Some tips for getting into Xiaomi/Poco
I've seen a lot of people regretting or complaining about Poco or Xiaomi here. For this post I hope to set you some expectations while getting into Poco or Xiaomi phones.
- Ads will be there.
You can do debloat from adb, it will work, just a reminder uninstalling might cause problems. But for normie who doesn't want to do that, most you can do is disable, uninstall updates, or disable notifications for those apps.
- Set the expectations low, especially for HyperOS.
If you plan to flash a custom ROM, good for you. If you don't or couldn't because of banking apps, I don't recommend updating your system OS or system apps unless there's new features you're really into. 9/10 it would get the phone worse.
- Don't buy them at MSRP, they will have huge discounts.
Set the discounted price as you get in price will really change the perspective of the phone. For Poco, most of the time there's no competition with a similar price segment. Like this year, F8 Ultra, F8 Pro, X8PM, I've found them go really cheap for 30% of MSRP.
- Only buy 12G RAM and flagship chips, if you can.
HyperOS is really a badly optimized OS, it's really up to the dev if your phone works smoothly. Since Poco goes really cheap, it's easy to get a phone with D8500 or 8sGen4 phone. The 12G is really just for future prevention, I had a 12G D7300 Redmi phone, but it was really laggy and not retaining background apps even with HyperOS3.
- Don't expect it to last long, treat it like a budget phone.
You get what you pay for, really. The upsides here is the replacement for either display or battery is somewhat reasonable with Poco or Redmi. Nobody knows when the next X3Pro disaster comes.
Recommendations (with 20% off of MSRP):
X8PM
F8 Pro
F8 Ultra
These are really good, the basic X8PM already ticks a lot of basics. It gets better with Pro and Ultra, Snapdragon support and more.
X8Pro
F7
Both are good but cuts off a lot of modern features like ultrasonic fingerprint sensor and e-sim, and you could get X8PM with just a little more money.
M7
M8 Pro
If you're considering this, I'd recommend to just save some money and upgrade to one of the above. If you couldn't it's still a fine phone, M7 gets e-sim but no Snapdragon compared to M8 Pro.
Used: Redmi Note 3, Note 5, Note 7, Note 8, Note 10S, Note 14 Pro 5G, Mi Mix 2, Mi Mix 2S, Poco F5, Poco X8PM