Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro review: A highly accessible powerhouse
Xiaomi puts the pedal to the metal with its latest budget bargain, the impressively powerful Poco X7 Pro
Pros
- Impressive specs for the money
- Solid IP68-certified design
- Rapid performance
Cons
- Xiaomi’s software is still difficult to love
- No charger in box
- Top model not available in UK
If the Poco X7 offers the outline of a much more expensive phone, then the Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro sets out looking for a fight with the big boys. With a level of performance that embarrasses many a mid-range phone and a couple of stand-out features, it captured my attention from the off.
For those who only have about £300 to spend on their next phone, the Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro promises a lot. However, it’s also saddled with Xiaomi’s clunky software and we in the UK don’t get access to the most powerful model. Can Xiaomi’s budget sub-brand overcome these familiar niggles to offer a clear winner?
Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro review: What you need to know
If we were to rank phones purely on bangs per buck, the Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro would have to feature somewhere near the top of the table. For around the £300 mark it supplies a powerful MediaTek Dimensity 8400 Ultra processor with up to 12GB of RAM, as well as either 256GB or 512GB of internal storage.
There’s a vibrant 6.67in 120Hz AMOLED display with a stated peak brightness of 3,200 nits, and unlike the Poco X7, it’s dead flat. This is housed within a flat-edged plastic body with an unusually advanced IP68 dust and water resistance rating.
Xiaomi has gone with a focused dual camera set-up, consisting of a 50-megapixel main camera and an 8-megapixel ultrawide, wisely stripping out the Poco X7’s 2-megapixel macro camera. Rounding out the camera offering is a 20-megapixel front camera for selfies.
Finally, it runs on an atypically large 6,000mAh battery, and there’s support for speedy 90W charging – though there’s no bundled brick with the global model. Even so, the Poco X7 Pro’s spec list makes for hugely impressive reading.
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Like the Poco X7, this makes the Poco X7 Pro cheaper than its predecessor. Last year’s sole 12GB model of the Poco X6 Pro weighed in at £369, so the X7 Pro is already £20 cheaper than the previous generation, before we even take into account the new, and cheaper still, 8GB variant.
At this sort of price, the Poco X7 Pro is entering into competition with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy A35 5G, the Motorola Edge 50 Fusion and the Nothing Phone (2a) – formidably classy phones one and all.
Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro review: Design and key features
Despite its shared name and similar pricing, the Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro looks nothing like the Poco X7. Where the latter is extremely curvaceous, the Pro adopts the modern iPhone-inspired trend for flat surfaces, including a dead-flat plastic rim.
If anything it looks more functional and less overtly ‘premium’ than its cheaper brother, despite adopting a more up to date look – something that’s perhaps reinforced by the lower number of camera modules on the Pro model, which we’ll discuss more below.
Nevertheless, the Poco X7 Pro feels good in the hand, especially in the vegan leather-backed variant that I was sent (the Green and Silver models use smooth plastic). In truth, I’m not sold on the look of this yellow and black finish, but I do like the feel of the material. I also like how the yellow section’s subtle ridged finish contrasts with the faux leather black section.
You get the same impressive IP68 rating as the Poco X7 – a higher level of water and dust resistance than is offered by many more expensive phones. Interestingly, though, the Pro uses Corning Gorilla Glass 7i around front, which is newer but ostensibly inferior to the Poco X7’s Gorilla Glass Victus 2. Of course, with the latter’s more exposed curved glass design, it’s arguably more vulnerable to damage than the Pro.
This vegan leather model of the Pro measures 75 x 8.4 x 161mm and weighs 198g, which feels nicely balanced in the hand. The smooth plastic variants shave that thickness down to 8.3mm, and weigh a little less at 195g.
Elsewhere, the Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro has much the same points of interest dotted around the phone as the Poco X7. You have a fast and reliable in-display fingerprint sensor, a pair of loud and clear (if slightly thin) stereo speakers and an IR blaster on the top edge. The latter lets you control your TV or hi-fi using the preinstalled Mi Remote app, which I’ve always found to be a useful inclusion.
Xiaomi’s wider software provision remains difficult to love, however. HyperOS is an overstuffed UI that seems to go out of its way to irritate. At one point the phone’s Wallpaper Carousel feature, which adds a bunch of random chintzy images to the lockscreen, seemed to activate without my consent. Elsewhere, there’s too much bloatware and a messy split notification menu, and topping it all off, the phone will only receive three major OS updates and four years of security updates.
Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro review: Display
On paper, the Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro appears to have a very similar display to the Poco X7. It’s another 6.67in 120Hz AMOLED with a sharp 1,220 x 2,712 resolution. We’re seeing these so-called ‘1.5K’ screens appear more and more, and they offer a nice compromise between bog standard FHD/1080p and the flagship-level pixel overload of QHD.
Xiaomi claims that the Pro screen gets 200cd/m² brighter than the Poco X7 in all situations, topping out at 3,200cd/m² in peak HDR scenarios. This may be so, but I only recorded a top brightness of 510cd/m² when auto-brightness was switched off, which is broadly in the same ballpark as the Poco X7, not to mention the Poco X6 Pro.
Where the Poco X7 Pro really shows its Pro mettle is with its colour tuning. I recorded an sRGB gamut coverage of 97.6% against a volume of 100.5%, with an average Delta E score of 1.09. This was in the default Original Colour Pro colour scheme, which means that it’s set up to look more natural right out of the box than the regular Poco X7.
