Remember the Poco X3 of last year? Yep! the same phone that had a unique-looking camera module design, a 120Hz LCD & a 64 Megapixel Sony IMX682 sensor. Well, today, we got the Poco X3 Pro and as the name suggests, it is a more powerful version of the last year’s X3. As expected, Poco surprised us with the price to performance ratio because, for a starting price of EUR 249 (Early Bird price is EUR 199!), this phone has the Qualcomm Snapdragon 860 chipset, a 120Hz display, UFS 3.1 storage, a 5,160mAh battery, 33W fast charging, Stereo speakers and more. Isn’t it crazy how good of an overall package this phone is?
But to offer such features at as low of a price as possible, Poco had to do some cost-cutting here and there. Look at the design as an example. Poco has not changed the design from the Poco X3 of last year. There is the same camera module design, the same flat panel with a hole-punch in the center, the same side-facing fingerprint scanner, and the same port placement. The main difference is in the internals.
The biggest upgrade is definitely in terms of the chip. While the Poco X3 had Snapdragon 732G, Poco X3 Pro has the Snapdragon 860 4G SOC. As the name suggests, it sits between the Snapdragon 855+ and Snapdragon 865 when it comes to performance. Just as in the case of Snapdragon 855+, there is an octa-core Kryo 485 CPU clocked at up to 2.96GHz and Adreno 640 GPU. Along with this chip, the phone also features super-fast UFS 3.1 storage, something that we rarely see making its way over to mid-range devices. The RAM is still LPDDR4X, though!
Speaking of the panel upfront, it is a 6.67-inch LCD with a 120Hz refresh rate and Full-HD+ resolution and yes, you guessed it right! It is the same display as on the Poco X3 of last year. One upgrade this time is that there is Gorilla Glass 6 protection instead of Gorilla Glass 5. The refresh rate can be switched between 50Hz, 60Hz, 90Hz, and 120Hz. There is a tiny hole-punch cutout in the middle on top that houses a 20 Megapixel selfie shooter in it. Again, the same as on last year’s model.
Poco fans will be disappointed with the cameras on this phone because, despite the fact that it has “Pro” in its name, the cameras are downgraded from last year’s vanilla model. Last year’s Poco X3 had a 64 Megapixel Sony IMX682 sensor but the Poco X3 Pro now has a 48 Megapixel Sony IMX582 sensor. This is the same camera sensor that we saw on phones such as the Redmi K20 which launched two years ago. This sensor is paired with an 8 Megapixel ultrawide, a 2 Megapixel macro, and a 2 Megapixel depth sensor. Again, there is a downgrade compared to the last year because Poco X3 had a 13 Megapixel ultrawide camera. There is no support for 4K 60fps video recording as it is limited to 30fps.
Finally, Poco X3 Pro has a 5,160mAh battery and supports 33W fast charging via the Type-C port. The 33W adapter comes in the box. There are stereo speakers as well but all of this was there in the case of the Poco X3 too.
So in short, Poco X3 Pro is just Poco X3 but with a better chip, faster storage, and downgraded cameras. But do you know what’s the fun part? The early bird price of the X3 Pro is the same as that of Poco X3 when it launched last year i.e., EUR 199.
There are two storage options with 6GB + 128GB variant priced at EUR 249 (Early bird price is EUR 199) and the 8GB + 256GB variant priced at EUR 299 (Early bird price is EUR 249). The Early Bird price is for sales between March 24th and April 1st.