Xiaomi has always offered smartphones with features better than their price tag. And Pocophone – Xiaomi’s sub-brand – seems to follow the footsteps. Pocophone today unveiled their first ever smartphone (named Poco F1) at an event in New Delhi. This could well be a knock-out punch for other smartphones in the same price bracket.

Pocophone Poco F1 features

Build Quality

The design language of Poco F1 isn’t something new or something out of the box. We have seen the design before and it resembles that of Xiaomi Mi 8 on the front. The only difference being in the rear. The Poco F1 doesn’t sport a glass back in favor of a plastic build. This might not be one of the prettiest smartphones you’ve seen but it gets the job done.

Display and the Notch

The Poco F1 features a 5.99 inch Full HD+ IPS LCD 2.5D curved glass display. Not to forget, it features a notch too. But if you don’t like this controversial ‘feature’ you can disable it in the settings menu. The screen features a 19:9 aspect ratio and a resolution of 2160×1080 pixels.

Coming back to the notch, it not only houses the earpiece and front camera but sensors and hardware for IR Face Unlocking. The facial recognition system is similar to the one seen on Xiaomi Mi 8. Namely, the notch contains –

• Infrared lens
• Infrared lighting
• Earpiece
• Proximity sensor
• 20MP front camera

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What lies underneath is something to take note of

Underneath that plastic build of Poco F1 lies a flagship level smartphone. As revealed by recent teasers and as you might have read in the title, it houses a Snapdragon 845 processor and comes with up to 8GB of RAM + 256 gigs of onboard storage.  All of it is powered by a massive 4000Mah of battery!

Software

“Pocophone is a Xiaomi sub-brand so it should come with MIUI” Well, not necessarily. The Poco F1 has its own Poco launcher (which will be available on the Google PlayStore in the upcoming weeks). It resembles Xiaomi MIUI but has a one very notable and welcome difference. The Poco launcher has an app drawer as opposed to MIUI.

On the similarity front, the Poco launcher has a ton of customization options few of them being – hidden apps, group icons by color, and support for third-party icons.

Pocophone has promised that the Poco F1 will receive Android Pie in Q4. Plus, they have said to push out security updates every four months.

Cameras

The Poco F1 features a dual camera setup on the rear which sports a 12MP + 5MP camera setup. It is placed vertically just above the fingerprint sensor. On the front sits a 20MP selfie shooter in the notch. It includes AI camera features and recognition of 206 scenes over 25 categories. Plus, you can shoot portrait mode selfies too.

Pocophone Poco F1 specifications in a nutshell

• 6.18-inch (2246 × 1080 pixels) Full HD+ 18.7:9 2.5D curved glass display, 1500:1 contrast ratio, 84% NTSC color gamut, Corning Gorilla Glass protection
• Octa-Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform with Adreno 630 GPU
• 6GB/8GB LPDDR4x RAM, 64GB / 128GB/256GB (UFS 2.1) storage, expandable memory with up to 256GB with microSD
• Android 8.1 (Oreo) with MIUI 9, upgradable to Android 9.0 (Pie)
• Hybrid Dual SIM (nano + nano / microSD)
• 12MP rear camera with dual LED Flash, f/1.9 aperture, 1.4μm pixel size, Sony IMX363 sensor, Dual Pixel auto focus, a secondary 5MP camera with Samsung sensor
• 20MP front-facing camera with ƒ/2.0 aperture
• Fingerprint sensor, IR face unlock
• 3.5mm audio jack, Dirac HD, Dual Smart PA
• Dimensions: 155.5x 75.3x 8.8; Weight: 180g
• Dual 4G+ VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 ac (2.4GHz + 5GHz), Bluetooth 5, GPS + GLONASS, USB Type-C
• 4000mAh battery with Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 fast charging

Also read – Confirmed: These smartphones will get Android Pie

Poco F1 pricing and availability

The Poco F1 will be available in four variants and they are –

• 6GB + 64GB – Rs 20,999
• 6GB + 128GB – Rs 23,999
• 8GB + 256GB – Rs 28,999
• 8GB + 256GB (Kevlar Edition) – Rs 29,999

The color variants it will be available in are Steel Blue, Rosso Red, and Graphite Black. Consumers will be available to buy the Poco F1 from Flipkart (it will be a Flipkart exclusive) and Mi stores. The first flash sale is scheduled for August 29.

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