Poco F8 Ultra review: the world's best-sounding phone
And it's made of 'denim'
Early this year Poco launched its first Ultra phone, the broadly impressive F7 Ultra, and now the Xiaomi sub-brand is rounding out 2025 with its successor. The F8 Ultra is a completely different phone with some unique features that make it stand out from its usual upper-midrange offerings, not to mention the competition.
Poco is calling the F8 Ultra “the brand’s official entry into the premium flagship segment”. There are a few caveats to that claim — unsurprisingly, this device isn’t quite up there with the likes of the Xiaomi 15 Ultra. But starting at just $729, this is a capable, well-designed device that nails all the basics and has at least one claim to absolute supremacy.
The F8 Ultra doesn’t look too remarkable from the front until you take it out of the box, touch the back panel and realise that huh, this phone looks and feels like it’s made of denim. It isn’t actually real denim, of course, but a synthetic finish that Poco describes as “Xiaomi’s third-generation nano-tech material, providing durability against dirt and wear while boasting a tech-chic look.”
As someone who has been known to wear jeans around the calendar, I dig the look. I do have concerns about its durability, and it feels a little disconcerting when temperatures rise inside the phone itself, but Poco assures me that it’s all been fully tested out. I somehow contrived to spill some iced tea on it with no obvious lasting effect, so there’s that. (Not sure I’d want to test that with red wine.)
The style and texture won’t be for everyone, though, so of course there is a boring regular black model as well that looks perfectly fine.
Okay, so let’s get into that camera bump — without talking about the cameras just yet. To be clear, Poco does not deserve any iPhone 17 Pro knock-off accusations here; the F6 Pro from a year and a half ago had the same double-wide design well ahead of Apple. The difference now is that Poco is making use of the extra space for a unique feature.
On the right of the cameras is a Bose-branded subwoofer. When paired with the top and bottom speakers, you get full-on 2.1 stereo output. There are two Bose-tuned sound profiles that you can access in the settings app, Dynamic and Balanced; the former gives you more bass and makes more of an obvious difference versus other devices.
The results are actually great. We aren’t in separate-Bluetooth-speaker territory here, but the F8 Ultra sounds better than most tablets and is streets ahead of every other phone, with far more bass and detail than you’d expect from such a comparatively small device. It also gets much louder without suffering from distortion.
I am not altogether sure that louder, better phone audio would be a net positive if widely deployed across society, but if you often find yourself using your phone speakers in the privacy of your own home or hotel room, I can highly recommend the F8 Ultra. I’ve used it to watch NBA games, full Netflix episodes and YouTube videos, as well as listen to podcasts, over the past few weeks, and it makes all of those feel like a much different experience to other phones — including the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max, which has a near-identical chassis and speaker layout other than the subwoofer.
While I don’t think the F8 Ultra is quite there for music listening, I’m not sure any phone ever really could be. Poco and Bose definitely deserve credit for expanding the scenarios in which I’d be happy to use built-in audio. Seriously, I watched three episodes of The Diplomat on this phone.
That particular use case was helped by the excellent 6.9” display, which is the same panel as on the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max. It has a 120Hz refresh rate, 3,500 nits peak brightness and supports Dolby Vision. The resolution is 2608x1200, which is maybe a touch lower than you’d hope for a flagship at that size — many competitors are 1440p — but Poco has a trick up its sleeve.
The panel uses what Poco calls HyperRGB and panel supplier TCL refers to as “Real RGB”, which is perhaps more descriptive. In short, this screen has a true RGB layout, meaning each pixel has red, green and blue subpixels rather than sharing red and blue with green, which is commonly referred to as Pentile.
That makes for a 33% boost in subpixel resolution if all things are equal, or depending on how you want to look at it, only 66% as many pixels for the phone to render in order to achieve the same clarity.
Pentile layouts are less of an issue than they used to be at lower resolutions, when jagged visual artefacts were common. Subjectively, though, this screen looks incredibly sharp and well on par with 1440p panels of a similar size, despite the phone outputting fewer pixels.
