POCO X4 Pro Review - $250 iPhone Destroyer?

for the last week i've swapped out my 1200 iphone 13 pro max for this 250 budget phone this thing costs five times less and yet somehow it keeps up this is the poco x4 pro it's a successor to the poco x3 lineup that took the internet by storm over the last two years but this time around they've taken that secret formula and push it to the next level and it's off to a flying start with this packaging you get a clear squidgy case a screen protector the phone itself a 67 watt turbo charger apparently and a usbc cable [Music] so i'm going to show you why this phone in particular is so ridiculously impressive but then i also want to show you how it is the epitome of every single thing that is wrong with the budget phone market right now so the very first thing that you'll notice is how well designed it is not luxury per se it lacks the density of a flagship but the glass back gives it a touch of elegance there's absolutely zero flexing or signs of sloppy construction and the fact that the phone is not too heavy combined with the tight corners means that i think it pulls off the completely flat look without feeling jabby or leaving marks in your hand but even more so than the design pockets just they've just nailed the feeling of using the phone you really get the impression that they've agonized over the details which is not something i thought i'd be saying about a pocophone the side mounted fingerprint scanner means that by the time you've tapped your power button you're in the haptics are so good that they took me off guard every action you take is rewarded with a soft reassuring vibration every time you tap a button in the ui every time you push a slider to the end every time you turn the phone on standby plus this phone just ticks boxes it's got a dual speaker one firing at the bottom one firing at the top an ir blaster to use it as a tv remote a headphone jack and even ip53 splash proofing i'm like me but if i had to isolate one thing about this one thing that's just too good for less than three hundred dollars because it's the easiest place to cut corners it's this screen you wanna know why this barely feels like a downgrade from my iphone it's because of how bright and fluid this display is with the only interruption being this tiny little hole punch up top there is a bit of a chin at the bottom but that's quite significantly countered by the fact that the panel itself is a 120 hertz amoled 1200 nit almost perfectly color accurate experience the latter being a a treat that i was not expecting but yeah i mean i can confidently edit my photos on this phone and be rest assured that when i post them they're gonna turn out the way that they look on this screen you know that battery test we made recently i made the final edit to the thumbnail of that video on this phone the display quality was the achilles heel of the poco x3 but this time they've genuinely taken that weakness and turned it into a strength and so now i've been handing this phone to person after person over the last few days asking them to have a flick through the ui and then guess how much this thing costs i've had 399 400 450 even 500 not a single person was close mind you i don't have an exact price for this right now all i've been given is a ballpark figure of between 250 and 300 but you can see the point right and if you are enjoying this video then a sub to the channel would be polite and poco has somehow managed to do all of this while still over delivering on the power experience it doesn't feel quite flagship there is some like hesitation when you're rapidly flicking between abs it does take an extra half a second to load photos but the fact that you are getting a strong mid-range chip in this case the fairly recent snapdragon 695 means that for scrolling and browsing and to be honest even 90 of gaming you might not even realize the difference coming from a flagship phone i wouldn't call myself a hardcore phone gamer but i have imported my entire repertoire of go 2 games and they all run perfectly at high settings and while playing them i haven't had to think once about battery with what i would say are average days of playing scrolling and photo taking you know about five hours of screen on time i'm ending these days with a minimum of 30 left and that is with 120 hertz refresh rates enabled and then from that 30 it literally takes 25 30 minutes with this fast charger until i'm back to 100 again wow now all of this begs a very obvious question how how on earth did budget phones just a few years ago look like this with poor lcd screens puny looking cameras and laggy performance and yet now you can get the full flagship shebang for just 250. i'll tell you and i would say this is the problem with 90 of budget devices nowadays see smartphones are getting more and more complex we've now got 5g we've got three plus cameras on the back we've got really advanced software features and ai but with a cheap phone you can't possibly implement all these things properly and at the same time it's become easier than ever to just pretend so this is what most of these companies resort to because an average consumer isn't going to know any better most of the real progress being made