Have a POCO for Mother’s Day
Looking for a great gift for a special Mum? Xiaomi’s much lauded sub-brand POCO has just launched its latest models, including its first-ever Ultra model and a new POCO F7 Pro model.
With flagship-level features and top end chipsets at ultra-competitive prices, the upcoming POCO F7 series has been eagerly anticipated by all the major tech magazines and websites, especially after last year’s POCO F6 Pro success on the market.
While Google and Samsung have undoubtedly been the biggest names in Android phones for several years now, the Chinese tech giant Xiaomi has built a formidable reputation for top end phones.
They also have a couple of more budget friendly sub-brands, with Redmi already starting to become very popular in the UK. POCO is another of Xiaomi ‘s sub brands and their earlier models earned some rave reviews on tech websites. When reviewing the POCO F7’s predecessor – the POCO F6 Pro – WIRED lead with the headline “Small Price, Big performance”, TechRadar praised its “Premium Power and Visuals on a Budget” and T3.com went as far as saying “For gamers on a budget, the Poco F6 Pro could be the best phone of 2024, out-performing the competition when it comes to power-to-price ratio”.
So, it’s fair to say that big things are expected of the POCO F7 Pro and POCO F7 Ultra, both released this week. But if you’d prefer to see how a regular everyday user finds the phone rather than tech gurus, then come back to Mums and Dads in around a month because I’ve been lucky enough to get my hands on a review model of the POCO F7 Pro to test for Mums and Dads readers.
I’m not going to be sat at a desk with a checklist of specifications to tick through while writing my review, I’ll be putting the Poco F7 Pro through its paces on our upcoming trip to France. Our review unit will set sail from Portsmouth to Santander, then be taken to some of the highest ski resorts and peaks in the Pyrenees, afterwards it will be taken up the largest sand dune in Europe, in the sea to film the kids surfing, down water-slides at a couple of water-parks, and navigating us the entire length of France, before heading back to the UK via Guernsey.
I expect the F7 Pro to take a lot of images with its two 50MP cameras on this trip, so the whopping 512GB of storage will be handy. The IP68 waterproof and dustproof rating will be put to the test from all the snow that stays in the Pyrenees well into April, not to mention pools, water-slides, the sea and all the sand blowing around on the Dune du Pilat. We’ll also be using it to navigate us while driving in remote regions and walking around a couple of cities, so I’ll have a really good idea how the battery life and connectivity perform too.
I’ll be relying on our 10-year-old daughter and her 13-year-old brother to test the gaming performance, as they’re two of the most critical people I can think of when it comes to “laggy” phones, which is why they’re always asking me if they can use mine rather than their own phones. Hopefully, the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset will keep those two as happy as it keeps all those professional tech reviewers at Wired, Tech Radar and T3!
So, look out for the full review in Mums and Dads at the end of April, but if you can’t wait that long, or need the perfect gift for Mum then the POCO F7 Pro is on sale at Amazon for £399.
