Poco F7 Ultra Review

Introduction

For years, Poco has been offering up phones with almost-flagship levels of power at a price far below some of the more expensive phones on the market. 

Recently, that was done using the previous year’s top Snapdragon processor. The same is true of the Poco F7 Pro, which runs the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 from last year. 

But for 2025, there’s a new top model in town – enter the Poco F7 Ultra. Like all the best phones in 2025, it has the Snapdragon 8 Elite. 

It’s more expensive than you might expect from a Poco phone as a result, coming in at £649 in the UK, but is that extra cash worth it? I’ve spent the past week with the Poco F7 Ultra, and here’s what I’ve learned. 

Design 

• Same design across Poco F7 range
• Metal and glass build, with flat edges
• IP68 dust and water resistance

Okay, let’s talk design. In previous years, Poco has done this weird thing where it launches phones in the same series that look nothing like each other. So it feels like a “FINALLY!” moment that the Poco F7 Pro and the Poco F7 Ultra look pretty much identical. 

There’s no wildly different camera design, or unusual discrepancies in what specs or hardware are on offer. 

The Ultra’s flat metal edges match those of the Pro model, as do the camera island design and placement, the pill-shaped LED flash, and the circular accents in the glass. The glass panel on the back has slightly more generous curving at the edges, but otherwise, they’re very similar. 

The only thing I will say is that when you compare the yellow Poco F7 Ultra model to the black version, its aesthetic isn’t as premium or understated. But you can hardly expect Poco to launch a phone and not make a version in a Kill Bill jumpsuit. 

Both of these do come in black though, with the Ultra model featuring a brass coloured ring around the top of the camera island. The Pro version has silver. 

Aesthetics aside, Poco has certified the Ultra with an IP68  water and dust resistance rating, which essentially means you can drop it in water, get rained on, and it’ll survive it just fine. 

Screen

• 6.67-inch 120Hz AMOLED screen
• High-res WQHD+ resolution
• No LPTO support

As displays go, the 6.67-inch AMOLED 120Hz panel on the F7 Ultra is very strong. It’s big and – with the full WQHD+ resolution enabled – crispy. More than that, it hits all the right notes in terms of colour, contrast and brightness. 

With an 1800nit high brightness mode, it’s more than bright enough to remain visible outdoors in bright daylight. And with a 3200 nit peak brightness, its HDR performance is strong too. 

Watching movies and TV shows, I enjoyed the colour profile. It didn’t seem too over the top with its colour saturation, and kept skin tones and textures looking pretty realistic. 

In fact, in its default colour scheme setting ‘Original colour PRO’, that’s exactly the idea. Colours aren’t oversaturated, highlights don’t get blown out, and textures keep their authentic details. 

You can change to a more vivid or saturated colour scheme if you want, but for all-round balance and video quality, I much preferred keeping it in its default state. Still, you can tweak it to the nth degree if you so wish, even tweaking the white balance and temperature if you desire. 

While I’ll get into gaming performance in more detail shortly, it’s safe to say that the screen’s response times were also super impressive, responding immediately to gestures in games. All-round, just a very very good display. 

Arguably, its only weakness is that it’s not an LTPO panel and so doesn’t adjust its refresh rates at tiny increments – not that you’d ever notice that. At its fastest, graphics are buttery smooth and crisp, and the panel changes quickly based on the animation needs of the displayed content. 

This year, Poco has also swapped out the old optical fingerprint sensor in the display for an ultrasonic one. It doesn’t seem as responsive and quick as sensors I’ve used on Vivo, Oppo or Samsung phones, but it is technically better than optical sensors for accuracy and consistency. 

Performance

• Flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset
• Seems underclocked, or not well optimised
• Still great for gaming

Now, because this has the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset inside, you’d assume performance is top-tier, super speedy, and effortless. And for the most part, you’d be right to assume that. It’s snappy, responsive, and gets the job done. 

Look into the available benchmarking numbers, though, and there is a little bit of a caveat in that. While it comfortably outscores the 8 Gen 3 from last year in the CPU-focused Geekbench 6, it’s a little way behind most of the other Snapdragon 8 Elite phones – like the OnePlus 13, Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and Honor Magic 7 Pro –  we’ve tested and benchmarked so far. 

It does manage to keep up in the GPU department, however, with comparable scores to the similarly-WQHD+-enabled Galaxy S25 Ultra in most GFXBench and 3DMark tests.

Regardless, the Poco F7 Ultra finds almost everything effortless. Response times between gestures on screen and animation in games are almost instant, which is essential when quick reactions are needed in games like Call of Duty Mobile. And it can run those graphically intense games without too much trouble either. 

Even after gaming for longer periods to perform battery tests, I never felt the phone become warm. This suggests that it not only has more than enough power to make light work of usually quite demanding tasks but also has an effective cooling system to sustain that power. 

My only real gripe with performance was nothing to do with gaming or loading apps. It does those without a problem. Where it struggles is with connectivity. I consistently had an issue where the Wi-Fi would disconnect from the network and needed to be manually connected again. 

Despite my home having a strong mesh network system that works flawlessly with literally every other device in my house, the Poco just logged off and switched to 4G instead, which – in my area – is patchy and not particularly fast. 

During testing, I removed the SIM to see if it was a prioritisation issue, but even without the SIM, it would disconnect, usually when I walked upstairs away from the routers, but often even when I was in the same room as a router module. It’s not a problem I’ve experienced with any device for the past five years, and that includes my wireless printer. 

