Hey guys its Sagar feis my take on the POCO X2 after using it for 3 months. If you have been following my channel, youmight know that I don’t jump on making full review of any smartphone right away. I like to use it for at lest a few months,and that gives me plenty of time to know all the ins and outs of it. Plus, it also give the smartphone some timeto mature. By that time some of the early bugs are ironedout with software updates, and it also gives us a fairly good idea of how the hardwareis going to hold up over time. Before getting started, let us get a few thingsstraight, This is not the successor of the POCO F1. It did come out almost 18 months after thePOCO F1, but it doesn’t come with flagship specs.
If we are being honest, it not even a POCOphone to begin with. It is in fact a re-branded Redmi K30. But being re-branded doesn’t take away whatit actually offers. So what does the POCO X2 offer? A 6.67inch display with 120Hz refresh rate,Snapdragon 730G processor, 64 megapixel Sony IMX686 sensor as its primary camera, a 4500mAhbattery, and Glass sandwich design, at a starting price of Rs.16,999. This is the new price after the recent hikein GST rates by the Indian Government. I got this phone on the launch day at Rs.15,999,but even at its new price of Rs.16,999, POCO X2 offers you a lot of value for your money. Well now that you know I like this this phone,lets us dive a bit deeper into how my experience has been, using it for the last 3 months,and along the way, I will also cover some of the things that I didn’t like about it. But before we get to it, if you are new tothis channel make sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon next to it.
That way you won’t miss out on any of theamazing videos coming up on this channel. Let us start with the design and build quality. To begin with, it is a huge smartphone witha 6.67 inch display and it has gorilla glass 5 at the front and back. So design wise, it is already a huge leapover the plastic back of the POCO F1. I was never too fond of the plastic back onthe F1, so big thumbs up to POCO for putting a glass back on the X2. It makes it feel so much more premium forits price. I have said that it is huge phone, but howhuge exactly? Here is a size comparison with the iPhone11 Pro Max which is biggest of all the iPhones Apple launched last year, this should giveyou some idea of the scale. While this size means we do get a large displayand more room inside the device for a bigger battery. But I still think phones with 6 or 6.2 inchdisplays are the right size for most peoples hands. It does get a slight curve to the back, whichmakes it a bit easier to hold, but for my average sized hands, it is definitely a 2handed smartphone. Now the frame where you actually hold thephone looks like anodised aluminium, but it is in fact made of polycarbonate or plastic.
I have seen some big YouTubers say that theframe is made of metal, but they have got it wrong and it is plastic. Even on my unboxing video, a few guys saidthat It’s aluminium and I was wrong calling it plastic, but since then, many durabilitytest videos have gone up on youtube, which show that it is in fact plastic. The chases inside the phone is aluminium,but this frame is Plastic. We get Gorilla Glass 5 protection at the frontand back, and in my experience, it is surprisingly resilient against scratches. I have been using the phone without any screenprotector for past 3 months, and it hasn’t gathered any scratches yet. On some of the other phones with gorilla glass5, I have seen a few micro scratches show up with time, but not on the POCO X2. At the back, camera module is surrounded bythis circular optical illusion, which looks like a dome or a carved sphere from certainangles. It is a nice design choice to separate thePOCO X2 from all other glass back phones. These Cameras stick out quite a bit, and thephone does rattle a bit if you place it on the table, but only if you tap on top leftor right corner. But when a phone is placed on a table, youare more likely to tap on the bottom part, and while doing so, it doesn’t rattle. If you want it to stay flat, just put thecase that comes in the box. It protects the camera hump, and has a lipat the front to keep the display raised and protected.
This case also helps the back from gatheringfingerprints, so most of the time, I used my phone with it. At 208 grams, it is not exactly on the lighterside, but the weight is distributed very well throughout the phone, so it doesn’t feeltop or bottom heavy. It sports a P2i nano coating, which meansit is splash resistant and can withstand some light drizzle, but don’t use it in heavyrain or don’t take it for a swim, because it is not completely waterproof, and any kindof water damage is not covered under warranty. The most marketed feature of the POCO X2 isthe RealityFlow 120Hz high refresh rate display. It is an IPS LCD panel, and it supports HDR10 playback. Although it is an LCD panel and not an OLEDone, it does manage to reproduce very accurate colour and wide viewing angles. While it is not brightest LCD display, itgets bright enough to be easily viewable in outdoor lighting conditions. The highlighting feature here is the higher120Hz refresh rate. This makes the phone feel so much smootherand faster. Now I have showed it to a few of my friendsand there were mixed reactions. Some of them noticed the difference rightaway, and others didn’t even feel that it is anything different, even when I switchedit from 60 to 120Hz in front of them. I for one am able to tell the difference between60 and 120Hz, and I am glad that companies are pushing this tech out to sub Rs.20,000smartphones. If you don’t like this mode or if you wantto prolong the battery life, you can switch back to 60Hz. It’s a huge display, so it is great forplaying games and consuming media.
