A day at the tennis with the Poco F7 Ultra

Out of Camera #4

This weekend Tokyo hosted the qualifying rounds for the Billie Jean King Cup, the premier women’s national team tennis tournament. Japan, Romania and Canada were competing against each other for a slot in the finals in Shenzhen come September.

I’m a reasonably engaged tennis fan, but I haven’t actually been to watch any live matches since I went to Wimbledon something like 25 years ago. It was my birthday and I remember playing Metal Gear Solid on the Game Boy Color on the train up to London after school. That’s about it.

Anyway, it was great; I’ll be back. And, obviously, I made sure to take some photos.

My camera for the day was the new Poco F7 Ultra. This is my first time mentioning the F7 Ultra on Multicore, as it happens, so this post will also serve as a quick review.

The F7 Ultra is Xiaomi sub-brand Poco’s new flagship phone, following on from last year’s F6 Pro. Similar to how the F6 Pro was based on China’s Redmi K70 Pro, the F7 Ultra is essentially a rebranded K80 Pro. While this is Poco’s first “Ultra” phone, then, the naming represents a marketing shift rather than a fundamental technical leap.

The signature Poco yellow on this unit won’t be for everyone, but I kind of dig the F7 Ultra’s design. Like the F6 Pro, it’s extremely sturdy and angular. The two-tone finish around the camera module is neat, and the black aluminum edges contrast well with the yellow matte glass back panel.

The screen is very similar to the F6 Pro’s, which is to say it’s great — it’s still a 6.67” 1440p 120Hz OLED with skinny bezels on all four sides. Peak brightness is 3,200 nits, down from 4,000 on the F6 Pro, but on the more practical high-brightness mode measure it jumps from 1,200 to 1,800 nits. In other words, the F7 Ultra should look brighter in actual sunlight.

Poco’s traditional strength is in offering high-end specs at lower price points, often by using flagship components from previous years. The F6 Pro, for example, had a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which was the leading Android SoC in 2023. The F7 Ultra, though, is right up to date, using the same Snapdragon 8 Elite you’ll find in current Android flagships. This unit also came with 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM.

The “Ultra” branding tends to evoke breakthrough camera hardware when used by other manufacturers. The F7 Ultra might not be on par with the best from Xiaomi or Oppo, but the F7 Ultra is still something new for Poco. While the brand has tended to downplay photography in the past, the F7 Ultra’s camera system is a giant leap forward over the meagre hardware in its predecessor.

Here’s what’s on board:

• 24mm-equivalent lens with 50-megapixel 1/1.55" sensor and f/1.6 aperture

• 60mm 2.5x telephoto lens with 50-megapixel 1/2.76” sensor, f/2 aperture and telemacro close focusing

• 15mm ultrawide lens with 32-megapixel 1/3.42” sensor and f/2.2 aperture

Nothing too unique, but on paper this is a solid setup for what’s ostensibly a midrange phone. By comparison, the F6 Pro had the same primary camera module backed up by an 8-megapixel ultrawide and a useless 2-megapixel macro lens, so the F7 Ultra at least drags Poco into the realm of photographic respectability.

Or it ought to, anyway. “Ultra” phones usually focus on zoom performance, which is why I thought I’d bring the F7 Ultra along to a sports event — I figured it’d make for a challenging comparison next to my Olympics shots from the Xiaomi 14 Ultra. Let’s see how it fared.