Poco M2 Pro review

Performance

• Snapdragon 720G
• Up to 6GB of RAM

The performance of the Poco M2 Pro is just as good as I had with the Redmi Note 9 Pro. Thanks to the Snapdragon 720G chipset, the performance of mid-range smartphones has never been better under Rs 15,000. The Snapdragon 720G is an octa-core chipset with two high-performance Kryo Gold cores clocked at 2.3Ghz and six high-efficiency Kryo Silver cores clocked at 1.8GHz. There is Adreno 618 GPU clocked at 750Mhz that takes care of graphic performance. 

It is an 8nm chipset with an excellent balance between performance and battery life. It does fall behind in GPU-driven tasks such as gaming, but in almost every other scenario, we are looking at a top performance here.

If you are a regular user who uses the phone for calls, social media, and other apps, the phone will never let you down. In my testing, I did not find any lag or stutter. The device comes in three configurations - 4+64GB, 6+64GB, and 6+128GB with a dedicated microSD card slot onboard. Since the MIUI is slightly heavy and eats up a chunk of memory, we suggest you get a 6GB variant for a Rs 1,000 extra. 

Another welcome addition with the chipset is India’s own NavIC navigation system by ISRO in addition to the GPS / A-GPS / GLONASS / BEIDOU.

Gaming

Smartphone gaming has never been as big as it is right now. While the CPU is capable enough for most tasks, the GPU bottlenecks the gaming performance. This is perhaps best seen on PUBG Mobile where the Poco M2 Pro hovers around the 45fps mark on lowest settings. If gaming is your biggest priority, we suggest checking out phones such as the Realme 6 which has the MediaTek Helio G90T chipset. Its GPU performance is unmatchable for the price, even if it comes at the cost of heating.

Regardless, the Poco M2 Pro is still a capable gaming smartphone for most games that are not extremely heavy or demanding. Heating was minimal too. The big and tall display comes handy to provide an expansive canvas. The headphone jack is still around for a more immersive gaming experience.

These make it one of the better gaming smartphones for the price, which excels at everything else too.

Software

• Poco launcher over MIUI
• No ads in the interface

Another place where Poco borrows from Xiaomi is the software skin. Running Poco launcher atop MIUI 11, we get all the benefits that we’ve come to expect from these phones along with a layer of skimming and refinement, sans the ads in the interface. The result is one of the most functional Android skins in the segment.

It’s far from stock Android but boasts of numerous granular customizations to make it your own. Themes, icons, fonts and other major UI elements can all be changed. There’s a system-wide dark mode too. It also adds an app drawer.

In our usage, the Poco M2 Pro seemed well optimized for daily work and there weren’t any major bugs that needed attention. It also takes care of MIUI’s tendency of pushing unnecessary notifications, making the overall software experience rather enjoyable.

Biometrics

Just like several other mid-range smartphones this year, the Poco M2 Pro also comes with a side-mounted fingerprint scanner which is integrated with the power button doubles. It is a natural position and can be reached easily. Of course, it’s an active scanner and can wake the device at any time. It will take some time to get used to it for those who are new to it. Additionally, you also get a face to unlock feature which does the job pretty well. 

Audio

The loudspeaker on the Poco M2 Pro, while clear, has very low output levels. We often found ourselves cupping our hand around the bottom, even while indoors. Thankfully, it does support audio over USB Type-C as well as the 3.5mm headphone jack. Output via earphones was good.