Poco M2 Pro

Poco M2 Pro 

Poco Has been very selective about its smartphone portfolio. The brand split from its parent company Xiaomi some time ago and the company launched Poco X2 (Review) more than a year after the launch of Poco F1. With the launch of a flagship killer like Poco F1, the company is now focusing more on the budget segment. With the new Poco M2 Pro, it aims to dominate the sub-15,000 price segment. Poco says that it has enjoyed tremendous success with the Poco X2 and the company hopes to replicate that formula with this phone.

The Poco M2 Pro has been launched in India at a starting price of Rs 13,999 and looking at its specifications, it seems that it could be a strong rival to the Redmi Note 9 Pro and Realme 6, coming with a similar price tag There are two better products. However, just writing the specification on paper does not really reveal the capability of the smartphone. We have reviewed this to see how the Poco M2 Pro performs in real life. Let's see if the Poco M2 Pro is really as good as it is made.

 

Poco M2 Pro design

Poco wants people in India to believe that the M2 Pro is an indigenous phone. For this, the company has given special labels on the front and back of the box. However the strange thing is that the charger that comes with the phone has a Mi logo and when you turn the phone on, you are welcomed with the MIUI logo.

      

The Poco M2 Pro gets an attractive design and is well built, but looks similar to the Redmi Note 9 Pro (review). Everything is completely the same, including the display, buttons, ports, hole-punch and rear camera bump. Poco has used a new pattern on the bottom of the phone. Some minor changes have also been made to the camera module. The M2 Pro has a P2i water-repellant coating, which is said to be splash-proof. The Poco M2 Pro feels slightly heavier and larger in the hand. It has a fingerprint sensor set in the power button and also unlocks the phone with a simple tap.

Poco M2 Pro Performance

The performance of MIUI and the app was excellent during our review. This was largely due to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G chipset. This is the same processor that has been used in Redmi Note 9 Pro and Realme 6 Pro. I am testing the mid variant of the Poco M2 Pro, which has 6GB LPDDR4X RAM and 64GB UFS 2.1 storage and is priced at Rs 14,999. Apart from this, the phone comes with a 4 GB RAM + 64 GB storage variant and 6 GB RAM + 128 GB storage variant, which are priced at Rs 13,999 and Rs 16,999 respectively.

 

Navigating MIUI's interface was fast and multitasking also worked well. App loading in general was fast. Gaming performance was also very good. I played some heavy-graphics games and all went well with good graphics. I did not see any heating problem, even after playing for a long time at a time. Game Turbo is a useful feature, which gives you shortcuts for screen recording, etc. while playing the game.

The video experience on the Poco M2 Pro's display also looks good. However, the single speaker is not very impressive. If you use wired headphones, you can enable software enhancements for audio, but no features are available to increase the speaker volume.

 

Poco M2 Pro Cameras

The Poco M2 Pro has four rear cameras, with a primary sensor of 48-megapixels. It includes an 8-megapixel wide-angle lens, a 5-megapixel macro camera, and a 2-megapixel depth sensor. You get a 16-megapixel hole-punch selfie camera. Poco M2 Pro has the same version of the MIUI camera app that comes in the Redmi Note 9 Pro. The only real difference in the functionality of the two is that you can use night mode for a selfie camera on the M2 Pro.

There are also some interesting features, such as the ability to record full-HD video with a macro camera and its output was surprisingly good. Video recording can also be done in Pro mode, allowing you to set the exposure on your own and it also provides the ability to record in LOG format.

 

In broad daylight, the Poco M2 Pro's primary camera takes good-looking photos. The landscape shots had sharp details and the colors were vivid. The included Pro Color toggle gives you better color when you need it. Close-ups also look good, although the camera app shows bright colors slightly higher than the actual scene. The wide-angle camera gave extremely weak color and detail compared to the primary sensor. The portrait mode worked well and set the level of background blur well.

Primary and wide-angle cameras struggle in low light conditions. The camera app did a good job of suppressing the noise, but photos usually showed a lack of exposure. Apart from this, there is also a lack of detail when zooming. Night mode was also not effective, with barely a few photos showing improvement.

Selfies shot in good light were looking good. The detail and skin tone were generally good. The shots were decent as long as there was enough light around.

                           

The Poco M2 Pro supports 4K video recording up to 30fps.