There are dual punch hole style cutouts becausethere are 2 front facing cameras on this phone. Through software, POCO make it look like itis a single pill shaped cut out like on the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus. But these are in fact 2 separate cutouts,And there is screen between the two, which is coloured black via software. While this might lead many people in believingthat it is a longer cutout, the effect would have been more believable it were an AMOLEDdisplay. The notch is still smaller than what we hadon the POCO F1, and after a day or 2, I didn’t find it to be intrusive at all. It is definitely noticeable, because we areused to looking at the top right to check the battery %, but as I said, it is not toointrusive. Now since its an LCD panel we don’t getan in-display fingerprint sensor. Frankly I am glad for this, because the in-displayfingerprint sensors on budget smartphones are not that good to begin with. So the fingerprint sensor on the POCO X2 isplaced on its side, under the volume up and down buttons, and it also doubles as a powerbutton. From within the settings menu, you can eitherset it to read your fingerprint when you press the button, or you can even make it read youfingerprint just as you tap on it, which is a bit faster.
This fingerprint sensor is very fast and accurate. Although it is more accurate than the in-displayfingerprint sensor, and is easier to reach then the rear on, I still think it is placeda bit high for my hands to comfortably reach it. Since its a tall phone, I would have likedit to be placed a cm or so lower. Anyways, I still like this placement. We already saw that the volume buttons areabove this fingerprint sensor / power button. At the top, there is a noise cancelling microphoneand an IR blaster, which lets you use this phone as a remote controller for your homeappliances. On the left side there is the SIM card tray. It is a hybrid SIM tray, which means you caneither use 2 nano sim cards or a nano SIM card and a microSD card at a time. And at the bottom, we have the Speaker grillon the left, a microphone, USB type C port for charging and data transfer and everyone’sbeloved 3.5mm headphone jack on the right. I am more of a wireless audio person, butif you like listening to your music via wired earphones, output via this audio jack is ofvery high quality.
The speaker on this phone can also get prettyloud, but just like with most budget smartphones, it lacks the depth at higher volumes, andmight sound a bit tinny. Coming to the cameras. Primary one gets the 64 megapixel SONY IMX686 sensor with F/1.8 aperture and a 26mm lens. Then there is a 8 megapixel sensor with a13mm ultra wide angle lens and F/2.2 aperture. Followed by a 2 megapixel sensor with F/2.4aperture and a macro lens. And finally there is another 2 megapixel depthsensor with F/2.4 aperture. To put it in simple terms, Cameras on thePOCO X2 are the best on any smartphone under Rs.20,000. Look at these image samples. In most lighting conditions you will be reallyhappy with the images that come out of this phone. If you like to take portrait shots, try switchingto the Movie mode, and you will be blown away by the results. Now the macro camera is getting quite a bitof heat since last couple of weeks.
Sure its just a 2 megapixel sensor, but whenyou think about it, it needs to capture a very tiny part of the scene, and as far asthe focus is set properly, it doesn’t really matter how many details are in the remainingpart go the image, because most of the times those parts are out of focus anyways. I definitely agree that having higher resolutionwould be better, but I don’t think this kind of lens needs to have a multiple digitmegapixel count. You might not agree with me, and that is totallyfine, because if you know what you are doing with it, even a 2 megapixel macro camera cantake amazing looking images. Although it gets 2 front facing cameras, andone of them has a 20 megapixel sensor, selfies from the POCO X2 are not the best. There are some other smartphones at a lowerprice, which do a better job than this. But it makes up for it by taking amazing videos. POCO X2 can take electronically stabilised4K 30fps videos, and these videos look really good. For a much more detailed look at its camerasand for lot more image and video samples, I suggest you guys check out my dedicatedcamera review of the POCO X2. I will leave a link to it on the top rightcorner of the screen, and also link it in the description section. A part of why the POCO X2 is so good at takingimages is the image signal processing capability of the Snapdragon 730G processor. It is paired with Adreno 618 GPU for smoothergraphics, and you can choose from either 6 or 8GB of RAM, coupled with either 64, 128or 256GB of built in storage. Overall performance of this phone is verysmooth. App opening and switching is a breeze, andsince the G in the 730G processor stand for gaming, the gaming performance of this phoneis really good. Games that support higher refresh rate of120Hz on a smartphone are just s treat to play on this phone. POCO X2 not only shows better benchmark scoresthan the competing phones in its price range, the overall daily performance shows that itis a very capable smartphone.