here is happening on the inside and in other intangible ways but in order to keep selling phones these companies just have to keep exaggerating the more visible features further and further to the point where these phones now they quite often look like they do something without really doing it properly so for example 5g this phone technically has 5g it's in the marketing material it's on the back of the phone it's in the name this phone is actually called the poco x4 pro 5g but just like pretty much every budget phone the 5g here is not actually reliable enough to make it worth spending the extra 10 a month to actually upgrade to a 5g contract and so i reckon that 95 of users will be impressed by the fact that it has 5g and might well be swayed by it as it likens this phone to more expensive phones that do actually have better antennae and support more 5g bands but they'll never actually use it on this phone or for another example the software this is not bad software for the most part it is tactile fluid and feet ridge it just it feels like it's built to mislead people a bit like how this is never mentioned you wouldn't know this before buying it but the poco x4 pro is absolutely rammed with bloatware i counted up the number of apps the phone starts with they have a guess actually 30 40 nope 61 there are 61 apps pre-installed on this phone and that includes games shopping apps even travel agency apps littered with spammy offers it looks like they've also created a new screen that pops up every single time you install an app just so they can show you an ad it's not a big deal if you're in the know it'll probably take you 10 minutes to get rid of all the bloat and disable the ads but i'm just trying to make you aware of how these companies are managing to make phones that are this good so affordable they'll be getting paid to have these apps and these ads pre-installed on their phones but there's another catch like the skin that this phone is running on is called miui 13. and my best guess as to why they've called it miui 13 is to give people who are less in the know the impression that it is running on the future of android android 13. but it isn't doing that it's not even running on the current version of android android 12 it is in fact running on android 11 from 2020 then knowing poco's track record it'll most likely never get an android update beyond android 13. again it's not a deal breaker especially given that more recent versions of android they aren't as major and upgrade as they used to be but it's yet another slightly hidden way that the company's managing to squeeze out a little bit more profit the most obnoxious example of this by far though is this camera system it looks wild doesn't it i'm pretty sure they've made it like this to remind you of the 1400 xiaomi mi 11 ultra with that camera module that spans the entire back of the phone and it's got all the buzzwords it's a 108 megapixel ai triple camera but only in the technical sense of the words to clarify for the price it is not bad in broad daylight it's actually rather capable you can get decent natural background blur and plenty of detail with that 108 megapixel mode but it gets completely demolished in anything even resembling low light the video quality is consistently poor and capped at 1080p and not to mention that these two other cameras the ultrawide and the macro are not something you're going to want to use they're grainy even in like a best case scenario oh and that other camera that's just the word ai for the second time it already says ai once here you've got two ais and neither of them can take a proper video i'm just looking at the grain on my t-shirt right now considering this is like broad daylight that's it's pretty rough to be clear this is the kind of camera experience that you would expect for 250 the camera is fine it's just the way they're making this look and the way they're marketing it i'd find it hard to believe that people won't feel misled it's a bit like if someone released a car that looked like a lamborghini was being marketed as a sports car on a budget but then you buy it and you realize it's actually just using the engine of a scooter here's the crux of this video though the poco x4 pro it's an awesome bit of kit and i 100 recommend it but just be aware that there are no miracles here for 250 you're not getting a thousand dollar flagship there are compromises with a budget phone and you just got to bear in mind that those compromises are becoming much harder to read nowadays than they used to be three four years ago you'd know the second you looked at a phone if it was budget but nowadays companies have got sneakier and the caveats are much less obvious to check out some of the most extreme phones on the planet click here and stay tuned for the 10 million video it's coming really soon and it's going to blow you away my name is aaron this is the boss [Music]

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 5,978,378

Keywords: poco x4 pro, poco, x4 pro, x4, poco x4, review, poco x4 review, unboxing, camera, battery, mkbhd, marques brownlee, tech, smartphones, best budget phone, budget phone, 2022

Id: 8CCtqtva6ok

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 28 2022