- Fitri Aiyub
POCO F4 GT Review : Underpriced Or Undervalued?
Creating value out of thin air may seem impossible for hungry go-getters of the smartphone industry. Especially in an era of periscope cameras, foldable screens, and so on – you might think we're all just made to believe these flagships are worth the premium price of ingenuity, no? Take a look at this POCO F4 GT. It has a 6.67 inch 120Hz display, shoots 4K60 video, runs on Android 12, AND it has the latest snapdragon 8 Gen 1. What if we said it also has quad speakers? What if we said all of this is priced under RM3,000? Well hold on to your wallets if we've got your attention and if first-person-shooter gaming is right up your alley, because this POCO F4 GT might be the phone you've been waiting for.
There's no hiding about here. Taking a first glance at this phone assures itself firmly as a gaming phone with a flushed aluminium finish, sharp gamer-themed angular accents in this silver colour way, the RGB X-Factor gaming light around the camera module and a thoughtful lightning shaped cutout housing the dual LED flash. The 6.67inch display at the front has a very welcoming presence with thin bezels and just has that symmetrical look all round. On the sides sits the very well placed and highly responsive fingerprint sensor, very large speaker cutouts on both the top and bottom, and the physical magnetic pop-up gaming triggers – which uses elastic silicon material for a lighter hand feel and is said that the eight magnets inside this construction are aimed to provide gamers faster feedback and lower latency for a smoother experience. If that doesn't keep you entertained, the 6.67 inch AMOLED somehow will, promising over 1 billion colours, 395 ppi and 10 times higher in responsive control accuracy with refresh rates of up to 120Hz and up to 480Hz touch sampling rate. While it may not sum up to the likes of a Galaxy S22 Ultra screen, The 800 nits peak brightness can still get glaringly bright till we felt that dark mode was necessary at times yet still exceeds responsiveness which feels just a tad bit ahead from the S22 Ultra. It also supports every gamers necessity of a flat-edged display to minimise those accidental touches as this phone is relatively large measuring 162.5 x 76.7mm and can be quite a handful for users with smaller hands.
An equal pairing to the immersive experience is its quad speakers that are also symmetrical and strategically placed for when using the triggers to avoid blocking the speaker cutouts, supports Dolby Atmos and there's words of it being tuned by JBL yet no official stampings that are visible on the box or phone. Despite the claim, it still produces very loud outputs and is considerably well balanced in clarity and low end bass for music. In gaming, there's no faults here, providing you all the spatial awareness you'll need or just another reason to enjoy sound effects and soundtracks on Asphalt 9. Performance wise doesn't disappoint either, running on 8GB RAM, Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Adreno 730 , scoring top marks on Geekbench with 1237 for Single-core and 3465 for Multi-core. Which also beats the Galaxy S22 Ultra by a few points that scored 1214 for Single-core and 3245 for Multi-core. Our 3D Mark tests also managed to get readouts up to 52.7 average frame rates and recorded an overall score of 8801 and performed 96% better than all of the other devices.
Practical results show bright as day in responsiveness throughout all of the Call Of Duty matches, making every movement feel like a few milliseconds faster than your enemy and also thanks to the dedicated shoulder triggers that can be assigned to any button of your choosing. A very useful tool for first-person shooter games, giving you the advantage over your competitors and will automatically launch Game Turbo Boost to give you the maxed out performance when enabled while also having essential toggles at a thumb's reach.
But disappointingly, as much as it would've been a great extension for driving games, we couldn't get it to work in the likes of games such as Real Racing 3 which automatically assumed it was paired to a joystick that allowed no gyro steering control and even the default setting of left and right for accelerating and braking wasn't even functional on the screen.
Perhaps this could be a software patch from the game itself which might have still been left unchecked for phones such as these, but works completely fine on Asphalt 9 to which at least comes with a setting to turn off joystick controls.Photo and video captures are also very commendable, equipped with a 64MP wide, an 8MP ultra-wide and 2MP macro lens. Outputs are as expected coming from the 64MP wide, producing very sharp details and colour balance all throughout an image which resembles most Xiaomi phones. Not exactly up to the standards of photography focused builds as this phone wasn't catered for mobile photography, leaving out some of the computational advancements we've seen in the Xiaomi 12 series.
Nonetheless, it still captures great video at 4K30 and tops at 4K60fps. High dynamic range performs well in capturing the sky and exposure compensations which stack up equally to its stabilisation. You could even take a step further by enabling Steady video but will result in a slight crop and only supports up to 1080p. The 4700mAh battery did manage to get around a day and a half of casual use and about a full day when occasionally getting into heated matches. Either way, if it's ever about to run out of juice, the 120W fast charger will get you back up to 100% in just 17 minutes with Boost Charging Speed enabled. The POCO F4 GT comes with Android 12 MIUI 13, 8GB RAM, with 128GB or 256GB storage options and comes in Cyber Yellow, Stealth Black, and Knight Silver retailing at RM2,299 and S$749. Evidently, if you're a gamer and love having an upper hand over your opponents, the POCO F4 GT may serve you well in helping you reach the top ranks. Unlike the competitiveness in the gaming world where things can reset at a click of a button, physically putting a phone like this together must take some smart decisions from the people at POCO and Xiaomi to fit not just the best of hardware yet still aiming to class itself in mid-range territory. How they are able to price it so competitively doesn't add up to us in the POCO F4 GT as everything we've mentioned seemed to be an almost perfect phone with flagship performance. While cameras aren't the primary focus here nor was it intended to, maybe we've been so distracted till we forget the meaning of value for money. Maybe the next time you choose to pay a premium price for a premium phone, you might wanna take a second look for what else is out there. It might blow you out of the water, it might even get you to consider if some phones might just be overpriced knowing something like this exists.
Written by Fitri Aiyub