The OnePlus shows significantly better mid-tone contrast, and cleaner, brighter areas of shadow. The 11T Pro, which uses the same sensor, produces much brighter, punchier pictures all-round, and is only let down by a tendency to amp up color too much. Just look at the Poco X4 Pro’s 3DMark Wild Life test scores. It achieves 1207 points, which doesn’t come close to the last-generation Poco X3 Pro’s 3450 points. The most notable design choice the X4 Pro 5G showcases is its big, bold, in-your-face camera bump. Purely aesthetic, the camera mix on this phone is identical to that of the Redmi Note 11 Pro, whose camera bump is much subtler. Whether you fire up night mode or not, the Poco X4 Pro 5G outperforms cheaper competition like the Realme 9 and Realme 9 5G. Its noise handling is exceptional for the price, and while in automatic mode there's a natural darkness to photos, in night mode, you can grab some more exposed low-light photos that take advantage of computational photography.

The handset also comes with Xiaomi’s mid-level 67W fast-charging standard. Xiaomi offers speeds up to 120W today, but 67W is still a lot more powerful than anything Samsung or Apple provides. There’s an even more pronounced gap between the Poco and the OnePlus in GPU terms. Indeed, the Poco X4 Pro 5G is a fairly mediocre runner when it comes to games, which couldn’t be said about previous Poco generations.

Learn how to get the most from the Poco X4 Pro camera and you can achieve better results than the Poco X3 Pro. But general camera performance is a step down across the board from last year’s Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro – which is disappointing. The Poco X4 Pro runs Android 11 and Xiaomi’s MIUI 13. It’s a recent version of Android, the latest of the Xiaomi interface. And the top-most visual layer is Poco Launcher, which determines the look and feel of the skin. There’s some more bad news, too – and another opportunity to bash the Snapdragon 695. It restricts the Poco X4 Pro to 1080p video capture at 30 frames per second. There’s no 4K capture, no standard 60fps shooting, even if you drop the resolution to 720p. This seems a bit odd when there’s a slo-mo mode with 120fps at 720p. Even when you do run out of juice, Xiaomi has included its 67W fast charger in the box. This can get you from 0 to 77% in just 30 minutes. I didn’t experience any of the charging bugs that I did with the similarly equipped Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G, either.

The macro is a filler camera, its 2-megapixel resolution incapable of capturing any image worth saving, even if it does let you get quite close to your subject. Xiaomi makes one of the best affordable macro cameras, the 5-megapixel telephoto in the Redmi Note 10 Pro. This one is nothing like it. While the specs are remarkably similar to the latter, the OnePlus Nord CE 2 5G offers half the internal storage, a less fluid 90Hz display, and a smaller 4,500mAh battery for the same money. But as you’ll soon find out below, the OnePlus gives you superior performance and cleaner software. You can opt for a bolder version of the phone, in blue and bright yellow. We haven’t seen the latter in person, but it looks great in renders. Let’s hope it’s the latter, since it means the Poco X4 Pro may become more consistent with future software updates. This camera’s image quality is variable. Image processing, including noise reduction, is significantly worse than some of Xiaomi’s previous efforts at this price — including, not surprisingly, the Xiaomi 11T Pro. This is evident up-close, where fine detail looks fuzzier than that on images taken with last year’s Redmi Note 10 Pro.In the Poco X4 Pro 5G, Xiaomi has essentially released the same phone twice. Its core components and software are identical to the Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G’s, and its design is pretty similar, too. We rated that phone pretty highly in our five-star review, so there’s surely plenty to like here. It also appears to affect charging speed, which isn’t quite as nippy as we've seen from earlier 67W Xiaomi phones. On plugging in just seconds before the Poco X4 Pro switches off from low charge, it reaches 30% in 10 minutes, hits 50% charge at the 20-minute mark, and reaches 70% after 30 minutes. Great stuff.

