Test the Xiaomi Pocophone F1
17.9.2018
Translation: machine translated
Xiaomi introduces the Pocophone F1 under the Poco brand and the smartphone community is in an uproar. I've been testing the phone for eight days and I can say that it's nothing like the flagship phones of the moment. But one thing's for sure: it's worth the diversions.
What Xiaomi wants with the Pocophone F1 is clear: a flagship product at an unbeatable price. The mobile phone's specs argue in its favour: Snapdragon 845 processor, 4000mAh battery, 6GB of RAM and all at a small price. It's all very promising and, above all, looks like a declaration of war on the current market.
So I'm expecting a lot from this test. First hitch when I unpack the phone: the stench of plastic hits me full force. It was only after a day that the smell of the phone started to disappear.
The Pocophone feels good in the hand, but feels unnaturally heavy at 182 grams. Its 8.8mm thickness also comes as a bit of a surprise. The edges around the screen are remarkably large too. Basically, the Pocophone reminds me of a block with a large notch. I really imagine something else when people talk to me about a "flagship product".
The back of my version is matte plastic, so you can't see any fingerprints. And the finish is really well done. At first glance, you could almost mistake the plastic for matt metal. Xiaomi has chosen to place the fingerprint sensor directly under the camera. Depending on your skill and how quickly you get used to it, you'll have more or fewer fingerprints - which will blur your photos - on the lens.
The typical economic route
The path taken by Xiaomi with the Pocophone is reminiscent of other Chinese manufacturers: they create a daughter brand that sells cheaper mobile phones only online. Huawei, for example, founded the Honor brand. OnePlus is under the same roof as Oppo and Vivo. Before Poco, Xiaomi didn't have an explicit budget brand, but generally cheap devices, most notably the Redmi series. Xiaomi has now caught up with the creation of a new brand, Pocophone, which defies the competition with good value for money.
It quickly becomes apparent that concessions had to be made for the Pocophone. The phone isn't waterproof, doesn't have an OLED screen, but is equipped with a jack and packs a latest-generation processor. These three things also apply to Honor's latest mobile phone, the Honor Play. (The article below is in German.)
In budget phones, Corning Gorilla Glass is used most of the time. You don't find this glass in the Pocophone and Honor specs though - it has no cachet or quality features. I once had an Honor phone with this famous Gorilla Glass. It only took a drop of half a metre for the screen to shatter into a million pieces.
The screen is an IPS LCD. No OLED, but given the price, that doesn't surprise anyone. Another special feature: the 18.7:9 aspect ratio. That didn't bother me too much. But what does bother me is that the screen reflects a lot in sunlight. This is due to the glass, not the screen.
Xiaomi has equipped the Pocophone with Bluetooth 5.0. In the developer options, as usual, you have the option of choosing between AAC, aptX or aptX HD audio codecs. The phone has a headphone jack on top, which is pretty handy. As for the stereo speakers, they're useless. If you can call them stereo! Because for Poco, stereo means that music comes out of the bottom speaker and the mini speaker in the notch at the top. The top one isn't even half as loud as the other. I'm sure you can well imagine what that sounds like.
The streamlined NFC
The Pocophone doesn't have NFC. NFC stands for Near Field Communication in French. The lack of this feature has already annoyed me just after I took the phone out of its packaging, because I like to transfer my data - or at least some of it - this way to a new phone.
Cashless payment with the Pocophone is only possible from apps that work without NFC. Twint is currently one of these.
Netflix without HD
With the Pocophone, you can't watch Netflix in HD resolution. The resolution only goes up to 540p. This isn't because Xiaomi wanted to save money, but because Widevine L1 copy protection is missing. Widevine is a DRM platform. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, a service designed to prevent unauthorised copying of video data. Google Play Movies and Amazon also use the DRM service.
Widevine is divided into three security levels: L1, L2 and L3. The Pocophone only has the lowest level, L3. To stream in HD, the L1 specification is required. And to obtain L1, the device must be certified by Google. Certification is not subject to a licence fee.
When I'm on the train, I often watch Netflix. Imagine that I don't see any difference. Maybe it's because everything on the train is shaking and the sunlight reflects off the screen. But I can't see any difference, even when I'm sitting quietly at my desk. On a television, such a low resolution would certainly be immediately noticeable. On the smartphone's small screen, you can easily do without HD.
You can compare for yourself here. At the top, the HD resolution of the HTC U12+ and, at the bottom, the SD resolution of the Pocophone.
You can compare for yourself here.
I understand the community's protests though. Streaming without HD is not in tune with our times.
Huawei also faced the Widevine issue with the MediaPad M5. However, L1 certification was later achieved via an update. Other phones, such as the Mi Mix 2 and Mi 6 don't have L1 either, as do the Oneplus 5 and 5t.
Yes, it's fast
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor and 6GB of RAM speak for themselves. The Pocophone is fast. Apps open quickly, you can quickly switch between tabs. It works. It's fast. In all the time I've been testing it, the phone hasn't bogged down. The article below is in German.
The fingerprint sensor on the back also responds quickly and it's extremely rare that it doesn't work first time. Once, after eating a croissant in the office, I even managed to unlock the Poco with my greasy finger.
Facial recognition isn't quite as satisfying. Firstly, because it wasn't even installed. To use it, you have to select a country other than Switzerland when you first set up the phone.
Facial recognition is not as satisfactory.
