POCO F7 Ultra Ultimate Review: Premium Power for Less

Ah POCO. A brand that launched way back in 2018, by Xiaomi. In fact, this is the very first POCO phone I’ve used since the original POCOPhone F1 almost 7 years ago. It’s quite interesting to see how far POCO has come. They still see themselves as a brand that offers great performance at an affordable price. With the POCO F7 Ultra, that’s still sort of true, but prices are going up.

The POCO F7 Ultra is for all intents and purposes, a flagship smartphone. Sporting a Snapdragon 8 Elite, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage or 12GB/256GB. It also sports a stunning 6.7-inch display and two 50-megapixel cameras, with a 32-megapixel ultrawide. It’s truly a flagship phone, offering better performance than the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra.

But, specs are only part of the equation with a smartphone. So, let’s find out if the POCO F7 Ultra is worth your money in our full review.

POCO F7 Ultra Review: Design and Build Quality

The design of the POCO F7 Ultra is unique but boring at the same time. The F7 Ultra is available in both black and yellow, the same as their brand’s colors. The unit I have here is yellow, and it actually looks pretty nice. And I’m not typically a fan of yellow phones. The backside is mostly boring, however, the top third of the phone has an interesting design that kind of sets it apart. And on the left corner is the triple-camera setup. The back is slightly curved, while the sides are flat.

Speaking of the camera, there are three cameras here. Including a 50-megapixel Light Fusion 800 image sensor. That is Xiaomi’s own sensor that it designed. It also has a 50-megapixel 2.5x telephoto lens and a 32-megapixel ultra-wide camera. Surprisingly, it all fits into a pretty small area on the back of the phone.

On the right side is the power and volume buttons, with the SIM card tray at the bottom with the speaker and USB-C port. On the front, it’s basically all screen. It does have some fairly sizeable bezels actually. But keep in mind that this is an affordable flagship, so it’s cheaper than the Galaxy S25 Ultra and a few other flagships with much thinner bezels.

It’s a great looking phone that also feels great in the hand. And if you’ve picked up a Xiaomi phone in recent years, then you know exactly what the build quality is like. It’s pretty solid; no complaints here.

POCO F7 Ultra Review: Display

As mentioned, the POCO F7 Ultra does have a 6.67-inch 2K Flow AMOLED display. This is a variable refresh rate panel, up to 120Hz. With brightness hitting 1,800 nits in high brightness mode and 3,200 nits at peak brightness. I will say that the POCO F7 Ultra is plenty bright, even though those numbers really don’t sound that impressive. I’ve used this phone outdoors in direct sunlight and had no issues with seeing the display.

It also has 3840Hz PWM dimming, so those that need a high pulse width modulation, POCO has you covered here. There’s also POCO Shield Glass which is supposed to be great at keeping your display free of scratches and cracks. Honestly, so far it’s been pretty good. Though I haven’t tried to do any drop tests with it.

The color accuracy here is quite good, out of the box. It does still tend to be a tiny bit on the warm side, but I prefer it that way. The colors look very vibrant in videos and pictures, and even at high brightness, the colors aren’t blown out. Which we sometimes see on cheaper phones.

POCO F7 Ultra Review: Performance

Performance on the POCO F7 Ultra is right where you’d think it would be, top notch. That’s thanks to the Snapdragon 8 Elite inside, with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. It’s actually right on par with my OnePlus 13 with the same RAM/Storage combination. The F7 Ultra is plenty snappy, and I’ve never had any issues with the phone getting hot or running out of RAM.

The fingerprint sensor is also pretty good here, though it is still an optical one. So it’s not quite as fast as the ultrasonic sensors that the Pixel 9, Galaxy S25, and OnePlus 13 have now.

The speaker performance is the sole weak point in an otherwise stellar device. At higher volumes, the sound quality becomes noticeably tinny and distorted, forcing users to keep the volume at around 50% to maintain decent audio clarity. It’s a disappointing compromise in an otherwise impressive smartphone that excels in nearly every other aspect.

Benchmarks

With every phone that we review, we run a number of benchmarks to see how well it performs. Because OEMs can and will tell us what we want to hear, when it comes to performance, but that might not always be true. So, we run Geekbench 6, 3D Mark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test, and AnTuTu. And we record the results, so we can compare it to other devices in reviews like this.

First up is Geekbench. Which was a rather interesting one. I had to run this test three separate times. The first two, the single-core score was really low, while the multi-core and GPU scores were right around what we were expecting. But, when I turn on “Ultimate Mode” in the battery settings, and run the test, I do get a better score. It is still the lowest Snapdragon 8 Elite score we’ve gotten so far, however. Which leads me to believe that the software is not as optimized as it should and could be.

