POCO's back with the f4 gt now it is a more gaming focus phone compared to say the poco
f3 it's got gaming triggers on it and that means that you can assign any control that you want to
that and it will then be emulating the touch with it it's all powered by this snapdragon 8 gen 1.
my model here which is a review unit that poco sent out to me has 12 gigabytes of ram and 256
gigabytes of ufs 3.1 storage cameras on the rear we've got a 64 megapixel main camera 8
megapixel ultra wide and a 2 megapixel macro the screen it's 6.67 inches it is an amoled screen
and it does have a 120 hertz refresh rate in the cutout we have a 20 megapixel front-facing camera
and the battery this one is 4700 milliamp hours included with our phone we get a 120 watt charger
very quick around 21 to 26 minutes it depends and i'll give you the exact times that i'm getting and
then our cable slightly different now it's nice and long and you notice that it's got this style
plug and that's great that they've used this right angle style plug now that means it's not going to
dig into your hands when you're gaming at the same time and charging now we do get a little
bit of paperwork here which is standard so quick start guide safety information and a warranty card
and they do have this which is a 3.5 millimeter adapter here to type c and
a tpu case there with cutouts for our always on fingerprint reader and those mechanical triggers
when you first handle the f4 gt you notice that it is a bit of a heavy phone now six point six
seven inches it's not extremely large but it's not a small phone either we have gorilla glass victus
well there are cameras here at the back so a main 64 megapixel sensor this one is the imax 686
no optical image stabilization with it at all 2 megapixel camera for macro ouch that shouldn't
really be there and then an 8 megapixel ultra wide which is also quite a weak camera now this little
logo right here that looks like it's a lightning bolt or something that's our flash now there is
a bit of a light effect that does happen with the lens there are some colors that come through that
you notice that when you plug it in for example it's charging you see that on the camera module
and there are various different settings as you can see for it so you can keep it on when charging
you can use it for incoming calls and it's full rgb so you can go along and customize that color
so it is basically a notification light which is great you can see there for the notifications you
can see it you can set to use it with the game turbo or selected applications there as well
but after the phone at the top you'll find our some tracer takes two nano sims antenna line
volume up and down and a microphone so there are three mics on this phone now it's a squared off
edge around it it's a metal frame that does have and it feels good it's only about 8.5 millimeters
of thickness up the top the mechanical triggers so they can be hidden away normally you would
probably have them hidden away if you're not gaming so you can simply just swipe that there's
a little switch that then just releases and pushes them up now they've got a little bit of travel to
them they feel good and they can be assigned to be shortcuts for applications you could use this
for the camera for example so simply just press that it will launch the camera we have our always
on fingerprint reader and power button now this is very accurate and i'll just show you demonstrate
now that when you tap it it just unlocks straight away it's very quick and i really have not had any
issues with it good location to it's about where i think most people's thumb would be
now we do have quad speakers with this phone so that's actually two little speakers right
there side firing good position at the top one of those three microphones and an ir
transmitter our other two speakers microphone for voice calls and i've placed voice calls they sound
good there is noise cancellation of course and the type c port sadly usb 2.0 spec xiaomi are stuck in
their ways forever it seems i just don't want to give this video out so for me that's a key thing
in a gaming phone i want video out and i also want a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack which this lacks
the screen is covered with gorilla glass it has a screen protector on it out of the factory and they
do a perfect job applying it no dust underneath it unlike me trying to do it myself would be an
absolute mess and then the camera and the cutout right here that's 20 megapixels very standard
there from xiaomi bezels on this 6.67 display aren't too bad they're certainly not the slimmest
and it is able to display 1.07 billion colors maximum brightness xiaomi claimed to be 800
nets and i'm measuring 740 just the fraction over that which is still good so you can make it out
in direct sunlight and notice that it's banding here on the camera that i'm using to record
but i don't see in person with my eyes any banding any flicker with this screen it's very good so it
is using miui 13 for poco which is a customized version of that for poco and i've noticed that the
launcher itself has been good there's occasional little bugs that i'm seeing with animations like
right now it should be showing the mountain here in the background clearly but for some reason
it's permanently blurred i don't know why that is happening but it should clear itself up hopefully
now gestures they are working normally fine uh as you see as i swipe up that we can go into
recent apps and i wanted to point out that the haptics on this particular one very very good we
get these nice strong crisp little bursts pulses there for the haptics engine which is the x-axis
linear motor that they've got in this and to me it feels like one of the better haptics
