POCO M3 Pro 5G Review. An HONEST Take After One Week! By TechTablets

-Chris here with Poco's new release, the M3 Pro. So this is a bit of deja vu, yet again we are seeing basically another rebrand of one of their phones. This time instead of being a Note 10 5G, it's the M3 Pro. However there are a few differences. I do like this version of the hardware better. It has better performance, a slightly brighter screen so if you're unaware of the specs of this.

Yes, obviously it has 5G support, it has the Dimensity 700. Now my model is a review unit that they did send out to me Poco in exchange for this video. It has 6gb of Ram, 128gb of UFS 2.2 storage, a large 5.000 milliamp per hour battery, 18 watt charging. A 48 megapixel main rear camera, 8 megapixels selfie and the IPS screen that is 90 hertz. So we get a 22.5 watt charger, now the charging rate of the phone is 18 watts and it will take about 1 hour and 50 minutes, we have the type-c to type-a usb cable, we get a quick start guide, warranty card, safety information, some Poco stickers and a tpu case. What isn't included, at least with the EU model here, is some headphones.

So let's have a look at the build of this one very very similar deja vu here, because this really is the Redmi Note 10 5G. The same front 8 megapixels with the cutout right here, we have an IPS panel which is Full HD Plus and this of course is 6.5 inches, exactly the same there. Does have quite a bit of bezel around the outside, now here on the side we have the side fingerprint reader capacitive always on one one volume up and down as it's a plastic frame around the outside. The thickness of this one, okay it is about nine millimeters my measurements and a 190 grams the weight. Now this fingerprint reader it can be sometimes a little bit slow, but it tends to be quite accurate, I have noticed.

You can see there when I touch it, which is now. There is a noticeable delay there, so it's definitely not the quickest and you can already see. Look at how the screen the color shift out quite a lot for an IPS panel. I'll get onto this a little bit more it is quite a poor one they've gone with in this particular. Well it's a budget phone, so it's kind of understandable there of course.

Now here on the back, the main camera is a 48 megapixels one and sadly we don't have an ultra wide. So I would have preferred instead of these two 2 megapixels cameras, which are... Well, basically useless. You don't really use them. So once for depth information other one is macro, they should have combined this into at least an 8 megapixels ultra wide, I think would have been a lot better.

So the design here, a little compared to the Note 10 5G that we have the same plastic on the back of it, it's plastic, but it's a different style to it. This is glossy picks up fingerprints a little bit more and then of course the Poco branding here and that distinguishes it and makes it a little bit different to of course that Note 10 5G. Down the bottom, we have our type-c port, if my camera will focus, there we go. Microphone and you can just see an antenna line there and here is our single loudspeaker with this one. So the frame around the outside this part here is plastic.

Up the top, we get a 3.5 millimeter with average quality out, I mean it's pretty good, not too bad typical Xiaomi, IR transmitter and our secondary microphone. So the SIM tray on this one here we'll take two nano sims or a micro sd card but unfortunately, if you want to use a micro sd card you can only use the single nano sim. Other manufactures will include the two sim trays and the micro sd support, but not with this one here. Notice there is a rubber gasket that is around this sim tray and it is metal reinforced, which is good. So the good news is with the screen here, that it is covered with Gorilla Glass 3 and it is brighter than the Note 10 5G screen.

If you saw my review of my videos on that particular model, I was not happy with this 217 nits of brightness. This one sadly is not actually that much better. So 90 hertz, still the same refresh rate but it is only 330 nits, according to my measurements and this will vary from panel to panel. To me that's simply not bright enough, I like to see at least 400 nits minimum brightness. So when you're out on direct sunlight trying to use or see what's on the screen, it is a real struggle, even sometimes running the camera to see what mode I'm in or if I go over into a different mode or select video or something, I can sometime barely make that out.

So the color that we get with this one, I think it's pretty average. Definitely this is a low end screen, I know, yes this has a great price point this phone and it is very cheap. So it really is, in category with the price of it what type of phone it is that's low end and you see the colors shifting out there, quite a lot there just looking out the screen. So around the notch cut out, it does dip dim down a little bit and the edges you're gonna see quite a bit of that. If you want a much better panel and if you can, I would highly recommend just saving up and going for the Note 10 Pro or the Note 10S.

We have Poco launcher with this one, Android 11 and thankfully the wrong performance optimization is better than what I saw with the Redmi Note 10 5G, which just had a lot of micro starters lag, it was choppy, unresponsive, here it's a lot better. So recent task here I find gestures are okay, you can bring up your recent apps and just swap over them, pretty quick you can go over to them now. If it's a third-party app, it will kill it off quite quickly and that one only just recently had open, but you might have just seen there, even though it's running at 90 hertz the animations at time are quite poor. I've notice this before with the other Poco launcher that I've been running on some of their phones that, optimization I fell needed a little bit with this one, so the Dimensity 700 isn't exactly a powerhouse of a chip, but it's still not a bad chip considering again the price point of this phone. What is on offer is good performance wise, I just think it needs a bit of optimization.

