Poco are known for their flagship-killing smartphones but they're switching gears now with the new Poco M3. It's a phone with an entry-level price but it still brings some competitive mid-range features, like awesome battery life and stereo speakers. Let's see what it's all about in our full review.
Design and build:
The Poco M3 is an entry-level smartphone, but you wouldn't guess it at first glance. Sure the back is plastic, and Poco doesn't try to hide that and manages to lookunique with the glass accent and Poco logo. Instead of pretending to be a shiny glass, the back panel is matte with a rough, almost leathery texture.
This adds plenty of grip. The frame is made of plastic as well, and it's rather sharp and angular, which adds even more grip. The Poco M3 isn't light - almost 200 grams - partly because of its huge battery pack, but it feels great in the hand.
6.53'' IPS LCD:
On the front is a large 6.53-inch IPS LCD screen, covered by Gorilla Glass 3, with a 1080p resolution and a droplet-shaped notch at the top for the selfie cam. This display is pretty nice, 1080p is great to have at this price point.And content on the screen looks plenty sharp.
Contrast is good with deep enough blacks and the brightness is decent. We measured up to 440 nits maximum in auto mode when in bright conditions.
Colors aren't too accurate out of the box, but we were able to achieve some great color accuracy through the color settings.
Speakers and headphone jack:
What surprised us about the Poco M3 is that it not only has a 3.5mm jack for headphones, but also a pair of dedicated stereo speakers - something you usually see on premium devices. They're mounted on the top and bottom of the frame, and sound pretty well-balanced.
Overall their performance is some of the best we've heard recently. The Poco M3 scored a ''good'' mark in our loudness test and you get solid bass and superb mid-tones, too.
Battery life and charging:
Another striking feature of the Poco M3 is the battery life, thanks to its huge 6000mAh power pack.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a phone with better battery endurance. The Poco M3 was able to score an incredible rating of 154 hours in our battery life tests! Charging speed, on the other hand, isn’t too impressive.
The M3 supports up to 18W charging, with its bundled adapter we were able to charge from zero to only 25% in half an hour.A full charge would take almost 3 hours. Waking up and unlocking the Poco M3is done with a side-mounted fingerprint reader. It's quite responsive, though it's not as fast as some other readers we've seen lately, perhaps due to the unlock animation.
As far as storage goes, you can opt for 64 or 128GB onboard,and this is expandable through microSD.
The Poco M3 user interface is MIUI 12 over Android 10. It is the same as what you'll find running on recent Xiaomi smartphones. While many functions are provided by Google's apps, there are some proprietary ones like the Gallery, Music, or Security apps.
In MIUI 12 you can split the notification shade into 2 panels - the notification panel and the control panel, like what you'd see on iOS. There is an app drawer enabled by default that storesall of your apps and organizes them into categories, if you like. Finally, even on our unit we saw occasional ads within certain apps or when the virus scanner fires up after installing something from the Play Store. And some markets may have it even worse than that. Under the hood of the Poco M3 is a Snapdragon 662 chipset,which is a recently released, but low-end silicon.
It does an okay job for this class but performance is one area in which the budget nature of the Poco M3 shines through. Though you may encounter a stutter from time to time when swiping the home screen or switching between apps. You might encounter some issues when running heavier apps or games, unless you turn down graphic settings or even turn down the game's resolution to 720p. Once you've done that, you might be able to make a decent go of it. Now, onto the Poco M3's cameras.There are three cameras on the back, but it's a basic setup.
There's a 48MP Quad-Bayer camera, a 2MP macro cam, and a depth sensor. Photos from the main camera come out at 12MPand during the day these are superb for this class. There's more than enough detail, balanced sharpness, good contrast, and lively colors. Dynamic range is average and there is a bit of corner softness and visible noise, but overall these photos are much better than we expected.
The depth sensor is here to help out in Portrait mode and these photos come out pretty nice. There's good detail, proficient separation, and natural-looking defocused backgrounds. Close-up shots taken with the macro cam are okay if there's enough light. You can get enough detail for 2MP and low noise, but contrast isn't great. The trouble is, since focus is fixed, it usually takes multiple tries to get a macro shot to come out sharp. In low light, photos from the main camera are mediocre in quality. There's enough detail but the pictures are dark and quite noisy,with washed-out colors. We did notice that if you switch on the AI Camera mode at night,you get a brighter photo with some restored highlights.
And there's also support for a dedicated night mode. It brightens the whole scene, restores the clipped highlights, and wipes out the noise. Though this results in a loss of fine detail.
The overall result isn't bad though. For selfies, the Poco M3 has an 8MP front-facing camera. These photos have ok contrast and colors, and a mediocre amount of detail. There's visible noise and average dynamic range and we ran into occasional issues with the exposure, too. Videos can be recorded in up to only 1080p resolution at 30fps. This footage has okay contrast and colors, average detail, and a narrow dynamic range.
There's no support for electronic stabilization here. So, that’s the Poco M3. This phone punches above its weight class by offering a large FullHD screen, incredible battery life, great-sounding stereo speakers, a feature-packed interface, and a surprisingly good main camera. Plus, even though it's plastic, I really like its textured back design. Of course, there are compromises to be made.
It is most noticeable with the performance, which can run into hiccups here and there. Plus the camera setup isn't very versatile and both selfies and video recording are nothing to write home about.
But still, the overall experience is a lot more than you'd expect for this price. And if you're shopping for an entry-level smartphone or want to save some money on a mid-range smartphone, the Poco M3 deserves our recommendation.
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