If we are being honest, it not even a POCOphone to begin with. It is in fact a re-branded Redmi K30. But being re-branded doesn’t take away whatit actually offers. So what does the POCO X2 offer? A 6.67inch display with 120Hz refresh rate,Snapdragon 730G processor, 64 megapixel Sony IMX686 sensor as its primary camera, a 4500mAhbattery, and Glass sandwich design, at a starting price of Rs.16,999. This is the new price after the recent hikein GST rates by the Indian Government. I got this phone on the launch day at Rs.15,999,but even at its new price of Rs.16,999, POCO X2 offers you a lot of value for your money. Well now that you know I like this this phone,lets us dive a bit deeper into how my experience has been, using it for the last 3 months,and along the way, I will also cover some of the things that I didn’t like about it. But before we get to it, if you are new tothis channel make sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon next to it.
That way you won’t miss out on any of theamazing videos coming up on this channel. Let us start with the design and build quality. To begin with, it is a huge smartphone witha 6.67 inch display and it has gorilla glass 5 at the front and back. So design wise, it is already a huge leapover the plastic back of the POCO F1. I was never too fond of the plastic back onthe F1, so big thumbs up to POCO for putting a glass back on the X2. It makes it feel so much more premium forits price. I have said that it is huge phone, but howhuge exactly? Here is a size comparison with the iPhone11 Pro Max which is biggest of all the iPhones Apple launched last year, this should giveyou some idea of the scale. While this size means we do get a large displayand more room inside the device for a bigger battery. But I still think phones with 6 or 6.2 inchdisplays are the right size for most peoples hands. It does get a slight curve to the back, whichmakes it a bit easier to hold, but for my average sized hands, it is definitely a 2handed smartphone. Now the frame where you actually hold thephone looks like anodised aluminium, but it is in fact made of polycarbonate or plastic.
I have seen some big YouTubers say that theframe is made of metal, but they have got it wrong and it is plastic. Even on my unboxing video, a few guys saidthat It’s aluminium and I was wrong calling it plastic, but since then, many durabilitytest videos have gone up on youtube, which show that it is in fact plastic. The chases inside the phone is aluminium,but this frame is Plastic. We get Gorilla Glass 5 protection at the frontand back, and in my experience, it is surprisingly resilient against scratches. I have been using the phone without any screenprotector for past 3 months, and it hasn’t gathered any scratches yet. On some of the other phones with gorilla glass5, I have seen a few micro scratches show up with time, but not on the POCO X2. At the back, camera module is surrounded bythis circular optical illusion, which looks like a dome or a carved sphere from certainangles. It is a nice design choice to separate thePOCO X2 from all other glass back phones. These Cameras stick out quite a bit, and thephone does rattle a bit if you place it on the table, but only if you tap on top leftor right corner. But when a phone is placed on a table, youare more likely to tap on the bottom part, and while doing so, it doesn’t rattle. If you want it to stay flat, just put thecase that comes in the box. It protects the camera hump, and has a lipat the front to keep the display raised and protected.
This case also helps the back from gatheringfingerprints, so most of the time, I used my phone with it. At 208 grams, it is not exactly on the lighterside, but the weight is distributed very well throughout the phone, so it doesn’t feeltop or bottom heavy. It sports a P2i nano coating, which meansit is splash resistant and can withstand some light drizzle, but don’t use it in heavyrain or don’t take it for a swim, because it is not completely waterproof, and any kindof water damage is not covered under warranty. The most marketed feature of the POCO X2 isthe RealityFlow 120Hz high refresh rate display. It is an IPS LCD panel, and it supports HDR10 playback. Although it is an LCD panel and not an OLEDone, it does manage to reproduce very accurate colour and wide viewing angles. While it is not brightest LCD display, itgets bright enough to be easily viewable in outdoor lighting conditions. The highlighting feature here is the higher120Hz refresh rate. This makes the phone feel so much smootherand faster. Now I have showed it to a few of my friendsand there were mixed reactions. Some of them noticed the difference rightaway, and others didn’t even feel that it is anything different, even when I switchedit from 60 to 120Hz in front of them. I for one am able to tell the difference between60 and 120Hz, and I am glad that companies are pushing this tech out to sub Rs.20,000smartphones. If you don’t like this mode or if you wantto prolong the battery life, you can switch back to 60Hz. It’s a huge display, so it is great forplaying games and consuming media.
