POCO M3 Review: The New Budget King With A Massive Battery

POCO M3 is the latest budget smartphone from Xiaomi’s sub-brand POCO. The brand has consistently released budget and mid-range smartphones with excellent value for the money. With a price of just around Rs. 10,000, the POCO M3 might be the best smartphone in the price range. 

Let’s take a look at our POCO M3 review and see if the device is deserved to be called the king of budget smartphones.

POCO M3: Design & Display

The POCO is a relatively large phone. Its design is not that fancy but still has some nice touches to not make it look like a cheap smartphone. Its frame is made from plastic but the texture is well-done to the point that might make you mistake it for an aluminum frame. The back panel is also made of plastic but it has a rubberized faux leather finish, making the phone easier to hold on hand. At the top of the back panel, you can see a large rectangular housing, which accommodates a triple-camera setup and the POCO branding. 

On the front, it gets a 6.53” display with a water-drop notch at the top. The display supports Full-HD+ resolution, which is great at the price point. With the 1,080 x 2,340p resolution, the display has a pixel density of 395ppi. It has a regular 19.5:9 aspect ratio and an 83.4 percent screen-to-body ratio because of the relatively thick bottom bezel. 

As usual, MIUI 12 brings lots of options for customizing display. You can tweak the colour scheme settings of the screen to match your preference. Reading mode and Dark mode are also available on this phone. We believe that you can only find a few smartphones at the price point that can match the display quality of the POCO M3.

POCO M3: Performance

The device is driven by an octa-core Snapdragon 662 chipset, featuring four Kryo 260 Gold cores clocked at 2.0GHz and four Kryo 260 Silver cores clocked at 1.8GHz. It is paired with an Adreno 610 GPU, 4GB of RAM and 64/128GB of UFS 2.1 storage. With this setup, I doubt that you will have any issues with running daily tasks.

The POCO M3 benchmark scores are similar to other Snapdragon 662-powered smartphones. Its single-core and multi-core scores on Geekbench are 315 and 1,392 points, respectively. Meanwhile, its Antutu score is nearly 180,000 and its Open CL score is 376 points. 

As for the real-life performance, the device can run games like PUBG Mobile and Call of Duty: Mobile at normal settings and average games like Subway Surfers and Hill Climb 2 with ease. Not just that, the handset also didn’t generate lots of heat when I played games for a while. That is definitely a big plus since many other budget phones tend to heat quite a bit during a long gaming session. 

Of course, having 4GB of RAM means that you could see occasional lags when multitasking. But you can enjoy playing gaming on this phone with the Game Turbo mode. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the POCO M3 performance. 

POCO M3: Cameras

The POCO M3 has a triple-camera setup at the back, which is pretty much the standard for a budget smartphone. Its camera setup is pretty much in line with other smartphones in the price range as it consists of a 48MP main camera and two 2MP cameras for macro and portrait shots. On the front, it gets a single 8MP camera for selfies and video calls.

Out of the three rear cameras, we found that the 48MP is unsurprisingly the best one as it delivers great photos with good dynamic range and decent colors at normal lighting conditions. Thanks to the 48MP resolution, the camera is capable of capturing high-resolution photos with high details and good clarity. However, because of not having OIS, you will have to hold the device still when taking photos in low-light conditions. Another issue with the POCO M3’s cameras is that the exposure strategy sometimes is very aggressive in certain scenes, leading to photos having lower detail in the corners. In low-light scenes, the primary camera managed to deliver stable results, thanks to the Night Mode. However, in extremely dark cases, the exposure is too aggressive that the whole photo is filled with noises and hardly usable.

POCO M3: Battery

With a massive 6,000 mAh battery, the POCO M3 can easily run for two days for medium usage. In addition, you can also use the phone as a power bank thanks to the reverse charging feature. As usual, Xiaomi’s MIUI also offers lots of battery saver options in case you want to stretch the POCO M3’s battery life even more. 

The charging speed of this phone is not the fastest, but it is impressive for its price. With the 18W charging support, you will only have to wait a little over one hour to fully charge the device.

POCO M3 price: around Rs. 10,000

POCO M3 price in India: Unavailable

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