Xiaomi PocoFone F2 Pro

The F2 is the popular “flagship killer” followup to the Poco F1, giving it rather large shoes to fill. Let’s see if it manages the job.

- Ren Alcantara

DESIGN

The Poco F2 is a simply designed device. In trying to keep the cost of the unit down, it is created with few frills. The front of the device is dominated by a large 6.67-inch Super AMOLED display, and unlike practically every other current-generation flagship, the sides are nice and flat—something I actually like better than the trend towards curved-edge displays. The front is protected by Gorilla Glass 5, and the nicely colored rear (a shimmery blue, in our demo unit) is given the same protective treatment. The camera cluster is oriented in a rounded “X” shape inside a slightly raised circle, and there’s nothing but a bit of Poco branding at the bottom aside.

While for the most part, the phone is devoid of fancy gimmicks, it does have a pop-up front camera with illuminated sides. The LEDs in the pop-up unit also serves as the device’s notification LED, so whether it’s face-down, or with the screen up, you can see the status of your notifications as long as you have eyes on the top edge. Very clever. I like it.

HARDWARE

The whole point behind the original Poco F1 was to deliver performance at a lower cost than their competition. This holds true for the F2 as well, as can be seen in its spec sheet. It has the Snapdragon 865 SoC, an Adreno 650 GPU and up to 8GB of RAM under the hood. You also get up to 256 GB of storage, and a dual-SIM slot, though no expansion slot for storage.