Image: Xiaomi
We take Xiaomi’s latest flagship phone, the Poco F6 Pro out for a spin.
Xiaomi’s latest flagship phone, the Poco F6 Pro is a great statement on value for money when it comes to mobile gaming machines. For a tempting price tag (roughly $470), the phone offers a bit more gaming horsepower than users typically expect from this price bracket on top of other handy features - like a solid camera and lightning-fast charge times. We’ve been taking the Poco F6 Pro for a spin these last couple of weeks, and it’s shaping up to be a pretty great option for mobile gamers in particular. Hence, we'll be focusing on its gaming prowess in this review.
As a note before we begin however, the phone also comes with a cheaper Poco F6 model priced at roughly $370. The two phones actually have some notable differences, such as the Poco F6 Pro having a higher display resolution, faster charging and a better-performing chipset. However, we only tried out the Poco F6 Pro for the purposes of this review, so we won’t be making any subjective comparisons between either phones here.
A pretty great gaming machine
The Poco F6 Pro - which, interestingly, is just a rebrand of Xiaomi’s Redmi K70 - comes with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset. This does make this phone feel a little dated compared to other flagship phones released this year, such as the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (roughly $1.3K) and Honor Magic6 Pro (roughly $960), which feature a next-gen Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. The tradeoff here is that the Poco F6 Pro is a great deal cheaper than the aforementioned phones, and offers a satisfying level of performance nonetheless.
I’ve been using this phone for most of my mobile gaming over the last few weeks, and thankfully, I haven’t run into too many problems with it. Most of my gaming time was split between Zenless Zone Zero and Marvel Snap - though I did take a few other titles like Wuthering Waves, Roblox and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang out for a spin as well. With a 6.67-inch display, a screen resolution of 1440 x 3200 pixels and a 120Hz refresh rate, it's more than suitable to run even the most demanding games.
The Poco F6 Pro markets itself on affordable gaming, and on that note, it very much delivers. I was able to crank every one of these games up to their maximum graphical settings and enjoy relatively smooth gaming performance. Most of my time was spent playing Zenless Zone Zero, and I experienced no noticeable gameplay dips besides, oddly, when I took a gameplay screenshot for this review and saw the game stutter noticeably. During regular gameplay however, I experienced no problems. That's important for a game as reliant on precise input timing as Zenless Zone Zero, but the phone showed similar levels of buttery performance in every other game I tested.
You might need a power bank
The biggest problem gamers might run into with the Poco F6 Pro is its unsatisfactory battery life. The phone boasts a 5,000mAh battery, which actually gives you plenty of time before having to plug it into a socket. That is, unless you’re using it for gaming. Depending on what you’re playing (and your chosen graphical settings), it’s not uncommon to watch that battery tick down from 80% to 50% in the span of an hour. Fortunately, the phone only takes roughly 40 minutes to charge all the way up to 100%, so it won’t be out for too long. There’s also an option to boost the phone’s charging speed located in Settings, but it puts you at risk of overheating your phone even before a long gameplay session begins.
I found that this setting ended up making the phone - specifically its camera lens - burn up quite dramatically when playing games right after charging, so take that how you will. Even in normal conditions, the phone does warm up considerably, if not uncomfortably, after just 40 minutes of playtime. Thankfully, we did not notice any impact on performance as a result of this.
The Poco F6 Pro comes with 12GB of RAM and either 256 or 512GB of storage, which proved more than sufficient for me during the weeks I spent testing it. One downside is that this phone - much like many of its kind at the moment - comes with an annoying amount of bloatware. Mi apps come pre-installed in the phone along with a few Google apps, but it’s the former that seem totally unappealing to use. It only takes a minute or two to get these apps off your screen, but it’s still an annoyance I’d rather not deal with at all.
It’s worth noting that when it comes to making an upgrade to the Poco F6 Pro from prior Xiaomi phones like the 12T, it’s really only worth considering for the boost in gaming performance. This phone features a 50MP main camera, with an additional 8MP ultrawide, 2MP macro and 16MP selfie. The camera takes satisfyingly bright and detailed pictures as a result, but does not give this phone that much of an edge over the 12T. This is a phone for users who value rock-solid performance in either gaming or everyday app use over camera quality. That’s not to say this camera is anything to laugh at - it just pales in comparison to some of its peers, and even a few of Xiaomi’s other offerings.
Verdict
Xiaomi’s latest flagship phone, the Poco F6 Pro offers a lot of value for people who need an affordable mobile gaming machine. It’s one thing for your phone to run Clash of Clans smoothly, and another thing entirely for it to run Zenless Zone Zero or Roblox without seeing a few stutters and framerate drops. If you’re looking to avoid all of that, this phone is a very solid pick. It offers a lot of bang for your gaming buck, but don’t expect it to perform nearly as well in photography.
The Poco F6 Pro is now available for purchase. We received a review unit for this article.