Xiaomi‘s sub brand, Poco recently released their budget phone, the Poco M3. The tagline is “More than you expect”. This is Poco’s latest and cheapest phone after their announcement of separation from Xiaomi. Poco entered the scene with their Poco F1 offering flagship level specs at a lower midrange price tag for markets like India and Europe. Their first phone Poco F1 was touted a “flagship killer”. But later on, they decided to make midrange, as well as upper midrange processors for the budget conscious users.
Poco M3 hardware
Display:
The Poco M3 has a beautiful Full HD+ IPS LCD display with a size of 6.53 inches diagonally and a refresh rate of 60Hz. The colours are clear and crisp, and look more natural, when compared to AMOLED displays. The resolution is set at 2340×1080 pixels with an aspect ratio of 19.5:9. The display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3. You can see a dewdrop notch in front of the display which houses the selfie camera. The display also offers support for some features, such as what Poco calls “Sunlight mode,” Reading mode and more.
Build:
Coming to the back, the camera module along with the Poco logo take up a large chunk of the top portion of the phone. This design looks similar to the OnePlus 8T Cyberpunk 2077 edition. The remaining portion of the back features a plastic design with leather finish.
Processor and Storage:
The engine powering this smartphone is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 662. It’s a more efficient version of the older Snapdragon 660. While the Snapdragon 660 used a 14nm process node, this one is based on the more efficient 11nm process node. The Snapdragon 662 uses 4x A73 cores rebranded as Kryo 260 Gold at a clock speed of 2.0GHz, and 4x A53 cores rebranded as Kryo 260 Silver, using a clock speed of 1.8GHz. An Adreno 610 graphics processing unit completes the package.
Coming to the storage variants, the base storage is 64GB with 4GB RAM using UFS 2.1 module, whereas the 1288GB storage with the same 4GB RAM uses a newer UFS 2.2 module.
Battery:
The biggest selling point of this phone is the battery. It comprises of a large, juicy 6000mAh battery which could give the phone around more than 2 days of usage on a single charge. Coming to charging, you can charge the phone completely in around 3 hours with the bundled 18w charger. On a positive note, this budget midrange phone actually comes with a USB C port, as opposed to the standard micro USB port that comes with phones in this price range.
The company also boasted about the huge battery’s “high charge cycle” feature. This means the battery can last for up to 1,000 charge cycles. It also means the Poco M3’s battery can last for more than 2.5 years without degrading significantly.
Cameras:
The Poco M3 comes with a nice camera setup considering it’s price. The primary camera is a 48 megapixel camera that uses pixel binning of 4x 12MP images. There are 2 extra cameras. The first is a 2MP macro camera, and another is a 2MP depth camera for portrait shots. The rear camera offers a slew of modes, including Night mode, Document mode, Panorama and Raw mode. The selfie camera on the front, housed inside the dewdrop notch is an 8MP shooter which provides decent selfie shots.
Other features:
The new handset also has some other features, like a side-mounted fingerprint sensor for authentication, dual speakers with high-resolution audio and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Nowadays, 3.5mm jacks are a rare sight on smartphones.
The Poco M3 ships with MIUI 12, which is Android 10 based. Sadly, at the time of writing, we don’t have any official word on Android 11 or whether Android 12 will ever become available on this device. Hopefully, it’s just around the corner.
Finally, As far as the pricing and availability are concerned, the Poco M3 will start for a very attractive $149 for the 4/64GB option and $169 for the 4/128GB option. In Europe sales begin on November 30, prices are €149 for the 64GB model and €169 for the 128GB model. It is going to be available in blue, yellow, and black. There’s no word on the US availability as yet. But the pricing in dollars hints at a US availability in the near future!
