The Poco F7 has a wild cyberpunk design
Big screen, big battery, not-big price
A couple of months ago, I wrote about the Poco F7 Ultra, the first “Ultra”-branded phone from the company. I guess I didn’t mention that there was no regular, non-Ultra F7 at that point, and that that was kind of weird.
Well, here it is today, and it turns out it’s a completely different phone. The Poco F7 starts at just $339 and features the debut of an intriguing new chip from Qualcomm, a giant battery and — at least in one colourway — a striking futuristic design.
Poco calls this version the Cyber Silver Edition and well, it is certainly shooting for cyberpunk vibes. The back panel is a flat surface, but its top section evokes underlying vents and circuit boards, while the mirrored silver segment below shimmers with rainbow colours (and collects a lot of fingerprints). Overall the phone feels very well-built, with a glass back and clean aluminium frame.
The camera bump houses a couple of diagonal neon green lines that I thought might be RGB lights at first. They’re actually just a reflective material, but the effect is quite similar in person. Even next to that, the most conspicuous design element might be the Snapdragon logo with an optical spin effect.
This design is not necessarily my cup of tea, but I’m all for it. Poco has always targeted gamers based on its devices’ price-to-performance ratio, and this aesthetic is a fun way to tap into a little of that appeal without going overboard on the actual hardware.
The Poco F7 is one of the first phones to feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chip; it’s also set to power the Nothing Phone (3) next month. This is the follow-up to the 8s Gen 3 found in last year’s Poco F6; Qualcomm says it should offer 31% faster CPU performance and be 49% faster on the graphics front.
This chip doesn’t necessarily slot alongside the 2025 flagship standard, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, because it doesn’t have the new Oryon CPU cores — the prime core here is a 3.2GHz Cortex-X4. That still puts the F7 at 2024-flagship performance, though, and I found it to be very speedy in use. It tests similarly to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, Qualcomm’s highest-end chip from a year ago.
The display is also impressive — it’s a huge 6.83” 120Hz OLED panel with a resolution of 2772 x 1280. That’s slightly less sharp than the 1440p F7 Ultra, but you can’t really see the difference in practice unless you’re looking for it. The peak brightness is 3,200 nits, and it gets to 1,700 nits across the whole screen in the high-brightness mode, which is more than competitive. The bezels are thin for the device’s price range and very close to symmetrical.
The big screen is matched by a big battery; Poco has managed to fit a 6,500mAh battery into this phone, the largest ever in its F-series. It charges at up to 90W and you can also use it to charge other devices at 22.5W. Unfortunately there is no wireless charging.
Other specs that aren’t necessarily a given at this price range include IP68 dust and water resistance, NFC support, passable stereo speakers (with one channel using the earpiece) and an in-display fingerprint sensor.
As with most of Poco’s higher-end phones until the Ultra, the biggest compromise here is the camera. The F7’s main camera has a 50-megapixel 1/1.95” Sony IMX 882 sensor with an f/1.5 lens, and it’s backed up by a desultory 8-megapixel 1/4” ultrawide. Poco’s image processing has improved a lot, but camera hardware is almost never the reason to buy one of its phones, and that’s very much the case with the F7. Still, I’ll put it through its paces for an Out of Camera at some point.
The Poco F7 will cost $339 at launch for a model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, or $399 to bump the storage up to 512GB. That’s early-bird pricing, however — MSRP for each model is $399 and $449 respectively.
Overall, the Poco F7 is probably the best option available for the price right now if performance is your primary concern — and certainly if you happen to be into its unique design. The only obvious downsides are the lack of wireless charging and the basic camera system.