This is the brand new POCO M4 Pro 5G. I’ve been using it for like a week or two at this point – and I have to start by saying that the POCO M4 Pro is quite a weird one. It’s not exactly “entry-level” and yet there’s no POCO M4 – without the Pro. So, let’s get into it.
Design
I think we’ll start by talking about the design of the POCO M4 Pro 5G first. I immediately realized it’s using a very similar design as the POCO M3 from last year, but flattened the phone and changed the faux leather texture into this matte finish. That humongous camera cutout is now swapped with this two-tone design instead.
Screen
The screen is a simple 6.6-inch IPS LCD screen with 2400×1080 pixels in resolution with 90Hz refresh rate – but there is nothing much to talk about since it’s just like many other phones we’ve seen before.
The colors are decent but its brightness isn’t that high so it’ll struggle when used outdoors. Typical stuff for a phone with such hardware.
Cameras
Let’s now talk about the cameras. Even though it looks like there are lots of cameras, there are only two. You only get a main camera and an ultrawide angle camera.
To have a look at all the pictures taken with the POCO M4 Pro 5G, watch our video at the top of this review. The cameras are actually fairly decent.
Performance
The performance. It comes with a MediaTek Dimensity 810 chipset and overall, I think the performance is something I’ll consider as acceptable for its price range. Like what we mentioned in the gaming test video – which you can check below here – is rather weird.
We can play games like Genshin Impact at its lowest graphical settings at slightly above 30fps most of the time, the graphical settings available for PUBG, COD Mobile, and Mobile Legends are quite low.
Battery
This phone comes with a 5,000mAh battery and hey, it can last for quite a long time. It can definitely last you through more than one day with just one charge. From our battery life test, it lasts for >16 hours so I really won’t have to worry about the battery life of this phone at all.
Charger
The charger that’s included in the box is the proprietary 33W fast charging that we’ve encountered many times before – charges the phone from 15% to 100% in about 75 minutes or so.
Software
Of course, let’s not forget about the software side of things. It’s running a modified version of MIUI but in truth, it seems like only the home launcher got changed.
The POCO M4 Pro 5G comes with a lot of apps pre-installed that I think many people won’t use. I am not going to touch those pre-installed trash mobile games for sure.
And if you think the regular version of MIUI is problematic, then I have a surprise for you. It’s even more broken and buggier on the POCO M4 Pro 5G. On top of everything that we’ve complained about, it now has two more issues.
The first one is this NFC persistent notification that cannot be dismissed. To dismiss it, we can disable NFC entirely, which renders the feature more pointless than it already is. This issue is the first time we’re encountering this issue and it is not present on any other Xiaomi or POCO phones that we reviewed.
The second issue is a dark mode. For some reason, they manage to screw up dark mode. For a few apps like Facebook and Messenger, dark mode is literally black text on a black background. I can’t see anything. Enabling or disabling dark mode in the app doesn’t fix anything.
I have no idea what caused this issue but this happening on the POCO M4 Pro 5G. I have also tried it on the Redmi 10 that has the same version of Facebook but doesn’t have this dark mode bug. Even the subtitles in Netflix is black in color.
So, will this issue be fixed? MIUI has a “force dark mode” functionality built-in and it is forced upon all apps when dark mode is turned on. We can head into the settings up and manually disable that “forced dark mode” feature for certain apps to “fix” this issue.
We have already reported all of these issues back to Xiaomi directly as they are fundamentally affecting the user experience. We do expect a new firmware update to fix these issues soon.
UPDATE: Yes, a new update is issued to address the broken dark mode that we mentioned here. Though it’s still not “perfect”, at least we don’t have to deal with black-on-black texts.
Misc. things to mention
While the POCO M4 Pro 5G comes with “stereo speakers”, the secondary speaker is practically nonexistent as the volume is too low and the sound quality is horrendous.
Also, the POCO M4 Pro 5G comes with a dedicated SIM + combo slot instead of having 3 dedicated card slots. Just thought that’s worth pointing out for those who care.
Should you buy the POCO M4 Pro 5G?
We should really talk about the price. The starting price is RM849 with 4GB RAM + 64GB storage and I think that price is rather high, honestly. However, POCO Malaysia did have a promotion for this phone for the price of RM749, which was the retail price I was expecting, not the promotional price.
So, here’s the one-liner for the POCO M4 Pro 5G. This is a decent phone that has decent hardware but the software is even more broken than before, and the price is also not that low. That is why I suggest that if you want to buy the POCO M4 Pro 5G, wait for a sale and get it at RM749.
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