There are dual punch hole style cutouts becausethere are 2 front facing cameras on this phone. Through software, POCO make it look like itis a single pill shaped cut out like on the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus. But these are in fact 2 separate cutouts,And there is screen between the two, which is coloured black via software. While this might lead many people in believingthat it is a longer cutout, the effect would have been more believable it were an AMOLEDdisplay. The notch is still smaller than what we hadon the POCO F1, and after a day or 2, I didn’t find it to be intrusive at all. It is definitely noticeable, because we areused to looking at the top right to check the battery %, but as I said, it is not toointrusive. Now since its an LCD panel we don’t getan in-display fingerprint sensor. Frankly I am glad for this, because the in-displayfingerprint sensors on budget smartphones are not that good to begin with. So the fingerprint sensor on the POCO X2 isplaced on its side, under the volume up and down buttons, and it also doubles as a powerbutton. From within the settings menu, you can eitherset it to read your fingerprint when you press the button, or you can even make it read youfingerprint just as you tap on it, which is a bit faster.
This fingerprint sensor is very fast and accurate. Although it is more accurate than the in-displayfingerprint sensor, and is easier to reach then the rear on, I still think it is placeda bit high for my hands to comfortably reach it. Since its a tall phone, I would have likedit to be placed a cm or so lower. Anyways, I still like this placement. We already saw that the volume buttons areabove this fingerprint sensor / power button. At the top, there is a noise cancelling microphoneand an IR blaster, which lets you use this phone as a remote controller for your homeappliances. On the left side there is the SIM card tray. It is a hybrid SIM tray, which means you caneither use 2 nano sim cards or a nano SIM card and a microSD card at a time. And at the bottom, we have the Speaker grillon the left, a microphone, USB type C port for charging and data transfer and everyone’sbeloved 3.5mm headphone jack on the right. I am more of a wireless audio person, butif you like listening to your music via wired earphones, output via this audio jack is ofvery high quality.
The speaker on this phone can also get prettyloud, but just like with most budget smartphones, it lacks the depth at higher volumes, andmight sound a bit tinny. Coming to the cameras. Primary one gets the 64 megapixel SONY IMX686 sensor with F/1.8 aperture and a 26mm lens. Then there is a 8 megapixel sensor with a13mm ultra wide angle lens and F/2.2 aperture. Followed by a 2 megapixel sensor with F/2.4aperture and a macro lens. And finally there is another 2 megapixel depthsensor with F/2.4 aperture. To put it in simple terms, Cameras on thePOCO X2 are the best on any smartphone under Rs.20,000. Look at these image samples. In most lighting conditions you will be reallyhappy with the images that come out of this phone. If you like to take portrait shots, try switchingto the Movie mode, and you will be blown away by the results. Now the macro camera is getting quite a bitof heat since last couple of weeks.
Sure its just a 2 megapixel sensor, but whenyou think about it, it needs to capture a very tiny part of the scene, and as far asthe focus is set properly, it doesn’t really matter how many details are in the remainingpart go the image, because most of the times those parts are out of focus anyways. I definitely agree that having higher resolutionwould be better, but I don’t think this kind of lens needs to have a multiple digitmegapixel count. You might not agree with me, and that is totallyfine, because if you know what you are doing with it, even a 2 megapixel macro camera cantake amazing looking images. Although it gets 2 front facing cameras, andone of them has a 20 megapixel sensor, selfies from the POCO X2 are not the best. There are some other smartphones at a lowerprice, which do a better job than this. But it makes up for it by taking amazing videos. POCO X2 can take electronically stabilised4K 30fps videos, and these videos look really good. For a much more detailed look at its camerasand for lot more image and video samples, I suggest you guys check out my dedicatedcamera review of the POCO X2. I will leave a link to it on the top rightcorner of the screen, and also link it in the description section. A part of why the POCO X2 is so good at takingimages is the image signal processing capability of the Snapdragon 730G processor. It is paired with Adreno 618 GPU for smoothergraphics, and you can choose from either 6 or 8GB of RAM, coupled with either 64, 128or 256GB of built in storage. Overall performance of this phone is verysmooth. App opening and switching is a breeze, andsince the G in the 730G processor stand for gaming, the gaming performance of this phoneis really good. Games that support higher refresh rate of120Hz on a smartphone are just s treat to play on this phone. POCO X2 not only shows better benchmark scoresthan the competing phones in its price range, the overall daily performance shows that itis a very capable smartphone.
