[REVIEW] POCO F5 beats even more expensive competition with its performance thanks to Snapdragon 7+ Gen2

POCO F5 belongs to the latest series of smartphones from the Chinese brand, which belongs to Xiaomi. This time it comes with a renewed design, a new Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 processor and a 6.67″ AMOLED display.

The POCO F series of smartphones often offered high performance for little money. Is that the case now? You will find out in our detailed review.

Where to buy POCO F5?

Our foreign partners come with coupon offers for the POCO F5 smartphone in the global version with complete network and language support.

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We ordered the POCO F5 from our partner Gshopper, which us he delivered the package in a great 9 days from a Chinese warehouse, without any customs fees and VAT.

Technical specifications

What do we find in the package?

POCO F5 is sold in a standard smartphone box. The package was brought to us by the SPS courier, in which the smartphone box was wrapped in air foil and placed in a silicone envelope.

The POCO brand remains faithful to the yellow and black design of the packaging, so here we have a box in the typical colors of the subsidiary brand Xiaomi. Inside, in addition to the smartphone wrapped in silicone, we also find a paper envelope with a silicone transparent cover and a needle for opening SIM slot.

The package still includes a charging cable with an adapter, in this case with a power of 67 W.

Design and quality of workmanship

POCO F5 finally comes with a new and different rear camera design. We no longer have a complete module in which the lenses are located, as it used to be. This time, the individual cameras protrude directly from the back cover, and we really like this design.

As for the build quality, the back cover is plastic and glossy. In our case, we have available for testing the black version, which has a completely glossy back cover, so that all reflections and fingerprints can be seen beautifully on it. It is also available in white and blue. The white color, which has a fine structure reminiscent of icy frost, looks especially interesting.

The front edge of the smartphone is sharp, the display is flat, but the back cover has rounded edges, so it is quite comfortable to hold in the hand. Its weight is 181 g.

Layout of elements

If we look at the layout of the individual elements of the smartphone, nothing unusual will surprise us here. The bottom side contains a charging USB-C port, a microphone, a slot for 2 SIM card and speaker grill.

The upper side is home to the second microphone, another speaker, a pair of sensors and we even find a 3.5 mm port for connecting headphones, which is quite old-school these days.

The left side of the smartphone is empty, but on the opposite, right side, there are volume buttons along with a button to turn on / off and unlock the smartphone. It also has an integrated fingerprint reader.

AMOLED display

POCO F5 has a 6.67" display of AMOLED technology with a resolution of 2400 x 1080 px, which carries the attribute Flow AMOLED. The screen-to-body ratio is 93.4%, so the frames around the display are relatively thin.

Once a privilege, but now a standard, a high refresh rate of 120 Hz is also available. The contrast ratio is 5:000, the nominal brightness is 000 nits, which can go up to 1 nits for a short time. The smartphone can adjust the brightness in up to 500 levels.

The sampling frequency is represented by a value of 240 Hz, and there are also technologies such as Dolby Vision and HDR 10+. At the same time, the display covers up to 100% of the DCI-P3 color profile.

Overall, we are satisfied with the display. Its brightness is sufficient even for use in direct sunlight, although it is not among the absolute best.

The only disadvantage we noticed is the impossibility of setting a permanent always-on display, similar to the case with Redmi smartphones. For us, this is a big step back, since we still have this option on the older POCO F3, which we have been using until now. Unfortunately, we have the only option here, which is always-on display for 10 seconds.

Great performance and fast storage

The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 processor is hidden inside, which is manufactured using 4 nm technology and does not lack the attribute 5G. It is an eight-core processor consisting of one Cortex-X2 core clocked at 2.91 GHz, three A710 cores with 2.49 GHz and 4 A510 cores with 1.8 GHz.

It is assisted by Qualcomm Adreno 725 and in our case 12 GB of LPDDR5 type RAM. The storage has a capacity of 256 GB and is of the UFS 3.1 type. There is also an 8GB RAM version with the same 256GB storage. Thanks to the UFS 3.1 technology, we can virtually increase the RAM memory by another 3 GB, cutting from the internal storage.

Cooling was solved by the manufacturer using LiquidCooling 2.0 technology, which increases heat removal by up to 35% compared to older technology. It is also equipped with a large area of ​​graphite, which helps transfer heat from the chip.

We also installed the popular AnTuTu benchmark in the smartphone, in which we achieved a score of up to 1 points, which is an excellent value for a smartphone in this price category. POCO did not disappoint again with its performance and once again managed to produce a smartphone with very good performance at a reasonable price.

Operating system and MIUI superstructure

POCO F5 runs on the Android 13 operating system with a graphic superstructure from Xiaomi, MIUI in the global version 14.0.5. The subsidiary brand uses its own POCO launcher and list-style app menu. Here, the most used applications are at the top and all the others below them, sorted alphabetically.

As usual, here too we find several pre-installed applications such as Netflix, TikTok, Spotify, Booking or games such as Tile Fun, Solitaire, Bubble Shooter and others.

