Xiaomi’s Pocophone F1 is crazy cheap for what it offers

Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone brand known for affordable smartphones (and loads of other gadgets) with formidable specs, has launched a new brand. 

It’s called Pocophone, and by the looks of its first phone, the Pocophone F1, it appears it will launch similarly cheap phones with even better specs than Xiaomi. 

On the surface, the Pocophone F1 is just another Android-based iPhone clone, with a notch on top, and pretty slim bezels on the sides. On the back, it resembles OnePlus, with a plastic (or aramid fiber, depending on the trim) cover and vertically positioned dual cameras and fingerprint sensor. 

But the Pocophone surprises in terms of cost/benefit ratio. It launched in India on Wednesday starting at 20,999 rupees ($301), which is less than a third of the cost of an iPhone X or a Galaxy Note 9. And yet, it has specs that match or even eclipse those flagship phones. 

For that price, you get a 6.18-inch, 2,246 x 1,080 pixel screen, a Snapdragon 845 processor (yes, the same one that the Note 9 has), 6GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a 12/5-megapixel rear camera, a 20-megapixel selfie camera, a 4,000mAh battery, a fingerprint sensor, an IR-based face recognition technology (meaning that it works in the dark). It also has cool little tidbits that typically aren’t found on cheap phones, such as liquid cooling. 

For 23,999 rupees ($344), you get the same phone but with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. For 28,999 rupees ($415) you get 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and for 29,999 ($429) you get the “Armoured Edition” of the phone, which also packs 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and comes with an aramid fiber back case.  

Pocophone’s approach appears to be very OnePlus-like: Launch an affordable phone that matches the top dogs in specs, and sprinkle a little something extra on top to make it feel like a real flagship. The difference, however, is in the price. When OnePlus 6 launched earlier this year, it started at $529 for the base model, and the top trip was $629. That’s pretty good compared with, say, an iPhone, but the Pocophone F1 is so much cheaper still. 

Granted, the Pocophone F1 is a bit behind the OnePlus 6 when it comes to pure specs, as it has a nominally weaker camera and an LCD instead of AMOLED screen. And we haven’t tested the Pocophone F1 yet. From my experience with other Xiaomi phones, they do tend to be put together a bit more sloppily than phones from top brands; we’ll see if that’s true for Pocophone as well. 

The Pocophone F1 doesn’t appear to be headed to the U.S., at least not at this point — in fact, Xiaomi in general hasn’t made any moves in that direction lately. But its first phone is impressive, and it’ll be very interesting to see what the Pocophone brand does next.