On the single-core the F7 Ultra scored 2889, and multi-core, it was 8326. While the GPU score was 17,293. These are similar to other Snapdragon 8 Elite devices we’ve reviewed recently but still lower for some reason.

Moving onto 3D Mark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test. This benchmark actually serves two purposes for us. It helps us see how the thermals are, and thermal throttling. As well as seeing how hot this phone can truly get. We’ve gotten some wild temperature readings on this test in the past year, but the F7 Ultra was actually pretty normal, coming in at 117.5 degrees Fahrenheit. The scores were also virtually the same as the OnePlus 13 and Xiaomi 15, however the Galaxy S25 Ultra was quite a bit higher, but the stability was much lower. Meaning it peaked, and then dropped, while the POCO F7 Ultra stayed relatively the same throughout the test.

Then we have AnTuTu. We’ve started to do this test as an all-in-one test because AnTuTu tests just about every aspect of the phone and provides a comprehensive score. The POCO F7 Ultra hit a score of 2,533,644. That is pretty good, about 150k lower than the OnePlus 13, but a good amount higher than the Galaxy S25 Ultra, surprisingly.

Finally, we have a video export test. This one is a bit tougher for smartphone makers to “cheat” in. As with other benchmarks, OEMs have been caught overclocking the processor in benchmark tests to get higher scores. But with this one, we load in a 60-second long video into Capcut, and export it at 4K30. We time how long it takes to export, which is generally seconds. The POCO F7 Ultra was a bit slower than I was expecting actually. It was 14.2 seconds, while other Snapdragon 8 Elite devices are between 5-8 seconds. This is another hint to me that Hyper OS 2.0 isn’t as optimized as it should be.

Thermals

We also do a few thermal tests on every phone, to see how everything stacks up. There are three tests that we do. The first is recording the temperature after running 3D Mark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test. The second test is playing an hour of Genshin Impact at max screen brightness and max graphic settings. Finally, camera recording at 4K60. We take the temperature at 5 minutes and again at 10 minutes.

With 3D Mark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test, the POCO F7 Ultra did get quite warm. The metal frame was very hot, however the phone itself only reached 117.5 degrees Fahrenheit. That puts it within two degrees of the OnePlus 13, however, it is quite a bit warmer than the Galaxy S25 Ultra – keep in mind, Samsung did include a huge vapor chamber this year.

For the Genshin Impact test, the POCO F7 Ultra was at 96.1 degrees Fahrenheit. That is pretty much in-line with other Snapdragon 8 Elite devices like the OnePlus 13 and Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra; the S25 Ultra still has the lowest temperature here.

On the camera thermal tests, POCO also performed quite well. It hit 94.4 degrees at 5 minutes in, and 95.3 degrees at 10 minutes in. Those readings are very close to the Xiaomi 15 and the Galaxy S25 Ultra. However, the OnePlus 13 did very well in this test and was actually below 90 degrees Fahrenheit at five minutes in.

So the bottom line here for thermals is, they are pretty good. Whether you want the POCO F7 Ultra for gaming or you live in a hotter climate country like India, you should be perfectly fine.

POCO F7 Ultra Review: Battery Life and Charging

The part I hate the most about testing and reviewing a Xiaomi phone is, the battery life. This is because the battery life screen in Hyper OS 2.0 is virtually useless. It doesn’t tell you how long the screen has been on at all. So, I did try to use this as much as I would a daily driver, and at the end of the day, I had around 30% left. On the OnePlus 13, that would typically be around 45% at the end of the day. And around 35% on the Galaxy S25 Ultra.

Again, this is another hint that the POCO F7 Ultra isn’t as optimized as it could be, since it does have a 5,300mAh capacity battery, which is larger than the Galaxy S25 Ultra, with a smaller display. But, for most people, this should get them through the day with no problem. And if you do need to top up, there’s 120W charging with the charger that’s in the box. Which is incredibly fast, and has made me not charge it at night quite often.

My main complaint with charging is the same as with OnePlus, OPPO and a few other brands. The charging speed is nice and all, but it is very annoying that it is only possible with their charger. Thankfully, it is included in the box, but when I’m traveling, I don’t want to bring a specific charger for a phone to charge it quickly. I generally bring a USB-C PD charger, which is much slower for phones like this. I really wish OEMs would start to embrace USB-C PD and PPS more. Because Samsung actually offers the fastest USB-C PD charging speeds right now, despite all the hate they get.