The system itself is extremely smooth and nimble. During a week's testing, we didn't discover any major issues, and there weren't any bugs or hesitations.

We can find many customizations here, whether it is notification effects on the lock screen, the layout of applications on the home screen or dark mode or various widgets, wallpapers or themes.

Cameras

Cameras used to be the weak point of smartphones that offer high performance at an affordable price. After all, savings had to be made somewhere and everything cannot be perfect. So we don't have too high expectations from the cameras, but let's take a look at their specifications and output quality together.

As you can probably guess based on the parameters, the best is the main camera, which has a significantly better resolution than the other cameras. So let's start with it and show you some shots we took with this 64 Mpx camera. For comparison, we also attach images from the ultra-wide-angle lens and 2x zoomed-in images.

The photos have quite good sharpness as wellnamirange and colors tend to be closer to warm shades. However, we often found the photos a bit too dark, which is why they didn't preserve the current atmosphere at all. For example, even some photos taken in strong sunlight just after lunch look like they were taken in the shade sometime in the early evening.

Photos taken in a well-lit interior are quite good, and the main camera clearly leads in this category. You can see more details in the photos from it, they are brighter, sharper and have a nicer color presentation. It's the same in a dimly lit interior.

Ultra-wide-angle lens, macro and zoom

The ultra-wide-angle camera offers a completely different presentation of colors, which are brighter, more beautiful for us and somewhat cooler. At first glance, we often liked the colors of the photos from this lens more. On the other hand, you can already see at first glance that they are less sharp and offer significantly less detail, since this camera only has 8 Mpx.

We also have XNUMXx zoom, but the telescopic camera is missing here. The XNUMXx zoom is created using a cutout from the main camera, so the quality of these shots is slightly lower compared to the main camera.

The macro lens is only 2 Mpx and has fixed focus at a distance of 4 cm. Because of this, it is quite difficult to take sharp shots with its help. In addition, the quality is not good either, as 2 Mpx is a really low resolution for today.

Video

The maximum video recording resolution in this case is 4K at 30 fps. Other options include 1080p at 30 or 60 fps and 720p at 30 fps. The manufacturer states that optical stabilization is available along with electronic stabilization, but we did not find any information about optical stabilization in the camera application.

The only option for stabilization is to turn it on or off, but with stabilization on, the resolution switches to 1080p / 30 fps. Nevertheless, the video in 4K resolution is also stabilized quite well, even if you can see certain hesitations at times. However, this is not unusual in this price range and we cannot have too high expectations.

Night mode

Night mode greatly helps the POCO F5 smartphone. Without it turned on, photos are noticeably out of focus, often even blurred, and in low street lighting, the quality of photos is sometimes almost tragic, especially with an ultra-wide-angle camera.

Note: In both series of photos, the first trio was photographed without night mode and the second trio with night mode.

If we have very little light, the photos are better with night mode, but still not very good. On the contrary, with good artificial lighting of the objects, the main camera without night mode turned on proved more useful for us.

Battery and charging

POCO F5 received a 5000 mAh battery, which according to the manufacturer should last 30 hours of talk time, 14.8 hours of watching videos, 23.8 hours of reading or 155 hours of music playback.

We used the smartphone quite intensively, especially during the first days of testing, when it lasted us about one day. Later, when we only used the smartphone normally, we sometimes got 1 and a half days of endurance on a single charge. There are no surprises in this regard, and expect only a classic one-day endurance.

As for charging, we have support for 67 W wired charging, which works as follows:

Speakers and connectivity

The POCO F5 is equipped with a pair of speakers that, like many phones from Xiaomi at this price, perform quite decently. The volume is sufficient and, above all, they play cleanly even at the maximum level.

Wireless connectivity includes the popular NFC, Bluetooth version 5.3, support for 5G networks and several localization systems. Also interesting is the presence of the old 3.5 mm port for connecting the headphone jack, which is not often seen in new smartphones.

Unlocking options

Among the security settings, we can find several options for unlocking the smartphone. Specifically, it is unlocking using a fingerprint, face or using a Bluetooth device.

Most of you will definitely use fingerprint unlocking mainly. The reader is not located in the display, but in the button to light up the screen and turn the smartphone off or on. We have to admit that this reader is extremely fast and accurate, thanks to which we are also glad that the manufacturer did not reach for a cheap in-display reader, which is often inaccurate.

Face unlock also works well, which is also very fast.

POCO F5: Final review

The latest generation of the popular series from the POCO brand offers a very interesting mid-range smartphone in the form of the F5 model at a price just slightly above 300 EUR. In this segment, it clearly beats the competition with its performance, which is taken care of by the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 processor. It also has 12 GB of RAM and fast UFS 3.1 storage.

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As was the case with previous series, this is not a photo smartphone. The cameras are rather weak to average, so don't expect any miracles in this area. POCO F5 is mainly focused on performance with a good display and an attractive price tag.