Weekly poll results: the Poco M3 Pro 5G needs to prove that it is better than its 4G siblings

You can get a 5G phone on a budget, but how many people actually want a budget 5G phone? Judging by last week’s poll, there is a good number of people interested in the next-gen network technology, but the Poco M3 Pro is not necessarily their budget 5G phone of choice.

Some already snatched one up during the early bird deal that knocked €20 off the price – in this segment, that is a significant discount. But now that the deal is over, people are holding off until the reviews come out.

Others aren’t waiting, they have already settled on other 5G models that they like better. But it may not be the 5G phones that the M3 Pro is truly competing with. In the comments many brought up the Poco X3 (don’t forget the NFC version), which costs around the same, but has a better screen and camera, more premium build and faster charging, being 4G-only is not considered that much of an issue.

People weren’t overjoyed that the Poco M3 Pro is really a Redmi Note 10 5G with a different back panel. Worse still, some worried that the two phones may not be as identical as they seem at first – does the Redmi-branded phone get better software support the Poco-branded one? If we look at previous models, e.g. the Poco M2 Pro and the Redmi Note 9S (which are nearly identical), we see that the Redmi did get Android 11 in February, while the Poco is still waiting. In January a Poco exec said that it is coming in “a few weeks”, but by April it was still in the testing phase and it's yet to leave it.

Anyway, we wouldn’t count out the Poco M3 Pro just yet. Poco has shipped over 3.2 million units of the vanilla M3 and the two aren’t that far apart in terms of price. Farther now that the early bird deal is over, of course, but we doubt it is the one and only discount the Pro will ever get.

Unless you think the vanilla M3 is better than the M3 Pro – soon we will have more to say on the matter as we’ve just received a Pro to review (and we’ve already reviewed the vanilla model).