Poco started as an independent brand in 2018 and its primary objective was to give users something special at a very comparative price point. They launched the Poco M series to continue the journey, and Poco M4 Pro is the latest device in this lineup.

Pocophone is a subbrand of the Xiaomi company and they basically build affordable smartphones. Pocophone was renamed Poco in the year 2020 and now Poco India operates as an independent company.

Initially, Pocophones started its journey by launching Pocophone F1 way back in 2018 and over the years they gradually release F, X, M, and C series phones to spread to various levels.

Over the past four years, Poco launched 11 smartphones in different categories their most expensive phone is the POCO F3 GT edition, and the most affordable is POCO C31. Out of these 11 devices, most of them are rebranded Redmi phones.

Here we take a deep look at POCO M4 Pro which was launched on 28th February 2022 and since then it was one of the cheapest Amoled display phones available in the market.

The POCO M4 Pro comes with a bunch of good features that make it a good choice for the mid-range affordable category. The main highlight is the 6.43-inch Full HD AMOLED 90 Hz display.

Poco M4 Pro is powered by an Octa-core MediaTek Helio G96 processor. The base variant comes with 6GB of RAM. It runs Android 11 with the customize MIUI 13 out of the box and is powered by a 5000mAh non-removable battery.

The camera department is quite good at this price point we get a 64 MP triple camera setup, which Supports 33 Watt fast charging, and in the connectivity department, we have all the options like Bluetooth, WiFi, and NFC except 5G.

Let’s see what we have inside the POCO M4 Pro and also discuss every department in a brief way so after this review you get a clear idea of whether it’s a real midrange king or not.

Specifications:

Design, Build Quality, and Display:

In terms of design, It’s similar to the other Poco M series phones, with a glossy polycarbonate finish on the back and a slightly flatter edge design that looks modern and new.

I’m personally more of a matte finish lover but POCO here provided three color options Black, Yellow, and Blue, and they all are strikes through your eyes for sure.

A plastic back means the device is lighter weight only 179.5g and has a maximum thickness of 8.09mm, it’s a light and slime smartphone in the POCO M series.

The first thing you will notice is that the new Poco Design comes with a huge rear camera island with Poco branding and camera specifications.

Design-wise the M4 Pro is very compact and holding and using the phone in one hand is quite easy. The frame is made of plastic and the flat sides provide plenty of grips.

Now come to the buttons and ports, On the right side we have the volume up and down key and the power key which also act as a fingerprint reader and both keys are well positioned and responsive.

Left we have the Sim slot which supports two nano sim cards and a MicroSD slot, Bottom we have a primary microphone, speaker grill, and a USB Type-C port, on the top we have a secondary microphone, IR bluster, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and another speaker grill. Yes, the M4 pro has dual-stereo speakers.

Coming to the display here M4 pro shines because we have a 6.43 inch AMOLED Full HD + display with DCI-P3 support means you get a vibrant and bright display.

The AMOLED screen supports a 90 Hz refresh rate and 180 Hz touch sampling rate protected by Gorilla Glass 3. The display has 700 nits of brightness and goes up to 1000 nits so the sunlight readability is good.

Although the AMOLED panel doesn’t have the adaptive screen refresh rate or HDR support you get widevine L1 DRM certification means you can streams all digital content in high definition.

Overall the display is great for content consumption and gaming, on top of that the compact design is very durable, and using the phone for long hours is very fun.

Storage And Performance:

Here is one department POCO downgraded the chipset compared to the 5G version of Poco M4 Pro which is powered by the Mediatek Dimensity 810 (2.4 Ghz). Here they use the less powerful Mediatek Helio G96 (2.05 Ghz) processor and considering the price point I’m ok with it.

Helio processors are often used in mid-range phones and here Helio G96 performs well because it’s coupled with 6GB and 8GB RAM. Helio G96 is an Octa-core processor based on 12nm technology where two Cortex A-76 cores clocked at 2.05 Ghz and six Cortex A-55 cores clocked at 2.0 Ghz.

The GPU is Mali-G57 MC2 integrated with Mediatek’s Hyperengine 2.0 Lite technology offers smooth multitasking and gaming performance. Poco M4 pro uses LPDDR4X RAM and the storage is UFS 2.2 so you get a little faster processing compared to other phones in this segment.

In day-to-day usage, I don’t feel any lags or hiccups I’m happy with the overall app opening, gaming, capturing, and playing content over the internet. Mediatek Helio G96 handles everyday tasks pretty well and with 6 GB of RAM even in the base variant, you can expect a decent multitasking experience.

I usually toggle between five to six apps at a time and the M4 Pro managed to keep them in memory just fine seems like Xiaomi has really improved ram management with the MiUi 13.

The M4 Pro has only two downsides, one is the chipset is based on 12nm tech and for today’s standard it’s more of a resource-hungry chipset and the second is an absence of 5G, although it’s not a big issue right now.

So overall the Poco M4 Pro performs well under normal to heavy circumstances, I don’t find any major issues everything runs smooth, and especially gaming is good with an AMOLED 90 Hz display. You can play games like BGMI, New State, Asphalt 9, and COD Mobile on medium settings with consistent frame rates.

The phone also doesn’t heat up even after slightly long gaming sessions thanks to the large D5 heat pipe with multiple layers of heat dissipation material for faster heat dissipation.

Front and Rear Camera:

Generally, Poco phones are having decent cameras and the same applies to the Poco M4 Pro as well, although it has a wide camera arrey in the back with three camera sensors.

