Its macro camera is bad, just like all tertiary cameras of this spec. The ultrawide is mediocre too, producing images with washed-out mid-tones and significantly different colour character to the main camera’s photos. There’s a very noticeable step down in quality from the main camera, and images don’t hold up too well when you zoom in. The simple fact is that Qualcomm still hasn’t replaced the Snapdragon 870 at the time of writing. This was an unusually capable mid-range chip for its time, and it’s still a very strong performer today in the Poco F4. Triangular indents sit in the camera housing, the finish on the rear cover, while the camera flash LED sits inside a lightning strike-shaped cutout. Not that the Poco F4 looks radically new. It’s just a different shade of generic, with dual flat-glass surfaces, a flat-ish plastic rim, and a stepped camera module that may remind you of the Redmi Note 11 line to which the Poco is a not-so-distant cousin. There’s also something of last year’s Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite to the design, minus the attractively curvaceous camera module. Like the F3, the Poco F4’s battery life isn’t worth shouting about. The F4 uses a 4500mAh cell, and the battery struggled to power the phone through an entire day when set to the max refresh rate, playing plenty of games and using it out and about with 5G.

It’s capable of standing up to a day of use with 4hrs 45mins of screen-on time – what I’d term a moderate-to-intensive day – with just under half a tank left.

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Talking about the camera in detail, the Poco F4 5G might sport a triple-camera setup with a 64MP primary lens with OIS. The smartphone could also come with an 8MP and 2MP camera lens. There is a possibility that these could be ultrawide and depth sensors. You could also expect to get a 20MP front-facing camera. The Poco F4 GT runs Realme’s MIUI 13 software on top of Android 12, the latest version at the time of review. It looks good, but this is one of the quirkier custom interfaces around. For example, messes with the notifications drop down, using left-right swipes to let you switch between the function toggles and your notifications. You still get an FHD+ resolution, as well as flagship-echoing specs of a 120Hz refresh rate and HDR10+ support. It still gets nice and bright, too, to the tune of 900 nits in high brightness mode and 1300 nits at its peak. Gamers will appreciate the 360Hz touch sampling rate, which ensures that it’s responsive to inputs.

Xiaomi’s processing does some heavy-lifting here, and its colour science is pretty punchy. Those vibrant colours are calling out to be shared, but they’re not exactly what you’d call authentic or natural.On a more positive note, the Poco F4 GT’s general performance is excellent. It has the flagship zip that lets you jump from app to app snappily, and despite my reservations about performance, games run very well. The Poco F4 GT is part of a series from Xiaomi that appeals primarily for techies and mobile gamers. Early Poco phones were nigh-on unbeatable in the performance they offered for the money. The 2-megapixel macro camera has actually been downgraded from the 5-megapixel Poco F3, rendering it even more pointless than before. That’s some feat. The operating system runs on Android 12, with Xiaomi’s own MIUI 13 plastered over the top. Offering plenty of customisation options and avoiding the cluttered UI or excessive bloatware that plague some other OS skins, this is an accessible and user-friendly experience. Xiaomi Poco F4 review: Price and competition