It's a real shame the X4 Pro's video caps out at 1080p 30fps, because its footage doesn't look bad, and we know its 108MP sensor is capable of 4K capture. Indeed, Xiaomi’s MIUI 13 is present here on top of Android 11, just as it was with the Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G. It’s just as functional and customisable, but also just as stodged up with additional apps and gaudy icons. Also like the Redmi, the AI assistant here is left off by default, and I generally preferred it to stay that way. While the AI assistant served to brighten up the scenes on a challengingly overcast day, it also blew out a number of highlights and gave things a slightly false, icy-blue tint. As hardware setups go, the Poco X4 Pro 5G’s isn’t tearing up any trees, but it’s perfectly adequate for the price. It’s a modest bump over the Snapdragon 732G of the Poco X3 NFC, if not the blazing-fast Snapdragon 860 of the Poco X3 Pro.

Not the Poco you know

The screen's big at 6.67 inches, and with wide Full-HD resolution, competitively sharp. Bright and vibrant too, the Poco X4 Pro 5G is a perfect phone for watching on, so will be especially suited to folks who need a media player from their mobile. Poco X4 Pro 5G: Camera specs This phone may get better all-round with successive software updates. But if the aforementioned issues are tied to the compromises inherent in its Snapdragon 695 processor, it may well not. There’s plenty to like here, but we can’t help but feel that Poco series fans will end up disappointed by the Poco X4 Pro 5G. Xiaomi Poco X4 Pro 5G price and availability The Poco X4 Pro also comes with an IR blaster, enabling the Poco to function as a universal remote. Water/dust-resistance is a basic but useful IP53, which is fine to tolerate some rain but little more, and the fingerprint scanner is nippy and sits on the side, within the power button. Despite no OIS, the EIS does a fine job of holding a frame steady, and that extends to selfie video too, which holds up well in bright scenes – ultimately making the Redmi Poco X4 Pro a good camera phone at its price. but not an excellent one. Poco X4 Pro 5G: Additional specs As for gaming and processor-intensive tasks, image editing in Lightroom wasn't too painful, even when exporting large 108MP photos. Gaming is a bit more of a grind, especially when playing top-tier titles like Genshin Impact – minimum graphics settings only.

The Poco X4 Pro 5G is another very good affordable phone from the Xiaomi sub-brand. It isn’t an absolute performance power-house, with the OnePlus Nord CE 2 providing faster silicon for the same sort of money but there’s a lot to like elsewhere. The X4 Pro 5G is a successor to the X3 Pro and offers upgrades over the previous generation. While aspects like the display size, refresh and resolution, or the battery capacity have remained mostly the same as the X3 Pro, the screen is now a brighter AMOLED panel. The battery charges 70% faster at 41 minutes to 100%, thanks to the move from 33W to 67W (charging at 65W). The chipset is a 6nm Snapdragon 695 that has a slightly faster, more efficient CPU than last year’s SD860. As always, we bring you the 10 best cases for Xiaomi Poco X4 Pro 5G. 10. ZHKQT Case for Xiaomi Poco X4 Pro 5GWhile aspects like the display size, refresh and resolution, or the battery capacity have remained mostly the same as the X3 Pro, the screen is now a brighter AMOLED panel. The battery charges 70% faster at 41 minutes to 100%, thanks to the move from 33W to 67W (charging at 65W). Overall, the Poco X4 Pro 5G is a little more toned down over previous devices, although still more of a bicep-flexor than the Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G. The overall effect is to make your pictures look less natural – and in other scenes this HDR mode is too much, so leaving it on 24/7 isn’t the solution. General performance is good, with a few expected, and unexpected, niggles. The Poco X4 Pro’s app loads aren’t instantaneous, but are comparable with the more powerful Poco X3 Pro. Its multitasking screen is jerky, even in 120Hz mode – not an issue in the Poco X3 Pro, but it seems more a software quirk than anything else. The multitasking menu displays thumbnails of apps in their previous state, not a window of them actually running. OLED provides deeper contrast, with peak brightness higher too. Most noticeable has been that the Poco X4 Pro 5G switches into a completely new gear when the ambient light level gets very high.