Review: Xiaomi Poco F5 and F5 Pro

Simon Hill

6/10

The gap between mid-range and high-end smartphones has slowly been closing. Spend around $400 on a phone and you can expect a gorgeous screen, a good camera, and enough grunt to run the most demanding mobile games. The features that set the top phones apart are often far from essential.

The same holds true for Xiaomi's Poco F5 and F5 Pro. If you are looking for weaknesses, you won't find them on the spec sheet. These phones pack in everything you need at an attractive price. But the trade-off for this impressive hardware is generic, forgettable design and messy, confusing software. Bloatware and ads lurk beneath the surface. Sure, you can push them under with a bit of work, but is it worth the effort when strong alternatives are so abundant?

The Poco F5 and F5 Pro are almost exactly the same size. The F5 Pro is a touch bigger and heavier, with a curved glass back sliding into a thinner frame. It's funny how a little extra weight gives a phone a more expensive feel. The F5 has a trio of round lenses, much like the latest phones from Samsung and Apple, but the F5 Pro has a more pronounced rectangular camera module with a metal surround, which looks a bit dated to my eyes.

Both have a USB-C port and SIM tray on the bottom edge, but only the F5 finds room for a 3.5-mm audio jack up top. They are relatively lightweight and easy to use one-handed. The F5 has a fingerprint sensor in the power button, while the F5 Pro has an in-display fingerprint sensor. Both worked swiftly and reliably for me.

While the F5 and F5 Pro boast a 6.67-inch AMOLED display with a 120-Hz refresh rate, the Pro has a higher resolution and is slightly more responsive. These are bright, sharp screens that are legible in sunlight, and I found them a pleasure to use for web browsing, gaming, and kicking back with Netflix. The dual speakers are loud and clear.

The F5 Pro gets a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, but the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 in the Poco F5 actually outperforms it in many benchmarks. In everyday use, I did not feel any difference. Both phones can smoothly run games like Real Racing 3 and PUBG Mobile at a high frame rate, and the Pro kept its cool during a monster session of Kingdom Rush Vengeance. Beyond the quirks of Xiaomi's user interface, MIUI 14, I had no issues jumping in and out of apps, scrolling the web, or using the camera.

Stamina is pleasing. You can expect either phone to see you through the busiest days with some change. The F5 has a 5,000-mAh battery. The F5 Pro stretches to 5,160 mAh. I went a couple of days between charges, even with several hours of screen time each day. Both phones come with a 67-watt charger in the box, and I charged the F5 from 29 to 80 percent in just 17 minutes. Only the F5 Pro supports wireless charging, and it is relatively speedy, if you can find a wireless charger capable of delivering 30 watts. The F5 and the F5 Pro models I tested had an ample 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. There are other versions in some markets.

My F5 Pro was finished in a dull white, but it also comes in black. The F5 has a marbled effect in white, and adds blue as an option. My black model has an almost carbon-fiber effect with diagonal lines, but these are all conservative-looking phones. Finally, Gorilla Glass 5 is getting old. You should probably use the included translucent case, especially since the phones are only IP53 rated. Rain is fine, but immersion will probably kill them.

The triple lens cameras in the F5 and F5 Pro are identical, consisting of a 64-megapixel main lens, an 8-megapixel ultrawide, and a 2-megapixel macro lens. You also get a 16-megapixel selfie camera in each phone, and while you can dig into settings to snap a full 64-megapixel shot, I don't advise it. Likewise, for extreme close-ups, you might dig into the menu to find the macro option, but you can expect woefully inferior shots.

The camera has no trouble turning out shareable photos in good lighting, and the selfie camera is fine. The portrait mode on the main and selfie lens struggles with edges and stray hairs, but it produces a decent bokeh effect. The main camera has a night mode that does a passable job, but inevitably noise creeps in the darker it gets. It cannot match something like Google's Pixel.

The only difference on the spec sheet is that the Pro can record video in 8K, while the F5 is limited to 4K. The 8K video I recorded to test, however, was very jerky. Recording 4K at 30 fps, on the other hand, was impressively smooth, and both phones have optical image stabilization (OIS), so no need to worry about shaky hands.

Xiaomi packs in its version of standard apps, including a browser, gallery, video, security app, and a few more. It also bundles a weird assortment of third-party apps and games onto Poco phones. I am not a fan. Who wants Facebook or Block Puzzle Guardian preinstalled? The privacy policy you must accept to use Xiaomi's apps is off-putting, but apart from data collection concerns, the apps are inferior to Google's versions. The good news is that you can uninstall or ignore most of the bloatware.

Sadly, it's not as easy to get rid of MIUI. Upgrading from an older phone or another Xiaomi model might not be a big deal, but coming from a Pixel, Xiaomi's user interface feels terribly busy. There are some strange differences that make navigation errors all too frequent. Having to swipe down on the left for notifications and on the right for quick settings is annoying. These quirks add friction, and because your phone is likely the device you use most, the frustration accumulates.

Xiaomi says the Poco F5 and F5 Pro will get two years of Android updates and three years of security updates. That's below par compared to competitors like Samsung or Google, and you can expect to wait a while, as Xiaomi is not the quickest to update when new Android versions drop.

Early-bird prices at $429 and $329, respectively, might tempt you, but only if you're in the UK, since the phones aren't sold in the United States. They're both iterative, but then again, iterative updates have become the norm amid a smartphone sales slump.

There are abundant Android alternatives in the same ballpark. Said ballpark includes all of Google's Pixel phones, which remain at the top of our Best Android Phones Guide, along with the Samsung Galaxy A54 5G (8/10, WIRED Recommends) and the Nothing Phone (8/10, WIRED Recommends). I would pick any of these marvelous mid-rangers ahead of the Poco F5. You can also find solid options for less in our Best Cheap Phones guide.

The Poco F5 and F5 Pro boast good specs for the money, but that's no longer enough to stand out. If you're going up against Google's camera and software features, Samsung's quality, or even Nothing's distinctive design, the Pocos are found wanting. A phone must be more than the sum of its parts.