POCO X2 Android Smartphone Full Review

POCO X2 Android Smartphone Full Review

Here is my take on the POCO X2 after using it for 3 months. it also gives the Smartphone some time to mature. By that time some of the early bugs are ironed out with software updates, and it also gives us a fairly good idea of how the hardware is going to hold up over time. Before getting started, let us gets a few things straight, this is not the successor of the POCO F1. It did come out almost 18 months after the POCO F1, but it doesn’t come with flagship specs. If we are being honest, it not even a POCO phone, to begin with. It is, in fact, a re-branded Redmi K30. But being re-branded doesn’t take away what it 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 hike in 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 phone. 

Let us start with the design and build quality. To begin with, it is a huge Smartphone with a 6.67-inch display and it has gorilla glass 5 at the front and back. So design-wise, it is already a huge leap over the plastic back of the POCO F1. I was never too fond of the plastic back on the F1, so big thumbs up to POCO for putting the glass back on the X2. It makes it feel so much more premium for its price. I have said that it is a big phone, but how big exactly is? Here is a size comparison with the iPhone11 Pro Max which is the biggest of all the iPhones Apple launched last year; this should give you some idea of the scale. While this size means we do get a big display and more room inside the device for a bigger battery. But I still think phones with 6 or 6.2-inch displays are the right size for most people hands. It does get a slight curve to the back, which makes 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 the phone looks like anodized aluminium, but it is in fact made of polycarbonate or plastic. The chases inside the phone are aluminium, but this frame is Plastic. We get Gorilla Glass 5 protection at the front and back, and in my experience, it is surprisingly resilient against scratches. 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, the camera module is surrounded by this circular optical illusion, which looks like a dome or a carved sphere from certain angles. It is a nice design choice to separate the POCO X2 from all other glass back phones. These Cameras stick out quite a bit, and the phone does rattle a bit if you place it on the table, but only if you tap on top left or right corner. But when a phone is placed on a table, you are 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 the case that comes in the box. It protects the camera hump, and has a lip at the front to keep the display raised and protected. This case also helps the back from gathering fingerprints, so most of the time; I used my phone with it. At 208 grams, it is not exactly on the lighter side, but the weight is distributed very well throughout the phone, so it doesn’t feel top or bottom-heavy. It sports a P2i nano-coating, which means it is splash resistant and can withstand some light drizzle, but don’t use it in heavy rain or don’t take it for a swim, because it is not completely waterproof, and any kind of water damage is not covered under warranty.

The most marketed feature of the POCO X2 is the Reality Flow 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 OLED one, it does manage to reproduce very accurate colour and wide viewing angles. While it is not the brightest LCD display, it gets 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 smoother and faster. Now I have shown it to a few of my friends and there were mixed reactions. Some of them noticed the difference right away, and others didn’t even feel that it is anything different, even when I switched it from 60 to 120Hz in front of them. I for one can tell the difference between60 and 120Hz, and I am glad that companies are pushing this tech out to sub Rs.20, 000 Smartphone. If you don’t like this mode or if you want to prolong the battery life, you can switch back to 60Hz. It’s a huge display, so it is great for playing games and consuming media. There are dual punch hole style cutouts because there are 2 front-facing cameras on this phone. Through software, POCO makes it look like it is a single pill-shaped cut out like on the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus. But these are in fact 2 separate cutouts, and there is a screen between the two, which is coloured black via software. While this might lead many people in believing that it is a longer cutout, the effect would have been more believable it was an AMOLED display. The notch is still smaller than what we had on 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 are used to looking at the top right to check the battery %, but as I said, it is not too intrusive. Now since it’s an LCD panel we don’t get an in-display fingerprint sensor. Frankly, I am glad for this because the in-display fingerprint sensors on budget Smartphone are not that good, to begin with. So the fingerprint sensor on the POCO X2 is placed on its side, under the volume up and down buttons, and it also doubles as a power button. 

