Poco’s latest mid-range smartphones pack a display you’d expect on a flagship

Summary

• Poco’s new mid-rangers for 2024, the Poco X6 and X6 Pro, offer almost flagship-level features at an affordable price point.
• The Poco X6 Pro features a vegan leather back, a bezel-less 120Hz AMOLED display, and a powerful MediaTek chipset.
• The Poco X6 Pro and X6 both offer a 64MP camera with OIS, but the X6 Pro has additional camera compromises compared to its Pro sibling.

Xiaomi’s sub-brand Poco has made a name for itself with its flagship killers and budget phones packing powerful hardware. While not perfect, the company’s Poco F5 Pro from 2023 was an impressive mid-ranger and a great alternative to the Pixel 7a if you wanted a phone with more horsepower. Kickstarting 2024, Poco has announced its mid-rangers for this year — the Poco X6 and X6 Pro. They feature Qualcomm and MediaTek’s latest premium chips, upgraded cameras, and bezel-less 120Hz AMOLED displays that you’d typically find in flagship phones.

Poco X6 Pro

The Poco X6 Pro continues the trend of the lineup by packing almost flagship-level internals at an affordable price point. Dominating the phone’s front is a 1.5K 6.67-inch 120Hz AMOLED display with super thin bezels. It has a claimed peak brightness of 1800 nits and is protected by Gorilla Glass 5. Poco also says the panel has a 2160Hz touch sampling rate, which should help with touch responsiveness and gaming.

Inside the Poco X6 Pro is a MediaTek Dimensity 8300 Ultra chip. Fabricated on TSMC’s 4nm node, the octa-core CPU inside the chip can reach speeds of up to 3.35GHz. An Arm Mali G615 GPU complements the CPU setup.

Poco typically tends to make compromises in the camera department to keep the prices of its devices in check. It’s the same story with the Poco X6 Pro. While the primary 64MP camera now gets OIS for (hopefully) better low-light imaging, the 8MP ultrawide and 2MP macro cameras are unlikely to impress you with their performance.

Other key specs of the X6 Pro include IP54 dust and splash resistance, an in-screen fingerprint sensor, an IR blaster, NFC, and face unlock. The phone supports dual-SIM 5G, Wi-Fi 6, and Bluetooth 5.4.

The Poco X6 Pro’s yellow variant features a vegan leather back, which feels more premium than the plastic back of the black and grey shades.

Previous Poco phones have typically launched with a year-old version of Android. Thankfully, that’s not the case with the Poco X6 Pro. It runs on Android 14-based HyperOS out of the box. Xiaomi’s latest skin looks similar to MIUI but has smoother animations and a better user experience. Poco also promises three OS updates and four years of security patches for the phone.

Poco X6

The Poco X6 packs almost all the features of its Pro sibling at a slightly lower price point. So, you get the same 6.67-inch 120Hz bezel-less 1.5K AMOLED display with a peak brightness of 1800 nits, a 64MP camera with OIS, an 8MP ultrawide, and a 2MP macro.

Instead of the MediaTek Dimensity 8300 Ultra, the phone uses the Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 chip. While not as powerful as MediaTek’s offering, this Qualcomm SoC is powerful enough for daily use. And thanks to a 5100mAh battery with 67W fast charging, you don’t have to worry about running out of juice in the middle of the day.

However, unlike the Poco X6 Pro, the X6 runs on MIUI 14 based on Android 13. The company claims it will roll out the HyperOS update for the phone soon, though there’s no clear timeline. This also means the phone will presumably get one less OS update than the X6 Pro.

As always, Poco phones are unlikely to make their way to the US, but they nevertheless always prove how much tech affordable phones can pack.