So it's not too bad here and if it was anything like what I had with the Note 10 5G I would probably be throwing this phone out of the window, but good to see isn't not like that. So when you first get it you are greeted with quite a lot of bloatware and I mean a lot, okay. There's just all these junk applications that they've pushed onto this, very easy to uninstall and I know a lot of people criticize me for even mentioning this, but I still like to point it out with all brands the amount of bloat where they put on. So I count about 25 applications and almost about 3gb you will save just uninstalling all of that junk. So you just go into system, apps in the settings and just tick them all and that takes about 2 minutes to uninstall them, so yeah, it's a bit of a non-issue but I still like to mention it.

Now the internal storage UFS 2.2, this is the 128gb model that I got sent a review unit from Poco. Very decent speeds, here these are really good. Now just a year ago this would have been flagship kind of grade speeds, when we have like UFS 3 and 3.1 that those speeds are really getting up there now, which is good to see. So the Antutu score this is marginally faster than what I saw again with the Note 10 5G, which is basically the same exact identical phone, that's why I keep referring to it and the wireless speeds for the speakerphone and the price, they're okay but the minimum speed I would like to see, this one and this point where I review to at least be over 100 megabits per second. So it's on the slow side a little here.

GPS, it does work reasonably well, now we get an okay average signal strength, it's almost in the green there, it does see a lot of satellites and an accuracy of one meter is achievable here because this ia a Mediatek chip, not a qualcomm. Widevine security 1, so that is good to see Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, those kind of apps that need the drm, they will be there and you can see them and watch them in Full HD. So we only get a full camera 2 API level here, which level 3 would be ideal, but full still isn't bad, So gcam ports will work on this one, if you wanted to try squeeze a little bit more out of that 48 megapixels main camera that is on the rear. So battery run time at 90 hertz, this is pretty good okay. So 11 hours and 20 minutes this is a definite positive of this phone, it does have fairly decent battery life.

So for most people this will be around 7 to 8 hours of on-screen time you're looking at, depending on your use a possible two-day phone and as mentioned the charged time is about 1 hour and 50 minutes for this one. So the good news is yes we have the 3.5 millimeter headphone deck in this one and the quality is okay, it's average, it's not too bad sound that I'm getting from my hd pros here that I have here also some Xiaomi headphones. Just a single downwards trying loudspeakers here and it's really unimpressive, it's pretty average and here's a sample of it at 100 volume. Gaming performance of this phone is not too bad, so we have the Dimensity 700. With a game like PUBG, we can run the smooth or balance setting and the ultra frame rate.

Now ultra frame rate is a cap of 45 frames per second, which the phone can do. Now most of the time it will be 39 frames per second, 40, 41 frames per second, but it is smooth enough that you can get your kills, you can look down the scope without any major lag or anything like that. Now the Dimensity 700 with the 6gb of ram can even run a demanding title like Genshin Impact. And this is on the low setting and it will ruin it from anywhere about 35 to up to 59 frames per second, which is great to see. Thermals good.

It gets barely warm on the back and that is even after gaming for 30 minutes, so there's no need for me to break out my thermal imaging camera, because it is rally quite cold this phone. Moving over to video now, so with the front-facing camera we've got 1080p and it does have electronic image stabilization, the crop isn't too bad, but it is a little close, that's my arm there fully reaching out and I'll just go up these stairs here to show you that stabilization, it's okay. I mean it's definitely not the smoothest or the best I have seen the same goes for the rear, which I'll swap over to shortly. I do find in these bright conditions, it is overexposing a little bit, so more tweaking can be done by Poco, I feel with the cameras, with the video here and especially with the main camera too as you'll see later on from the samples, but I'll swap over now to the rear camera. Now this is our video quality, which is just 1080p 30 frames per second maximum unfortunately.

But it's great that we do have the electronic image stabilization. You see as I walk along. That it's not the best electronic image stabilization and I do find the 1080p quality to look a little bit washed out, like there's a lot of noise and just the of the lack of detail for even 1080p footage it's a little disappointing. So I do hope with firmware updates they can improve this. So focusing first on the positive at this one.

So good battery life. Yes, it's got 5G support so if you need those 5G speeds, you've got unlimited data and your carrier has 5G, well that's one reason to go for it. The screen however is washed out, just like the Note 10 5G, it's not an amazing IPS, it's quite average to poor quality. Brightness should be better than the 330 nits that I'm measuring, It is however slightly brighter than the Note 10 5G. It's faster smoother better optimized with the Poco launcher, however I still do see a few little stutters and occasional little lags with this.

Now you can play, as I showed you, demanding games even like Genshin Impact were playable. So it does offer a lot for the price point? Yes. I'm being a little critical here, but still I know for that price it is got a lot, it's got a lot on offer. There still I would go for the Redmi Note 10 Pro or the Redmi Note 10S over this one right here, because they have superior... Well cameras, screens, pretty much everything and that is the reason.

If you can hold off, save a little more, go for those models, you get a much better phone over the Poco M3 Pro. Now this is a big step up over the Poco M3, which I didn't particularly like. This one at least is a lot better if you're still looking and you're in that budge price group, well, you know. I've laid out everything in front of you, so you have to make that decision now. Thank you so much for watching this review.

I'll see you in the next one. Bye for now.

Source : TechTablets