Under Settings, you can change the region later. Facial recognition is then also available in Switzerland. For my test, I selected the India region. Until the end of the test, I didn't encounter any problems or inconveniences, I was able to use the phone in all languages. If I still find something that doesn't work for me, I'll add it as an update to this article.
Facial recognition sometimes works well in the dark, sometimes not so well. When it's very dark, not so well. The manufacturer talks about cameras and infrared sensors. My impression is rather that facial recognition only works in the dark if the face is sufficiently illuminated by the screen. But when it does work, it's really fast.
The 4000mAh battery lasts quite a long time. A single charge lasted me two days, but I still had to activate the power saving mode at the end of the second day. Fortunately, the Poco has Quick Charge 3.0 technology, otherwise it would take forever to charge the battery. A quick charge takes me about two hours, but should take less time after about ten charges.
At first, I had a bit of trouble with the notifications light. This also lights up when the mobile is being charged and is located under the screen, not in the notch. As a matter of habit, I therefore always held the phone upside down in the dark.
The camera is decent, but one wonders about the AI
The Pocophone has a 12-megapixel and a 5-megapixel camera. Poco uses a 1.4μm pixel sensor in the main lens. For comparison: the Mi 8 also has a 1.4μm pixel, the Huawei P20 Pro a 1.55μm. Nevertheless, camera-wise, we can see that many concessions have been made compared to the Mi 8. Impossible to take great photos in poor lighting conditions. This is certainly due to the fact that Poco has not installed an optical image stabiliser (OIS). Only EIS for videos is included. With f/1.9 and f/2.0 brightness, the Pocophone's camera also underperforms compared to the Mi 8. The review below is in German.
On its homepage, Poco is advertising its AI camera. It shows photos taken with AI and photos taken without. When I look at my photos, I'm unable to tell whether they were taken with AI or not.
The only thing you notice is that the image with AI is slightly less yellow and the sky is less saturated, i.e. a little brighter.
In contrast to Huawei's KI, we don't really understand what the AI is for. When the AI function is activated, it tells me most of the time that I'm photographing clouds. Occasionally a small sun is drawn, but nothing is optimised. But nothing is optimised.
In portrait mode, which you use for the bokeh effect, AI cannot be activated. The bokeh effect is sometimes good, sometimes not so good. Even in normal mode, you usually get a little bokeh effect. The phone also lets you take HDR photos. Again, it's hard to tell the difference from normal photos.
In summary, I can say that the camera takes good photos when the light is favourable, and bad photos when it's less so.
After all, if you zoom in on the images, the resolution is still about right. Poco forgoes soft focus here, as Honor does, for example. Details come out well this way.
The special selfie camera has 20 megapixels, which is very promising. It's just important to disable the 'beautify' mode completely before taking a photo. If it remains on, you look like some kind of doll and not yourself at all.
So, selfies aren't bad at all.
MIUI - a meowing cat
In the Pocophone, Poco has installed its MIUI interface on Android. Then another Poco Launcher on MIUI. The whole thing is called MIUI 9.6 for Poco. I don't like it.
In the videos from Poco India, the App Drawer looks great. Mostly, because apps can be hidden in the drawer and filtered by, for example, entertainment, communication and lifestyle apps. Well, I don't know why, but it doesn't work for me. I've tried several regions, looked for updates and tried the different themes. It just won't work. The App Drawer remains as it is, with all the apps and no ranking. If you have a Pocophone and this works for you, let me know in the comments.
Update 18.09.2018: sorting and filtering now work at home too.
MIUI wants to be special. So special that you can even swap the back key and the menu key. They call them mirror keys. Luckily you can disable this function. It was enabled on my phone by default.
MIUI and notifications, a difficult subject to tackle. It all starts with the fact that the battery charge level cannot be displayed as a percentage. What's more, you can only display eleven toggles in the top notification bar. There's no second page and you can't add any other icons. The only thing you can do is move them around.
Notification icons, like Whatsapp, don't exist in the status bar (i.e. the bar next to the time, network connection, etc.), probably because the notch is too wide. In the notifications bar, MIUI still shows me Whatsapp notifications at the bottom, even though I've prioritised them. Also, notifications from the same apps are usually not summarised, but just displayed, scattered somehow. [[image:16561778]]At the top, in the status bar, no icons are displayed and the key mirror image is automatically activated, making navigation super annoying
But at least Xiaomi has promised that by the end of the year, Android Pie will be on the Pocophone. Today, the latest security updates are from July 1. That's OK.
Is a good processor enough?
The Pocophone is a very cheap mobile phone with a top-class processor. But a good processor is still not enough to make a flagship phone.
The Pocophone lacks too many things to make it a flagship.
The finish should be nicer, the edge thinner and the notch smaller. Xiaomi has created its own interface with MIUI for Poco, but it remains to be seen whether this really makes sense.
The Pocophone is expected to have a slimmer edge and a smaller notch.
The Pocophone is the best you can get if you want a mid-range phone. I'd recommend it, because it's hard to find anything better at this price. But the Pocophone has had to make too many concessions to compete with the market giants. The Pocophone just doesn't measure up to the high-end models.
Testing devices and gadgets is my thing. Some experiments lead to interesting insights, others to demolished phones. I’m hooked on series and can’t imagine life without Netflix. In summer, you’ll find me soaking up the sun by the lake or at a music festival.
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