Poco F2 Pro review: Cutting the right corners

The Poco F2 Pro has a lot going for it — a great display, top-tier specs, brilliant battery life — all in a $499 package. If you’re not fussed about camera performance, this is a tremendous deal.

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The Pocophone F1 was a smartphone that truly focused on value for money. It included the important features and excluded the unimportant ones. We liked it because of its fantastic optimization of features, specs, and value.

Fast forward almost two years, the Poco brand has had more than just a name change. This time around, the latest device is looking and feeling very different. Can Xiaomi’s Poco F2 Pro match the hype and value of its predecessor?

Find out in Android Authority’s Poco F2 Pro review.

Poco F2 Pro review: Here’s the deal

Xiaomi’s Poco brand sells budget-friendly smartphones. The company put its name on the map after its pilot device launch — the Pocophone F1. The F1 was released at a crucial time when many of the top devices were starting to breach the four-figure mark in terms of cost. The F1 came in and woke up the market and showed consumers that you didn’t need to spend big bucks to get big specs.

The F2 Pro carries this idea forward. It’s a smartphone that costs half that of a true flagship, and yet it offers flagship specs. Can it deliver in the speed department given its top-to-bottom redesign?

Design

If you’re wondering if you’ve seen this design before, it’s because you have. The Redmi K30 Pro and the Poco F2 Pro share the same chassis. On both front and back, we’re treated to Gorilla Glass 5 with metal framing the device. This is a huge change from the predominantly polycarbonate construction of the original F1. The F2 Pro feels like a more premium phone in the hand than its predecessor, helping it fit into a smartphone market that skews toward the high end.

Up front there’s an uninterrupted display. The bezels surrounding said display are fairly thin, adding to the Poco F2 Pro’s good looks. The selfie camera is housed in a pop-up mechanism, which also houses the notification LED — a welcomed feature, as many smartphones lack it. The pop-up camera seems smooth and fairly quick to jump out of its slot. There’s also an IR blaster and headphone port on the top. The left side is bare, but on the right there is a volume rocker and a red power button. The buttons feel relatively clicky and tactile. I didn’t experience any creaks or rattles during my time with the device, either. On the bottom, there’s a USB-C port running at USB 2.0, a dual SIM tray, a mono speaker, and a microphone.

The quad-camera circle is positioned around back close to the top edge. It looks rather like the circular module of last year’s OnePlus 7T. The flash sits just below it, and the Poco logo is right at the bottom.

The optical in-display fingerprint scanner was finicky, sluggish, and unresponsive at times. The original F1’s traditional scanner was rapid, so this is a shame. Xiaomi did not make the phone to be water-resistant, but you wouldn’t expect that in a device at this price. The healthy array of colors means there’s an option to suit most people’s tastes.

The Poco F2 Pro’s build quality is far superior to its predecessor’s.

The phone as a whole feels well put together. I was impressed with just how much better the F2 Pro felt to use than the F1.

Display