that i've definitely felt with a phone here from poco recent phones from them
so you might have just seen then there was a bit of an animation stutter there the
the performance of it can sometimes just show those animations not quite being as fluid and
smooth as they they really should be notifications are all working fine no major bugs and you can
see now the background looks clear before it was blurry so it's just these small little things that
do need to be fixed and corrected now the poco f4 gt does have a bit of bloatware which is typical
from poco they install and pre-install all these kind of apps that you probably have to go through
and uninstall quite a few of them it doesn't take too long but it's a minor annoyance the good thing
is there are no adverts that i'm seeing with things like the system apps or the cleaner and
things like that which is good because i used to have adverts on there before so i am on the latest
firmware and the security update is from february so it's a little dated now being the fact that we
are in april of course at the time this review just to point out that my version as i mentioned
at the start does have the 12 gigabytes of ram and then a virtual memory of three gigabytes there too
so battery time i can run pc mark here this is a fixed battery life test the display is configured
to 200 nets it goes from 100 to 20 and it's worked out this time here which is good for 120 hertz
it's full hd plus resolution so it doesn't take a huge toll like the qhd displays realistically
you're looking about seven hours of on-screen time seven and a half with this phone with general kind
of use that is not gaming too mind you so charge time to go from four percent to 100 only took
23 minutes other time times i have charged it's been 25 minutes sometimes it's been 21
it is very quick of course 120 watt charging and it has a 4 700 milliamp hour battery we do have
a wide vine level one cert here so netflix will be in full hd uh but amazon prime video sadly is
not and a few others uh like disney for example would be standard definition until they whitelist
this device if that ever happens camera two api we have the maximum support here so level three you
can use things like open camera gcam ports test them out they will work you don't need to have
root access for that internal storage speeds now i have the 256 gigabyte version and you can see that
it is very quick very very quickly look at those random reads and especially that random write
speed there that's impressive really quick there and then the gps working well i can actually
get a lock indoors here and the accuracy will top out at three meters and it does see a huge amount
of satellites the snapdragon 8 gen 1 that this has of course it's powering it now the wi-fi speeds
excellent super quick better than most phones so they're focused on this area which is great for a
gaming phone you need good connectivity and even downstairs away from my wi-fi 6 router this is of
course wi-fi 6 speeds here it still gets over 300 megabits per second so that's impressive really
good wireless and the antutu score really high here nearing towards the million point mark there
and it's to be expected from the snapdragon 8 gen 1 for short bursts it is a powerful chip it does
generate a bit of heat just with that benchmark it went up 7.5 degrees and i lost 5 battery
and finally the geekbench score here does show that the snapdragon 8 gen 1 is a high performer
onto the audio so the f4 gt i know i've mentioned it a few times lacks a 3.5 millimeter headphone
jack which i think a gaming phone should definitely have but it does have a course
that type c adapter that's included you can use it audio quality does sound good
voice calls sound fine but how do the four speakers in this compare to what we have with the
samsung galaxy s 22 ultra those are akg tuned ones so on the left here that is the poco f4 gt i'll
start with that one first and then the samsung so we can hear the differences between the two
oh that was very close i think the wind there just goes to the samsung s22 ultra but they both
have very similar loudness to it i just think that the akg tune speakers that we do have with the s22
ultra just have a little tiny more bass to them but very good speakers in that poco f4 gt over
to gaming which you could say is the real focus of the f4 gt so with pubg you can run the extreme
frame rate option here which is 60 frames per second unfortunately we don't get a 90 frames per
second option or 120 would have been great with this developer let's have a look at some gameplay
to configure those gaming triggers that are at the top there you simply swipe up here when in a game
you've got game turbo and then the shoulder button option and that's where you can drag them over to
where you'll find for example iron sights and to shoot is how i normally set it up and you can save
it and that saves per game there so quite easy to do and it's very easy and quick and faster than i
think using the on-screen control so what those triggers are doing at the top there the shoulder
buttons it's basically just emulating on screen so when i press that you can see that is to fire and
that's to look down the iron sights or the scope if i had a scope with this gun at the moment and
it's very fast there you can see there's really no delay it's as fast as touching it there and of
course the touch does have that 480 hertz sample rate so it is very quick and responsive now the
game performance is very good here it's constantly 60 frames per second it's not super demanding pubg
so the snapdragon 8 gen 1 is able to handle this with ease really and not be pushed that hard you
can even see when you swipe into game turbo you can see there i'm in the performance mode too by