It’s an excellent display all-round, to the point where my day to day experience didn’t noticeably or meaningfully degrade when I moved over to the Poco X7 Pro from the Pixel 9 Pro – a phone that typically retails for £999.
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Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro review: Performance and battery life
While the Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro’s Dimensity 8400 Ultra chip isn’t the fastest that MediaTek produces, it’s still capable of making significantly more expensive phones sweat. An average Geekbench 6 multi-core benchmark score of 6,214 is much better than the Pixel 9 Pro with its custom Tensor G4, for example, and isn’t far off the global model of the Samsung Galaxy S24 with its Exynos 2400.
In GPU benchmark terms, too, the Poco X7 Pro stands up to those two £800-plus phones remarkably well. Suffice to say, the Poco X7 Pro absolutely blitzes everything in the sub-£400 category, including the aforementioned rival trio of the Samsung Galaxy A35, the Nothing Phone (2a) and the Motorola Edge 50 Fusion.
One caveat worth mentioning is that I was sent the very top Poco X7 Pro model, which comes with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM. This model won’t be made available in the UK, with only the 8 and 12GB options being offered. It’s slightly irritating that we weren’t given access to final UK hardware, but the performance difference should be negligible.
Xiaomi has really gone to town with the Poco X7 Pro’s battery, cramming in a huge 6,000mAh cell. While that’s quite a bit larger than the Poco X7’s chunky 5,110mAh battery, however, I didn’t notice a massive uptick in stamina. Indeed, in our regular looping video test, the Poco X7 Pro lasted 21hrs 43mins, which is about 3 hours less than the Poco X7. That’s also well short of the Nothing (2a), the Motorola Edge 50 Fusion and the Samsung Galaxy A35 5G.
Practical usage balanced this disappointing result out somewhat, with a day of moderate usage (around 4 hours of screen on time) leaving me at around 60%. So while it may not have impressed in our testing, it should still get you through a day of even the most intensive usage with ease, and will likely last average users a full two days before they need to plug it in.
When it does come time to juice up, the Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro supports up to 90W charging. Annoyingly, though, while the model I was sent came with said charger in the box, UK retail units won’t ship with one. In my testing, the 90W charger got the Poco X7 Pro from empty to 41% in 15 minutes, and to 82% in 30 minutes.
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Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro review: Cameras
Xiaomi has employed a simpler dual-camera set-up than on the regular Poco X7, and I’m totally behind that decision. We really didn’t need the latter’s 2-megapixel macro camera.
It’s a shame Xiaomi didn’t take the opportunity to bolster the existing two cameras at all, though. It’s the same 50-megapixel Sony IMX 882 main sensor, backed by the same underwhelming 8-megapixel ultrawide. The Pro’s more capable processor provides superior image processing but we’re not talking about a night and day improvement here.
Even so, the main sensor is capable of capturing decent shots in good lighting. Bolstered by a wide f/1.5 aperture and OIS, there’s plenty of detail and extremely vibrant colours. Many people will love that slightly hyperreal look, so this is largely a matter of preference, but I would have preferred a more natural palette. I also noticed the same hints of overexposure on certain shots taken with a low winter sun as I got with the Poco X7, but it’s nothing too offputting.
Night shots demonstrate that you’re not dealing with a top or even mid-tier performer here. You’ll start to notice the encroachment of noise, and a certain amount of grain in those dark skies, though the results are still reasonably bright and clear provided there’s some level of artificial lighting.
The 8-megapixel ultrawide isn’t a great sensor, offering a notable drop-off in clarity. With that said, Xiaomi does better than most to match up the general colour tone of its various cameras, at least.
Curiously, the Poco X7 Pro’s digital zoom only goes up to 10x (below) rather than the Poco X7’s 20x. It’s tempting to conclude that the latter’s macro camera was helping out more than I initially gave it credit for but, given how terrible those extreme zoom shots look, I’m not counting this as a limitation for the Pro.
The 20-megapixel front camera produces reasonable selfies, once you’ve turned the yucky beautifying effect off. I did observe, however, that some of them looked ever so slightly dingy when shooting in the aforementioned low summer sun.
Video is one area in which the Pro has a clear leg-up on the Poco X7, extending to 4K/60fps. The footage I captured was crisp and steady, thanks to that OIS provision, though like the X7, it seemed to pick up a fair amount of wind noise.
Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro review: Verdict
The Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro offers some outstanding specifications for a very low price, though a few caveats take some of the shine off a generally compelling package.
Performance levels are unimpeachable, with a level of power that challenges some of the 2024 flagship crowd. The display, too, is sharp, bright and beautifully calibrated and Xiaomi’s IP68 certification remains rare at this end of the market. The provision of a huge 6,000mAh battery also goes above-and-beyond, even if it doesn’t quite result in the truly epic stamina we’d have expected.
While a £300(ish) price tag for all this is hugely competitive, however, it’s somewhat annoying that the UK isn’t getting everything, whether that’s the top specification or a bundled 90W charger. Xiaomi’s software provision, meanwhile, remains difficult to love.
With all that said, anyone looking for the best performance possible for around the £300 mark needs look no further than the Xiaomi Poco X7 Pro. It’s a highly accessible powerhouse of a phone.
