introduction
Poco’s F-series devices have, in recent years, been its competitors in the “flagship killer” realm, and recently the family was split in two: a cheaper vanilla version and a Pro model that is the true “flagship killer”. ‘ with a high-end chipset.
That’s true again this year, but there’s an interesting twist, which we’ve noticed since the Poco F5 and Poco F5 Pro were announced: you’re much more interested in the vanilla F5 than the F5 Pro, and we assume that depends on the value proposition of each device. The F5 Pro isn’t bad, don’t get us wrong, but compared to F-series Pocos of the past, it’s not great either.
On the other hand, the Poco F5, on paper, seems to satisfy a lot of needs for a lot of people, so we were eager to see how it performs in everyday life over a long period of time during which we used it as the our one and only smartphone. Hence this long-term review was born.
It’s also important to note right away that the Poco F5 is identical to the Redmi Note 12 Turbo and is sold under that name in some markets. We gave up a long time ago on trying to understand Xiaomi’s names and distribution shenanigans, but we think this is important information you need to know before this review. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll call the phone the Poco F5 since it’s the shortest name, but know that everything we say about it applies to its sibling as well.
That said, we also note that the F5 stands out as the first phone powered by the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 SoC, one that, on paper, should deliver most of the performance of a Snapdragon 8-series, without the huge increase in prices they command nowadays. The best of all worlds, then? We will see. It’s been a while since what is technically a mid-range device has wowed us so much, theoretically offering such a well-put-together package at such a low price – the latest non-Turbo Redmi Notes don’t they did it, even though their predecessors a few years ago did it.
So let’s get straight to the point and see how the Poco F5 / Redmi Note 12 Turbo performs in our in-depth subjective tests. Join us on the next pages and we’ll let you know how satisfied we were.
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