Cameras

• Solid OIS-enabled 50MP primary camera
• 50MP 2.5x floating telephoto is excellent
• 32MP ultrawide is weakest of the trio

Poco has never really led the charge when it comes to camera performance – its phones are typically all about speed and performance, not so much about the photography or video. And, to an extent, the same is true here. 

Still, the fact it has 50MP primary, 50MP 2.5x telephoto and 32MP ultrawide lenses means you get a lot more versatility than what previous F-series phones had. There’s no pointless macro sensor here, for instance. 

Stick to the primary and telephoto cameras, and you’ll generally get good results in conditions with bright, consistent lighting. It snaps photos pretty quickly, and delivers results with good detail and manages to control bright highlights pretty effectively. 

The zoom camera, however, is the strong point. It may only be 2.5x optical zoom equivalent, but even at 5x zoom with some sensor cropping, it still delivers strong, detail-rich results without any obvious weaknesses. There’s no excessive haloing around bright points or artificial blurring of the background. Colours are rich, maybe a little oversaturated, but I’ve been pretty happy with it. 

It can even focus on objects that are pretty close, and so it works well as a macro shot. It focuses quickly and consistently and gives that heavy but attractive bokeh in the background. It’s a genuinely great zoom camera, particularly for portraits of people and pets. 

There is a bit of a lack of consistency when comparing colours and overall quality of the three cameras. For instance, the zoom results often look warmer than the primary, which, by comparison, is usually heavy on the greens and blues, oversaturating them. 

I often found with the primary results that the colours looked a little too over-egged, and that background and foreground layers didn’t blend naturally, almost like the foreground subject popped a bit too much. But by far the weakest camera is the ultrawide. In fact, I wouldn’t use it unless you absolutely had to. 

Images from that camera were so dark and flat, but more than that, they were often out of focus, a bit grainy and lacking in detail compared to the other two. It seems it doesn’t have the autofocus abilities of more expensive ultrawide cameras. 

The camera system shows some weakness in low light, even when using the night mode. Sticking with primary and zoom lenses was generally okay, but even those struggled to completely eliminate motion blur, often leaving pictures looking a bit soft. 

Still, they can draw in good light, without going to town and making it seem like daytime. So, in a pinch, you can just about get away with it for night shots. 

Software

• HyperOS 2 based on Android 15
• Odd UI choices make it frustrating to use at times
• Rather standard AI features

As Android skins go, Xiaomi’s HyperOS 2 is among the most frustrating to live with, for multiple reasons. Beyond the name change, it’s still the same messy, confusing interface it was when it was called MIUI. 

When you go to edit Home Screen settings, there’s no obvious way to change the grid layout on the first screen. You can do it, but you have to scroll a bit and find a ‘layout’ option that isn’t immediately obvious. 

When you do, you find the 4×2-sized widgets for the Home Screen can’t be resized to fit a 5-column layout, so they end up off-centre, with no way to fix it. It just feels clumsy and not well thought-through.  

When you want to change the wallpaper, it zips you off to the theme store, instead of simply showing you what wallpaper options are already available to use on the device or giving you convenient, easy access to the images you’ve downloaded for wallpapers. 

I’m not saying it’s impossible to set your own downloaded images as wallpapers, but the route for doing it isn’t the obvious one. For so many simple tasks like that – usually tweaked in the Settings – there are obstructions or extra steps and layers in the way, complicating the experience. 

These are admittedly minor gripes, but with so many software alternatives from other manufacturers and even custom launchers available from the Play Store, it should be better. 

You can get used to a lot of it, and with some tweaking and fixing of various settings, you can get it to a workable state, but it takes a little work and patience. And that’s without mentioning all the additional redundant apps and bloat preinstalled as standard.                        

Of course, being 2025, it also means Xiaomi leans into AI with its latest phones, with AI image editing tools, text-based tools and transcription services all present and accounted for. 

Battery life

• 5300mAh battery
• Solid all-day battery life
• Fast 120W charging capabilities

Battery life is pretty solid, thanks to a 5300mAh cell that’s slightly larger than that of the Galaxy S25 Ultra. A 60-minute stint watching Netflix drains about 6% of the battery with the display set to its full WQHD+ resolution, and will drain a similar amount with about half an hour of casual gaming. 

I never felt I’d struggle to get through a full day, but at the same time, the phone didn’t quite feel like a two-day phone – not for most users anyway. I’m quite a light user, and live in a 4G area, so battery drain is rarely an issue for me.

With 3 hours or so of screen time mixed between camera testing, video watching, gaming and social media, I’d get to the end of a day with around 40% left over. 

Thanks to fast 120W charging, however, I’d never set it to charge overnight. The wired charging is fast enough that I could comfortably wait until the phone hit that sub-20% mark, then plug it in for 20 minutes or so and carry on. 

Like the speed and performance in general, however, it never quite reached the speed you’d expect from a 120W charger. 

We tested charging speeds three times and found that a full charge would typically take between 30 and 35 minutes. This was with the fastest charging enabled in the settings, which isn’t on by default and needs to be enabled by working through some Settings menus. 

For an adapter this powerful, I’d expect a sub-30-minute refill time in a battery this size. However, my experience suggests it doesn’t keep those 120W speeds going for long. For instance, it’d manage to refill a quarter of the battery in the first five minutes and nearly 40 percent in the first 10 minutes, but after that, the rate drops. 

Despite that, it’s still very quick. Knowing it could give me at least 75% of a refill in just 20 minutes meant battery anxiety didn’t exist at all. 

Should you buy it?