From within the settings menu, you can either set it to read your fingerprint when you press the button, or you can even make it read your fingerprint 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-display fingerprint sensor and is easier to reach then the rear on, I still think it is placed a bit high for my hands to comfortably reach it. Since it’s a tall phone, I would have liked it to be placed a cm or so lower. Anyways, I still like this placement. We already saw that the volume buttons are above this fingerprint sensor/power button. At the top, there is a noise-cancelling microphone and an IR blaster, which lets you use this phone as a remote controller for your home appliances. On the left side, there is the SIM card tray. It is a hybrid SIM tray, which means you can either 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 grill on the left, a microphone, USB type C port for charging and data transfer and everyone’s beloved 3.5mm headphone jack on the right. I am more of a wireless audio person, but if you like listening to your music via wired earphones, output via this audio jack is of very high quality. The speaker on this phone can also get pretty loud, but just like with most budget Smartphone, it lacks the depth at higher volumes and might 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 an 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 depth sensor with F/2.4 aperture. To put it in simple terms, Cameras on the POCO X2 are the best on any Smartphone under Rs.20,000. Now the macro camera is getting quite a bit of heat since the last couple of weeks. Sure it's just a 2-megapixel sensor, but when you think about it, it needs to capture a very tiny part of the scene, and as far as the focus is set properly, it doesn’t really matter how many details are in the remaining part go the image, because most of the times those parts are out of focus anyway. I definitely agree that having higher resolution would be better, but I don’t think this kind of lens needs to have a multiple digit megapixel count. You might not agree with me, and that is totally fine because if you know what you are doing with it, even a 2-megapixel macro camera can take amazing looking images. Although it gets 2 front-facing cameras, and one of them has a 20-megapixel sensor, selfies from the POCO X2 are not the best. There are some other Smartphone at a lower price, which does 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 specialized. 

A part of why the POCO X2 is so good at taking images is the image signal processing capability of the Snapdragon 730G processor. It is paired with Adreno 618 GPU for smoother graphics, 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 very smooth. App opening and switching is a breeze, and since the G in the 730G processor stand for gaming, the gaming performance of this phone is 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 scores than the competing phones in its price range, but the overall daily performance also shows that it is 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 was new, but with software updates, POCO has fixed the issue. The phone does get a bit warm if I use the camera for a long time or after playing a few games, but I won’t say it got so hot that I would be worried or anything like that. A little bit of heat is expected, especially in the 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 won’t last long enough on a single charge and that they even faced ideal battery drain. While I got 5 and a half to 6 hours of screen on time with 120Hz mode on all the time, I think I could have made the battery last longer by switching to 60Hz. I still think the battery optimization should have been better because a battery this large should last for at least a day and a half. But then again, I was comparing its battery with the Note 9 Pro, which had a much larger battery. I did face the ideal battery drain issue, where my phone was losing close to 13-14 per cent of battery overnight, this issue has since been fixed, and overnight now it looses just 2-3% of the battery. When it’s time to charge it up, we get a 27watt charger in the box, which is pretty quick. Although there is a glass back, there is no wireless charging, but for this price, we don’t even expect phones to pack in this feature. POCO X2 packs in all the necessary sensors like 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 important to some people.

 Coming to the 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 Smartphone, on top of Android 10. Now since it is still technically a version of MIUI 11, there are a few aesthetic similarities, but the POCO launcher has a few new features of its own. Well, first of all, there are no spam ads on the UI of this POCO X2. That being said, you will still see the seeds if you open Mi browser or Mi videos app, so the best thing to do is download Google apps like chrome, as soon as you get this phone, and never use the preinstalled Mi apps. There is an app drawer, where apps are classified according to their category or you can even group them by colours if you think that makes it for you to find them. This not unique to the POCO X2, as the POCO launcher 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 definitely install a different launcher on this phone, and make it look more like Google Pixel. While the experience was not all that smooth when this phone first came out, there have been a few software updates since, and everything seems pretty smooth now. So my overall experience has been pretty smooth with 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 rarely as they occur because the normal experience is so smooth, those drops stand out like as our candy to my eyes. And if POCO or Xiaomi could just stop the shady ads and ton of notifications altogether, the experience would be so much better. The best thing you can do now is to not use their apps altogether, and turn off all the notifications for their apps. If you are ready to use a huge phone, and you want the best Smartphone under Rs.20,000 right now, I think you are going to love the POCO X2. Big display with 120Hz refresh rate is not only amazing for playing games, but it offers an overall amazing experience with very good brightness levels and a good amount of contrast with accurate colours.

Snapdragon 730G processor ensures a smooth experience overall, and the cameras are simply the best in this price range. POCO has proved that if there is an issue on the software side of things, they are fast enough to push out updates to fix it. All of this makes the POCO X2 the perfect Smartphone for anyone willing to spend Rs.17,000. That is it for this video guys. Please subscribe our website with email id in given subscription option given (right hand) on the page. So, that you can get out the latest review on time without any delay. Take care.😊😊😊😊