Poco X3 NFC long-term review

Performance, smoothness

While the Snapdragon 732G chipset powering the Poco X3 doesn't seem very different, on paper, compared to the Snapdragon 720G inside the Redmi Note 9 Pro we long-term reviewed last year, in actual day to day use there's a much more pronounced difference in feel. We aren't sure whether the SoC is the only contributing factor, or if there are some additional software optimizations at play too, but the Poco X3 has been the fastest and smoothest smartphone that we've ever used in this price class.

It easily beat both the aforementioned Redmi Note 9 Pro as well as the Redmi Note 8 Pro. Not by a lot when it comes to speed, but it was still definitely noticeable for normal day to day operations.

When it comes to smoothness, the difference was much more obvious, and that's thanks in no small part to the 120 Hz screen refresh rate and 240 Hz touch sampling rate. Obviously this phone didn't feel as smooth as a flagship with a 120 Hz screen, or even one with a 90 Hz refresh rate, but that's irrelevant because you're not choosing between the Poco X3 or one of those. You're choosing between this one and another midranger, and so far this is the smoothest mid-range phone we've ever tested for a long-term review.

The software helps that feeling too with the way its animations work, and overall the Poco X3 was an incredibly pleasant to use package, in terms of both speed and smoothness. It surprised us on both fronts, as we were expecting it to be much more similar to the Redmi Note 9 Pro in these areas. Thankfully, it's not. It's better, and we're happy that that's the case.

You still won't mistake this for a flagship in use, but it gets much closer to one than its price might have you believe.

Battery life

As usual for Xiaomi phones (or ones from its various sub-brands), battery life has been very good. We easily got more than 6 hours of screen on time in a day, with our absolute record being 5 hours of screen on time with 50% of the battery left.

Realistically, with usage similar to ours, we would expect you to easily hit 6-7 hours of screen on time every day, with some days even exceeding 8. Those are some great numbers, even if there was a bit more variability in our results than we are generally comfortable with. You can see this in the screenshots below.

Battery life

So it feels like the Poco X3 definitely has the potential to reach amazing heights in terms of longevity, but it doesn't always realize that potential and on some days sticks with being very good and not anything more. Still, one thing is clear - if you charge your device every night, you are very unlikely to ever need a midday top-up for this one.

As always, our usage involves about 12-16 hours off the charger in any given day, with primarily Wi-Fi connectivity but around an hour or more of mobile data, Bluetooth always on, about an hour of music listening via Bluetooth and an hour or two of calls, and about half an hour or so of GPS navigation with Waze (and rarely Google Maps). We should also note that the display refresh rate was always set to 120 Hz.

Charging from zero to hero takes about an hour and 15 minutes, which is not very fast, but not very slow either, and for this price point it's actually a good result in our book. It's funny that a cheap phone like this still comes with a charger in the box (and one that's capable of the fastest charging the phone can take), whereas expensive flagships are now starting to forgo the brick in the name of extra profits (sorry - we meant saving the environment or some such thing).