The top third of the Poco F7 Pro has a nice dual-tone rear with a glossy finish and a matte finish on the bottom. This, in theory, is quite smart since it eliminates the oily fingerprint problem that glossy backs have while offering a nice contrast.

The trade-off is apparent only when the phone is held in portrait mode. While watching landscape videos or playing games, your fingers will still touch the glossy area and smudge the device. 

The glass back has flat edges, which depart from the curved edges of the F6 series. The bezels are relatively thin and even all around.

The 6.67-inch “2K Flow” AMOLED panel (3,200 x 1,440 pixels resolution) supports up to 120Hz refresh rate, a peak brightness of 3,200 nits, a touch sampling rate of 2,560Hz and low blue light, flicker-free and circadian rhythm TÜV Rheinland eye comfort certifications. 

The phone was perfectly legible in bright afternoon sunlight. The display also supports HDR10+, 12-bit colour, and Dolby Vision, which means videos are nice and vibrant like a typical high-end phone.

Like the F6 series, the F7 Pro has two speakers, one at the bottom and one at the top behind the earpiece grill. Audio quality is decent, but it retains the same tiny flaw of having the bottom speaker play audio louder than the top speaker.

Thankfully, you’ll never end up with the bottom speaker covered by your palm since it’s placed) wisely. In landscape orientation, it rests at the top.

The Poco F7 Pro’s main camera uses a 50MP Omnivision OVX8000 sensor (1/1.55-inch, f/1.6 aperture, dual-pixel AF, OIS), paired with an 8MP ultrawide camera (f/2.2 aperture).

Poco omitted the macro camera on last year’s F6 Pro, which helps lower the F7 Pro’s asking price. Photography has never really been a top priority for Poco, so we’re not upset it’s missing a macro shooter, nor do we expect DSLR-like photos from this device.

Photos taken with the main camera are decent, thanks to its good handling over sharpness with relatively accurate colours.

Saturation and contrast are slightly boosted, and HDR is tastefully done without coming across too strongly. We noticed how some photos taken in warm light would lean towards orange and red tones, making the final result looking mildly unrealistic.

The 2x digital zoom offers good detail despite F7 Pro’s lowered imaging priorities. Zooming manually into the image of the canal with cherry blossom trees on both sides above reveals clear, distinct ripples in the area of the river closest to us. 

Low-light shots are noticeably improved when Night Mode is turned on. These shots are generally well-exposed, and photos taken with Night Mode activated result in a more accurate white balance.

Some images end up with a slight yellow tint, but that’s easily fixed with some editing. 

Ultrawide shots are just passable. Some photos show noticeable distortion, and one shot under bright afternoon sun shows a rather obvious purple haze and green lens flare. In some photos, you’ll notice greatly heightened contrast when comparing to its main camera output, lacking consistency. We also observed a lack of detail retention in most ultrawide images. 

All in all the Poco F7 Pro performs just as we expected for a S$600+ phone. It’s not terrible, but it won’t be a winner.

Our battery benchmark uses PCMark for Android’s Work 3.0 Battery Life test to determine a modern Android-based smartphone’s battery uptime in minutes. This controlled benchmark simulates real-world usage with a combination of both web and social media browsing, video and photo editing, parsing data with various file formats, writing (on documents), and more.

The Poco F7 Pro has a large 6,000mAh battery, and while the phone still can’t match up to Nothing’s insane battery optimisation, the F7 Pro beats out the other competitors. It is just a minute off from the Poco X7 Pro’s battery test, which also has a 6,000mAh battery.

Two hours of playing Honor of Kings on max settings only ate up 35%, so there’s plenty of battery for the phone to last a full day for gamers and people using their phones heavily.

Juicing up the phone quickly is also no issue since the Poco F7 Pro offers 90W fast charging. It took 28 minutes to charge from 0 to 50%, and a full charge to 100% took 58 minutes. Temperatures, however, were concerning, with the charging process causing the phone to 39.6°C. 

There is no wireless charging capability here, so if you want to charge your phone without wires, you’ll have to upgrade to the Poco F7 Ultra.

Like last year’s series, we feel this year’s Poco F7 phones offer great value for money. This is especially true for users who are more specs-focused and on a tight budget. Poco F7 Pro’s flagship-tier hardware, great performance, and long-lasting battery life are undeniably excellent for its price, but the phone isn’t rated E for Everyone.

If you’re looking for an all-around great experience, you might be somewhat annoyed with the amount of bloatware and ads the phone ships with. You can uninstall the bloatware and manually disable notifications for the first-party apps, but we would rather not have this problem at all.

The phone is less suitable for people who take more photos than play mobile games. It lacks a dedicated telephoto lens, and the ultrawide camera doesn’t meet our expectations.

The good thing about the Poco F7 Pro is that it’s very well-designed for gaming, not only because of its performance but also its display quality and healthy battery uptime. This usually also means the phone would be a good choice for non-gamers who just need something reliable without paying too much money.