The Poco M4 Pro has a 64-megapixel main camera with phase detection autofocus, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide, and a 2-megapixel macro cam for closer objects. You got a higher resolution large sensor main camera than what you’d find on the 5g version of the phone.

In terms of quality, the main 64 MP camera performs well in bright daylight and the photos came up sharp with lots of details. The dynamic range is good and the photo came up crisp with lively colors, considering the price I personally love these images.

The portrait shots have good subject separation and are rendered well the default background blur doesn’t go overboard either looks natural and the wide-angle shots come up really good with enough detail.

Coming to the bad part is the close-up shots from the macro cam where the resolution is just too low and the final image is hazy in some cases.

Low light photos are full of noise with flashy colors but using the dedicated night mode gives you much more balanced highlights brighter shadows and lower mid-tones.

Here are some shots from the rear cam, let’s have a look…

In front, we have a 16 Megapixel punch hole camera and I like the front-facing camera’s performance overall selfies are more detailed than on the 5g version of the phone and the dynamic range and colors look nice.

The Poco M4 pro can shoot videos and only up to full HD (1080p at 30 FPS) resolution and the footage from the main camera is not amazing but it’s not bad either there’s low noise and good detail with accurate colors.

So overall the camera performs well in bright outdoors and slightly low indoors but low light images suffer. Videos are good and very much usable for social media purposes and in this range this overall experience is good.

MiUi 13 with Android 11:

POCO phones are based on Custom MiUi and here we have the all-new MiUi 13 out of the box based on Android 11. M4 Pro runs the POCO version of MiUi which has a new set of icons and the rest looks similar to the Xiaomi or Redmi phones.

You’ll have largely the same highly customizable and snappy experience as other recent phones from the Xiaomi family. The main difference is you can’t disable the app drawer and have your apps on the home screen.

Xiaomi has really improved ram management with the MiUi 13 still it does come with a bunch of bloatware apps and games but you can uninstall most of them however like most of the latest Xiaomi launched the M4 pro based on Android 11 and not the latest Android 12.

In MiUi 13 you get a new set of Wallpaper, Widgets, a personalized Assistant, Fluency, stability, and new gesture-enabled features to ease your multitasking. Also, you get the Google Dialer and messaging app default in MiUi 13. More info about MiUi 13 is here.

Back in 2021 Poco had confirmed that they should bring their custom UI for the Poco phones which is much lighter and simpler than MiUi but we are middle of 2022 and still waiting. I’m curious about that but for right now we have MiUi which works well inside the device.

Battery and Fast Charging:

There is a definite improvement in this section because here POCO included a big 5000 mAh Lithium-polymer cell inside the M4 Pro and as expected the battery life is good for general usage and even for heavy users you don’t have to plug in the device very often.

Under medium usage consisting of taking a bunch of photos, videos streaming, Netflix, and browsing the web alongside some gaming every now and then I managed to get around Eight hours of screen on time here, which I think is sufficient for most of us.

In the charging section, the Poco M4 Pro supports the 33-watt Fast charging and the 33-watt adaptor is included inside which takes 45 minutes to charge from 30% to 100% so it’s not great but acceptable by today’s standard.

Other Important Features:

• The Poco M4 Pro comes with an officially IP 53 rating means some drops of water or light rain are not gonna cause you any harm.

• The SCG Eye care display protects your eyes from the harmful blue lights and it’s a nice inclusion by the company because sometimes we spent long hours with our device.

• M4 Pro supports NFC using Google pay but this feature may vary from country to country.

• Poco doesn’t skip the 3.5mm headphones jack and additionally, we get dual stereo speakers with Hi-resolution Audio certification.

• All the essential sensors are present like Proximity sensor, Ambient light sensor, Gyroscope, Accelerometer, Electronic compass, and IR blaster.

• the side-mounted fingerprint scanner is embedded inside the power button and It’s lightning-fast and very accurate.

• In terms of connectivity, the M4 Pro supports Bluetooth 5.0, WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, hotspot, and satellite navigation systems like GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, and Beidou.

Should POCO M4 Pro Maximize your Fun?

First of all, it’s a fact that every device has some flaws, so it’s better to think like the headline above rather than look at it that way. So after knowing all the above features, you can definitely judge by yourself whether POCO M4 Pro can increase your happiness or not.

When a smartphone is reviewed, the first thing that comes to mind is how good the features are in terms of price, and from that point of view, I really like the M4 Pro where the company has given a good phone at a very competitive price point.

Before buying a phone, there are a few things you must keep in mind the M4 Pro is a 4G phone, so if you want 5G, you will not find it here, the Helio G96 is a capable processor but not expect anything beyond that.

The AMOLED display is great at this price point but it doesn’t have any adaptive refresh rate means its cant toggle between 60 to 90 Hz automatically. A huge camera island on the back and the overall camera quality is good but nothing spectacular.

And if you’re a stock Android lover then you may not like the MiUi 13 because it’s heavy and comes with many preconfigured apps and games, but if the POCO Ui comes in near future then the situation may be changed.

Apart from the above two or three things, overall I like POCO M4 Pro where you get a 90 Hz AMOLED screen, triple rear 64 MP camera, 5000 mAh battery with 33-watt fast charging at ₹14999 ($193) which I think is a great deal.

Last but not least when First Pocophone was launched I was very happy that a company has come up with a great phone for mid-range users but over time it has been seen that all POCO phones are rebranded versions of Redmi phones which has disappointed many like me.