This isn’t something that really changes the experience of using the phone, but technically it’s quite a breakthrough and something I hope to see deployed elsewhere. In particular, I wonder how practical it would be for 1080p gaming handhelds, where rendering bandwidth is at a premium.
For now, though, the biggest benefit to the F8 Ultra is probably in power efficiency. Poco claims a 19.5% advantage from the panel alone, and that’s helped further by the 6,500mAh battery, a 27% increase in capacity over the F7 Ultra. It can be charged at up to 100W wired or 50W wirelessly, and there’s also 22.5W reverse wireless charging.
The spec sheet is rounded out by Qualcomm’s latest flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor. The F7 Ultra was one of the last phones to release during the cycle for the previous 8 Elite chip, but the F8 Ultra is one of the first with the 8 Elite Gen 5. That’s significant in global markets — this chip won’t show up in Samsung phones until next year, for example.
The F8 Ultra comes in two memory configurations: 12GB of RAM with 256GB of storage, and 16GB of RAM with 512GB of storage. I’ve been testing the latter, and performance has been very good, as has battery life. I recently put the phone through a punishing day involving an early start, several hours of photography in bright sunlight and a lot of use during long bus rides, and it still had 19% left when I dropped it on the charger before bed.
As for the cameras, Poco has delivered upgrades across the board. The main camera has a 50-megapixel 1/1.31” Light Fusion sensor with a f/1.67 lens. For the first time in a Poco phone there’s a 5x periscope telephoto, here with a f/3 aperture and 50-megapixel 1/2.76” sensor, while the 0.7x ultrawide has a f/2.4 aperture and a 50-megapixel 1/2.88” sensor.
This is not quite what I’d consider a true flagship camera array; the ultrawide and telephoto sensors are quite small, and it would have been nice to get a lens somewhere between 1x and 5x. But it’s close, and marks a big improvement on the F7 Ultra. Results are generally very good for this price range, and the main camera is right up there with the best.
Poco doesn’t benefit from the same Leica collaboration on colour science as its Xiaomi parent, so the image tuning here is much more vibrant and smartphone-like, with stronger HDR and more sharpening in the pipeline. That’s not necessarily to my taste, but it is to a lot of people’s, and the important thing here is the consistency.
Here are some unedited samples across all three cameras:
The two extra lenses do occasionally struggle to keep up with the main camera. You can see the difference in colours in the ultrawide’s viewfinder, for example, but by the time the photo has been taken and processed the exposures tend to be a near match. And while the 5x lens is generally solid — and doubles as a macro lens thanks to its close focusing distance — I did notice its photos falling back to the main camera occasionally in low light, which isn’t too surprising given the small sensor and aperture.
One other thing to note is that at 0.7x, or 18mm-equivalent, the ultrawide is noticeably less wide than most other phones, meaning there’s less of a difference between its field of view and that of the main camera. I personally don’t find this to be a problem at all and actually think it’s a more photographically useful focal length, but not everyone agrees.
You can see a straight comparison above. Both are basically ultrawide shots in the traditional sense, one is just slightly more so than the other.
Overall this is a good if not spectacular camera system, but an extremely good one for the price. I’d certainly take it over the iPhone 17 or the Pixel 10.
The Poco F8 Ultra does fall short of “premium flagship" status in some ways — there are a few too many pre-installed apps for my liking, it could use a mid-range telephoto and the still-thin bottom bezel is very slightly thicker than the other three, if you care about that sort of thing.
But at $729 for the 12GB/256GB model and $799 for 16GB/512GB, it’s hard to complain. The slight price hike over the F7 Ultra has led to a far better phone, one that’s competitive with Samsung’s best at a significant discount.
And for the first time, Poco has hit on an unexpected but genuinely unique selling point. The Bose triple speaker system might be a leftfield addition, but it’s surprisingly useful and something no-one else can match.