the way here but the gpu is only being pushed nine percent and the cpu at 44 which is has nothing at
all so great performance here with pubg i'm going to move over now to gen chain impact which is
one of the more demanding games you can get the performance overall is very good and of course
if you do want a better more solid just 60 frames per second the whole time then lower the setting
preset down of course or tweak a few things to be able to get that so very good performance with
such a demanding title like genshin impact here so what i'll do now is i'm going to game for one hour
and we'll see just how hot is it actually going to get well that did not work out well at all i was
about the 38 minute mark into gaming with gen chen impact on the highest possible settings and this
happened it threw me out of the game completely just booted me out of it and the overheating error
in fact the screen was flickering almost and it just became unresponsive this is not good at all
so if you intend to play very demanding games you are going to have to lower settings to stop it
from getting too hot now it is getting up to about 50 degrees celsius and the liquid cooling 3.0
i don't know if it's doing a job here it's good enough well not good enough for a demanding
game like gen chen impact obviously with this happening that's i don't think that's acceptable
over to the cameras now here with the poco f4 gt so we only get 1080p with the front-facing camera
no 4k it does have electronic image stabilization the audio bitrate is disappointing so it's around
96 kilobits per second up to sometimes about 103. you do get quite a close crop so my arm fully
extended out is about here now and the electronic image stabilization just testing it out does seem
to work reasonably well but come on xiaomi bring us 4k with front-facing cameras for vlog footage
let's move over to the rear cameras which can at least shoot 4k so we do have 4k 34k 16 no 8k
with this main 64 imx 686 sensor no optical image stabilization so it's all electronic here with it
stability does look reasonably good now if i pull back here in the camera mode it won't go
over to the ultra wide because the ultra wide can only shoot 1080p that 8 megapixel sensor
it really should be a 13 megapixel sensor with its stability as just mentioned is looking very
good and this overall 4k image quality i don't find is too bad at all so straight away you
notice the difference here that this camera does not look as good as the main 64 megapixel sensor
only 8 megapixels it looks washed out it's lacking detail and to me it's about 900p upscaled to 1080p
it just really is lacking in detail here look at the edges there of the sea with the reflection
not so good so the electronic image stabilization however with this 8 megapixel sensor
is reasonably good but it's certainly the weaker cameras of all the poco f4 gt's cameras
so then to quickly recap here the things i like about this phone gaming triggers very good
build quality flat amoled screen that's bright very responsive fast 120 hertz and we do have
a reasonably good main camera it's not bad the sony imac 686 now it doesn't have any optical
image stabilization so for night shots it could be a little bit of blurriness that comes into
there but it wasn't that bad from the samples i've seen the ultra wide is certainly not a strength of
the camera setup and a 2 megapixel macro camera that you're probably actually never going to use
but hey it's there just to say that they've got a macro camera now those gaming triggers they
are quite nice very good hardware with them and they definitely do add to the gaming experience
especially when you're playing titles like pubg call of duty i like the quad loudspeakers on this
so one of the things i don't like about it well first and foremost really is it overheated on me
so 38 minutes into playing gen chen impact boom crashed booted me out of the game it didn't crash
it just booted me out of the game through that overheating message and that's not what you want
to see at all on a phone so the snapdragon 8 in my experience now the 8 gen 1 that i reviewed quite a
few phones with now it really comes down to it being a very hot chipset so it either needs to
be fan cooled as i've seen in some other gaming phones to maintain consistent high performance
or it needs to be throttled throttled quite a bit so i can see that xiaomi is going to come out with
a fix for this so it won't happen you won't get booted out of games but they will need to throttle
down the performance to control the thermals to stop it from overheating or simply increase that
actual trip point and the skin temperature sensor they call it normally so that's where the battery
is on the back there instead of it triggering it at 50 degrees or 48 degrees they're going to end
up putting that up a little bit higher so push it the thermal so it gets quite warm and gaming so
that is an area that i'm sure they're going to fix but it's not good at all to see the others
are minor so there's no video out from the type c port we don't have micro sd card support and no
3.5 millimeter headphone jack besides those things it is a very good phone but if you are a poco f3
owner should you actually upgrade well i would say no unless you don't well unless you game a
lot and you want the gaming triggers i would stick with the poco f3 it's still a fantastic phone
it's got a really good price tag now a lot cheaper than what this is pricing for the f4
gt unfortunately at the time of me recording this video it's all under embargo we don't
know until the actual launch event when i need to have this video ready of course
for that so thank you so much for watching my full take here full review of the poco f4 gt