Benchmarks

As with performance, we also run benchmarks on the battery life and charging for each phone. First up is battery life. So for this test, we charge the phone to 100%, and let it keep charging for a bit more to make sure it’s actually at 100%. Then we unplug, load up a 24-hour long YouTube video, and play it at full screen, at about 200 nits. This is to make it fair for all phones, instead of max brightness, as some phones have much brighter displays than others. We then record the time when it hits 1%. For the POCO F7 Ultra, that was 21 hours and 30 minutes. That’s an hour behind the OnePlus 13 and just a half hour behind the Galaxy S25 Ultra. So it’s not a bad showing at all.

For charging, we plugged the phone in after the battery test, using the charger that was in the box. Or one that can output the max charging speed for the phone. In this case, we used the 120W charger that is in the box, using an adapter. We found that it took 28 minutes and 20 seconds to go from 1% to 100%. That is among the fastest-charging phones we’ve ever reviewed.

POCO F7 Ultra Review: Software

POCO is launching the F7 Ultra with the latest version of Android – Android 15 and HyperOS 2.0. This is the same software that launched on the Xiaomi 15 series earlier this month. It’s the second version of HyperOS which does bring around some changes. Including more customization.

There are also quite a few apps pre-installed on the F7 Ultra, unfortunately. Including AliExpress, Amazon Music, Book.com, and Moovit to name a few. These are at least removable, while some others are not, like Xiaomi’s Music app, Mi Browser and a few more system apps. But thankfully, POCO does give you 512GB of storage here.

If you’re someone who likes the way iOS looks but prefers Android, then HyperOS is perfect for you. There are a lot of things copied from iOS, but the biggest thing is going to be the Quick Settings Panel. It looks very similar and even lacks the settings icon like it does on iPhone. This actually really annoys me, even as someone who uses iOS. Because on Android, I’m so used to pulling down the notification shade and jumping into settings. But that’s not possible here, unfortunately.

POCO is promising four years of Android updates and 5+ years of security updates. So, you will get plenty of updates from POCO, and the company has gotten much better at pushing out these updates, too.

POCO F7 Ultra Review: Camera

I was actually very excited to check out the POCO F7 Ultra because of the camera. This is the first time I’ve gotten to use Xiaomi’s own image sensor on a phone, which is the primary sensor on the F7 Ultra. It’s a 50-megapixel f/1.6 aperture and 1/1.55″ sensor. So it’s a pretty decent size. And it did not disappoint. It performed really well, taking some pretty great photos that did have the correct colors. Unlike the Galaxy S25 Ultra, which is typically oversaturated. It also performed well with shadows, which is something that the Pixel 9 series struggles with.

There’s also the telephoto sensor, which is also a 50-megapixel sensor with an f/2.0 aperture. This is a 2.5x optical zoom sensor equivalent to 60mm. The zoom isn’t perfect here, but at 2.5x it does perform quite well. Past that, at 5x or 10x, it does start to fall apart, with fewer details in the picture. At 5x it is a sensor crop, while 10x is digital zoom enhanced with AI. Here are a handful of pictures taken with the zoom camera.

Then we have the 32-megapixel ultrawide camera, which is an interesting choice for an ultrawide. To be honest, I don’t use the ultrawide all that often, and since it is not used for macro here, it’s getting used even less. But for the few times I did use it, it worked just as it should.

Finally, macro, or super macro as POCO calls it. Despite not advertising it as such, the POCO F7 Ultra does do telemacro. So when you tap on the “Super Macro” icon, it will switch over to the telephoto lens, and all macro shots will be 60mm or higher. The quality on these macro shots is quite good, even indoors where the lighting isn’t the best. Which, to be honest, surprised me a good bit. Since these shots usually don’t look to great. But Xiaomi, POCO’s parent company, has done a lot with the camera in recent years, so this is not that surprising.

Overall, the camera is quite good and perhaps best-in-class in this price range. Despite not having the Leica cooperation for this brand from Xiaomi, it’s really not needed. However, I’d love to see how great it would look with some of Leica’s input.

Should you buy the POCO F7 Ultra?

The POCO F7 Ultra is pretty impressive for its price. And it might just be the cheapest Snapdragon 8 Elite smartphone that you can buy right now. There’s really not much to dislike about the F7 Ultra. For me, my main complaint is the software. I’m not a big fan of HyperOS 2.0, however, that is very subjective. It’s a good software skin that is getting better with every update, it’s just not my cup of tea.

I can’t help but think that if the POCO F7 Ultra were available in the US, it might put Samsung and Apple out of business. Because this phone is uber competitive with Samsung and Apple’s latest.

You should buy the POCO F7 Ultra if: 

• You want a cheap phone with flagship specs.
• You want a great camera experience at a lower price.

You should not buy the POCO F7 Ultra if: 

• You live in the US, as it won’t be fully compatible with US networks.
• You want the best camera experience possible.

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