Introducing, POCO’s latest entry in the entry-mid-ish-range level smartphone. Seems like POCO is sprinkling its magic into more segments of the smartphone market – but how good is the POCO M3?
Design
Let’s start off with the most obvious thing here – the design. When I first saw the POCO M3 was “wow, that’s a beautiful design” – and that’s especially true for the yellow-colored POCO M3. It’s just eye-catching.
The back of this phone is made out of plastic but has a leather texture to it – which actually feels great though I don’t know how easy it is to clean if grime starts to accumulate between the gaps.
Then there’s also the humongous cutout at the top, which reminds a lot of people – including me – of the OnePlus 8T Cyberpunk 2077 edition.
The POCO M3, it’s made entirely out of plastic, and I don’t know what purpose it serves. It does look nice though – but only when fingerprints are wiped away. There’s also a huge POCO brand name that’s on this piece here – but it’s pad-printed.
This means that the POCO brand name is printed on top and can be felt by your fingertips, and it can also be scraped off easily. Imagine this – taking it in or out of the pocket countless times a day will definitely scrape it off someday.
Cameras
And within like 1/3 of the whole cutout is where the real camera cutout is found. Within this triple camera setup, we have a 48MP f/1.8 main camera, one 2MP macro, and another depth sensor.
So far, pictures coming out of it actually looks okay – especially for a phone of this price. White balance is a little aggressive, and the overall exposure is a little darker for my taste, though.
All of our picture samples are in the video at the top of this review. Watch that instead.
Battery
The POCO M3 is actually a rather thicc phone. That is because the phone has a massive 6,000mAh battery inside of it – and throughout our battery life test, it lasts for 21 and a half hours – and that’s just insane!
As for charging times though, it’s even more insane. The POCO M3 comes bundled with a 22.5W charger, but the phone itself only accepts 18W maximum. That aside, the charging time from 15% to 100% takes more than an hour and a half.
Screen
And then – the screen. The POCO M3 comes with a 6.53-inch IPS LCD screen with 1080p in resolution and again, no complaints here. The screen looks fine and serves its purposes really well. Actually, I want to praise POCO for including a 1080p screen and not a 720p screen like its competitors.
Specs & performance
Lastly, the specs and performance. It’s equipped with the Snapdragon 662 chipset, 4GB RAM, and for our unit – it has 128GB of internal storage. The overall performance is quite decent and we have already done the gaming test on this phone – which you can check out both videos here.
Though I want to highlight that originally when we got the POCO M3, navigating the system was laggy and stutters a lot. Since then, there is already one firmware update that fixed most of these issues. So good job there, POCO.
Overall user experience is the same as any other phones running on MIUI 12, and you can check out our previous reviews for that instead.
Should you buy the POCO M3?
So overall, I think that the POCO M3 is a fantastic smartphone. The starting price for the 64GB storage version starts at RM599, which is a very good price for what it offers.
Now, at first, I’m not sure if POCO will ever do the promotion again and sell it at RM499 again – but as we’re writing this review, Xiaomi Malaysia is bringing back the RM499 deal this 12.12 sale.
As a personal note, the POCO M3 is a great secondary device for our use here in the studio – because of the IR blaster. We can remotely control the camera, which is a huge boon for us. Maybe we can mess around with the AC or the TV too. 🤔
Where to buy?
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