Xiaomi today held the regional unveiling of their new sub-brand — POCO — with its first smartphone, the POCO F1. It is the new budget-focused flagship phone that’s made it to India before any other part of the world and is now coming to the UAE. It packs flagship features, promising camera, top of the line chipset and the most important, an insanely low price tag.
It’s the cheapest Snapdragon 845 smartphone that starts selling at mere AED 1,249 (approx $300). In the UAE, the POCO F1 family has two variants— 6GB RAM/64GB storage and 6GB RAM/128GB storage and will be available in Graphite Black, Steel Blue, and Rosso Red colours.
Gets ample of processing power
The POCO F1 features the top-end Snapdragon 845 chipset with 6GB of RAM. On top, it gets LiquidCool Technology cooling system for thermal management. The company claims that it delivers sustained peak performance for extended periods. It is also claimed that the system is 300% more effective than conventional, non-liquid cooling solutions as it allows heat from the CPU to dissipate in a go. To make it even speedier, the phone uses an LPDDR4x DRAM and UFS 2.1 storage.
Bigger battery than most competitors
We have seen phones like the OnePlus 6 or Oppo Find X killing it with the performance, but it’s uncommon to find a big battery on them. POCO F1 get a 4000mAh cell, which is said to sustain 8-hours of continuous gaming. Moreover, with the Qualcomm QC 3.0 support, it shouldn’t take unusual charging time.
Borrows flagship camera setup from the Mi 8
It’s not revolutionary, but the rear camera setup on the POCO F1 looks quite promising on paper. To have an idea, it’s the same module that was seen on the Mi 8 earlier this year. It gets a 12MP Sony IMX363 primary sensor with 1.4-micron pixel size and a 5MP secondary sensor. It gets dual-pixel autofocus technology that was first seen on the Samsung Galaxy S7, and it enhances focus speed and accuracy.
Up front, there’s a 20MP sensor featuring Super Pixel tech that is said to combine information from four pixels into one large 1.8-micron pixel for clearer images with minimum noise.
Both the cameras get AI features for photos. Xiaomi says the AI intelligently identifies and optimizes the images in real-time by judging the scene. It is pre-fed with 206 scenes across 25 categories.
What else?
POCO F1 also includes a tweaked MIUI launcher called the POCO launcher, which will be available on the Google Play store eventually. The launcher is a slightly improved version of MIUI, which feels faster and smoother. For a change, the POCO F1 comes with an app drawer that can automatically categorise apps. Moreover, MIUI for POCO also priorities security and regular updates from Google.
The launcher is currently based on Android Oreo 8.1, but the company has promised to release the Android P by Q4 2018.
POCO F1 Price and availability
The POCO F1 will retail at AED 1,249 for the 6GB+64GB and AED 1,349 for the 6GB+128GB configuration. It will go on sale at Mi stores and mi-mena.com as well as official partners like Etisalat, Noon and Carrefour.
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