Tech Blog #82 | POCO F5 Pro - Wireless Charging on a POCO For The 1st Time..

POCO, the sub-brand of Xiaomi, is famous for Value for Money Smartphones. POCO F1 was the first rival. Year by year, POCO's F series became famous among people. Last year's POCO F3 was a hit too. And now, it's time for the POCO F5 series. But here, the POCO F5 Pro is the highlight. Let's talk about it.

Starting with the design, the POCO F5 Pro features a sleek and modern touch. It comes with a glass front protected by Gorilla Glass 5, a glass back, but a plastic frame. The device is IP53-rated, providing dust and splash resistance for added durability. And it weighs around 200g only.

The smartphone boasts a 6.67-inch AMOLED display with a 20:9 aspect ratio. The display supports a wide range of colors, offering 68 billion colors, and features a high refresh rate of 120Hz, ensuring smooth scrolling and fluid animations. With support for Dolby Vision and HDR10+, users can enjoy enhanced contrast and dynamic colors. The display also offers a peak brightness of 1400 nits, making it easily visible even in bright sunlight.

Under the hood, the POCO F5 Pro is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset, built on a 4nm architecture. And we all know it's not the brand-new flagship chipset. It's last year's flagship chipset. But it does the job decent, compared to most chipsets. This processor surely ensures smooth multitasking, responsive app launches, and lag-free performance. The Adreno 730 GPU handles graphics-intensive tasks, delivering a lag-free gaming experience.

In terms of memory and storage, the POCO F5 Pro offers multiple options. Users can choose between 256GB of internal storage with either 8GB or 12GB of RAM or opt for the higher-tier variant with 512GB of storage and 12GB of RAM. It's not UFS 4.0 but the UFS 3.1 storage technology ensures fast read and write speeds, enabling quick file transfers.

The POCO F5 Pro boasts a triple camera setup on the rear. It features a 64MP wide lens with PDAF, and optical image stabilization (OIS) for sharp and detailed photos. An 8MP ultrawide lens with a 120-degree field of view, and a useless 2MP macro lens. On the front, there is a 16MP selfie camera that captures decent-quality selfies. The main problem is still, the highest video quality of selfie videos is 1080P @30fps.

When it comes to audio, the POCO F5 Pro features stereo speakers that deliver a satisfactory audio experience. However, it does not include a 3.5mm headphone jack, so users will need to rely on wireless or USB Type-C audio solutions. It also consists of an infrared port for remote control functionality. The device runs on Android 13 with MIUI 14 for POCO, providing a customizable user interface but it's filled with pre-installed bloatware.

The POCO F5 Pro is equipped with a 5160mAh non-removable Li-Po battery, which assures a long-lasting battery life. It supports 67W wired charging, advertised to charge up to 50% in just 15 minutes, and for the first time in a POCO Device,30W wireless charging which is advertised to charge up to 50% in 32 minutes. That's a big plus point for this smartphone.

In terms of pricing, the POCO F5 Pro offers excellent value for money. With a price of $469.00 / €499.00, it provides flagship-level specifications and performance at a more affordable price point compared to many other smartphones in the market.