There’s a lot of crossover between Xiaomi’s various sub-brands, which explains why the Poco F5 Pro looks an awful lot like the Redmi K60 – a mid-range phone that launched in China towards the end of 2022 – and very unlike the vanilla Poco F5.

Xiaomi has given the Poco F5 a 5000mAh battery, which is much larger than the Poco F4’s 4500mAh cell. Considering last year’s model was quite a bit heavier, that’s quite a feat. You’re getting MIUI 14 layered on top of Android 13 with the Poco F5, just like with the Poco F5 Pro, not to mention the Xiaomi 13 and the Redmi Note 12 Pro. It’s no less cluttered or clumsy here.Once again there’s a rather compact 1/2in 64MP main sensor, a mediocre 8MP ultra-wide, and an inconsequential 2MP macro. OIS makes a return for that main sensor, which is good news, but again nothing new. The camera has no trouble turning out shareable photos in good lighting, and the selfie camera is fine. The portrait mode on the main and selfie lens struggles with edges and stray hairs, but it produces a decent bokeh effect. The main camera has a night mode that does a passable job, but inevitably noise creeps in the darker it gets. It cannot match something like Google’s Pixel. It would have been a lot better to swap out the macro sensor with a telephoto shooter. Since this isn't the case, the phone crops in on the main camera when you're zooming in on a scene. This is generally fine on a bright sunny day, with a respectable level of detail, decent exposure, and a good dynamic range. However, images tend to become soft when the sky is overcast. The Poco F5 is quite clearly a better phone than the Poco F4, with impressive performance, a nicer design, and superior battery life adding to an already impressive AMOLED display. Shots from the main sensor also tend to be a little too saturated, and the noise levels tend to increase in darker areas, with images becoming over-sharpened in this case. This is solved when you switch to Night mode, which does a solid job of lifting the brightness and reducing noise, likely owing to OIS that allows for slower shutter speeds. On the other hand, the default Photo mode doesn't produce bright shots at night.

But really, you shouldn’t have to work that hard straight out of the box. Other mid-range phones, most notably the Pixel 7a and the Motorola Edge 40, don’t make you jump through so many hoops. Battery life You can watch the launch on the Poco Global YouTube channel from 1300 BST. But what do we know so far about the specs of these new phones? The triple lens cameras in the F5 and F5 Pro are identical, consisting of a 64-megapixel main lens, an 8-megapixel ultrawide, and a 2-megapixel macro lens. You also get a 16-megapixel selfie camera in each phone, and while you can dig into settings to snap a full 64-megapixel shot, I don’t advise it. Likewise, for extreme close-ups, you might dig into the menu to find the macro option, but you can expect woefully inferior shots.

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The day-to-day performance of the phone shows that it occupies the slot between recent flagship models and upper mid-rangers, which is to be expected of the Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen 2. This means that general scrolling, web browsing, and multitasking work fine, although I do notice occasional lag when returning to the home screen. That said, this does not occur often enough to be a major issue. The 16Mp snapper is totally fine. A little warm with no alarmingly obvious “beauty” effects going on, which could either be a blessing or a curse, but it’s entirely useable.

Proximity Sensor, Light Sensor, Gyroscope Sensor, Accelerometer (G-Sensor), Fingerprint Sensor, Infrared SensorThe Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen 2 chipset is one of the most powerful processors on the market, so you can be sure that the POCO F5 will be able to handle anything you throw at it. The 67W charging is incredibly fast, so you can go from empty to full in just a few minutes. The Full HD+ 120Hz OLED display is incredibly smooth and responsive, making it a pleasure to use for gaming, watching videos, or just browsing the web. And so we come to the part of the review where we mention the key weakness with most if not all Xiaomi phones: software.