There are a few frame drops in the 120Hz mode,if you are pushing it for a long time, but it doesn’t happen too often. This was a major issue when the phone wasnew, but with software updates, POCO has fixed the issue. The phone does get a bit warm if I use thecamera for a long time or after playing a few games, but I won’t say it got so hotthat I would be worried or anything like that. Little bit of heat is expected, speciallyin summer season, like we are in right now. As long as we are on the topic of issues,many people had a few of them with the battery on this phone. There were complains that even with a 4500mAhbattery, their phone wont last long enough on a single charge, and that they even facedideal battery drain. While I got 5 and half to 6 hours of screenon time with 120Hz mode on all the time, I think I could have made the battery last longerby switching to 60Hz. I still think the battery optimisation shouldhave been better, coz a battery this large should last for at least a day and a half. But then again, I was comparing its batterywith the Note 9 Pro, which had a much larger battery. I did face the ideal battery drain issue,where my phone was loosing close to 13-14 percent of battery over night, this issuehas since been fixed, and over night now it looses just 2-3% of the battery. When its time to charge it up, we get a 27wattcharger in the box, which is pretty quick. Although there is a glass back, there is nowireless charging, but for this price, we don’t even expect phones to pack in thisfeature. POCO X2 packs in all the necessary sensorslike the ambient light and proximity sensor, gyroscope, accelerometer, IR sensor, GPS,Bluetooth 5.0, wifi 5.0, dual VOLTE and it also gets FM radio, which is very importantto some people. Coming to software side of things. Even if this is technically a Xiaomi phone,POCO X2 runs a version of MIUI 11 that is specifically tweaked for POCO smartphones,on top of Android 10. Now since it is still technically a versionof MIUI 11, there are a few aesthetic similarities, but the POCO launcher has a few new featuresof its own. Well first of all, there are no spam ads onthe UI of this POCO X2. That being said, you will still see theseads if you open Mi browser or Mi videos app, so the best thing to do is download googleapps like chrome, as soon as you get this phone, and never use the preinstalled Mi apps. There is an app drawer, where apps are classifiedaccording to their category or you can even group them by colours, if you think that makesit for you to find them. This not unique to the POCO X2, as the POCOlauncher is available on the google Play store, and you can install it on any android smartphone. There are a few good features on this UI,but I am still not a big fan of MIUI in any form, so given a chance I would definitelyinstall a different launcher on this phone, and make it look more like Google Pixel. While the experience was not all that smoothwhen this phone first came out, there have been a few software updates since, and everythingseems pretty smooth now. So my overall experience has been pretty smoothwith this phone. I did not encounter any performance issues,or excessive heating issues, so it has been smooth sailing for me. Ya about the frame drops I mentioned, as rarelyas they occur, because the normal experience is so smooth, those drops stand out like asour candy to my eyes. And if POCO or Xiaomi could just stop theshady ads and ton of notifications altogether, the experience would be so much more better. Best thing you can do now is to not use theirapps altogether, and turn off all the notifications for their apps. If you are ready for to use a huge phone,and you want the best smartphone under Rs.20,000 right now, I think you are going to love thePOCO X2. Big display with 120Hz refresh rate is notonly amazing for playing games, but it offers overall amazing experience with very goodbrightness levels, and good amount of contrast with accurate colours. Snapdragon 730G processor ensures a smoothexperience overall, and the cameras are simply the best in this price range. POCO has proved that if there are any issueon the software side of things, they are fast enough to push out updates to fix it. All of this, makes the POCO X2 the perfectsmartphone for anyone who is willing to spend Rs.17,000. That is it for this video guys. Please hit the like button if you enjoyedthis video, and also subscribe to the channel for more quality tech videos like this. You can also check out some of the other videosfrom this channel. This has been Sagar, and I will catch youguys in the next video. Take care.
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