage. They were easily deleted, too. Others that are worth keeping around try a little too hard to upsell you on things like homescreen themes.

Artificial intelligence is a given, even on a budget phone like this. You get Xaomi’s AI-infused notes and voice recorder apps, Gemini is the default voice assistant, and the gallery app has a handful of AI editing tools. It’s not up there with Google and Samsung’s efforts, but useful all the same.

I couldn’t nail down an update promise from Poco for the X7 Pro, meaning it’ll probably get the same two big new Android versions as previous efforts. That’s not great these days, with affordable rivals offering three years minimum – and you not having to spend much more to get a phone with five or even seven years promised.

Performance & battery life: pace setter

This is the first phone I’ve used with a Dimensity 8400 Ultra chipset. MediaTek and Xiaomi worked together on the silicon, a bit like how Qualcomm turns up the wick on its “for Galaxy” edition Snapdragon CPUs for Samsung. The eight-core chip is no slouch, clocking benchmark scores just below the current crop of flagship handsets.

I saw 1650 and 6529 in the Geekbench single- and multi-core tests, which shows MediaTek continues to do better with multi-threaded jobs than the equivalent Snapdragon, Exynos or Tensor – and means this phone comfortably competes with mid-range models from last year.

Daily use was as smooth as you like, helped in part by the 12GB of RAM. Apps opened quickly, it reacted instantly to taps and swipes, and multitasking wasn’t really an issue either. I do find HyperOS has a habit of putting apps into deep sleep sooner than other phones with similar amounts of memory, but they resumed pretty much straight away.

Gaming was slick, too. Streets of Rage 4 might not be super demanding, but the glorious 2D animations still played at a smooth 60fps once I’d cranked all the details to their highest levels. Alien: Isolation is more punishing, defaulting to lower details and with a much lower frame rate, but the fact this affordable phone can still play it fairly well is impressive.

The Poco X7 uses a step-down Dimensity 7300 Ultra, which naturally lags behind on performance pretty much across the board – but at no point did it feel hopelessly underpowered. The days of budget phones being a struggle to use are happily long gone.

I was impressed with how little the Poco X7 Pro’s battery was fazed by my gaming sessions, too. It helps that there’s a 6000mAh battery – some 1000mAh more than you’d find from last year’s longest lasting affordable phones, and a big jump over the 5110mAh found on the vanilla Poco X7. This global variant actually falls behind the Chinese handset, which finds space for a colossal 6550mAh cell, and neither can match the Honor Magic 7 Lite. That phone has astonishing staying power, and while this will still survive two days per charge relatively easily, it’s not quite a new class leader.

Charging speeds are suitably epic at 90W with a compatible power brick – which Poco still includes in the box. That’s something of a rarity these days. The Poco X7 tops out at 45W which is still – amazingly – as fast as the latest Google and Apple flagships.

Poco X7 Pro verdict

Poco phones always impress me with how they can deliver such capable hardware for relatively little cash. The Poco X7 Pro is no different. It looks and feels the part, is impressively potent, and lasts multiple days of regular use before needing to refuel. Its main camera can deliver nicely rounded shots during the day, and doesn’t completely fall apart at night either.

It’s more of an everyman than the Honor Magic 7 Lite, which has gone all-in on battery capacity for a little extra cash. The Nothing Phone 2a is a more direct rival, with a more distinctive appearance and superior cameras. Poco also needs to do more to reign in how many apps and games are pre-loaded out of the box. That might fly back home, but in the West it’s a sign of cheapness.

If that’s the only real indicator the X7 Pro is in bargain basement territory, though, I’d still say that’s a job well done.

Poco X7 Pro technical specifications