The Poco X3, Poco X3 NFC and Poco X3 Pro are Android-based

smartphone A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...

s developed by

Xiaomi Xiaomi (; ) is a Chinese multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Beijing, China. It is best known for consumer electronics software electric vehicles. It is the second-largest manufacturer of smartphones in the worl ...

, announced on 7 and 22 September 2020. The phone has a FHD+

IPS LCD IPS (in-plane switching) is a screen technology for liquid-crystal displays (LCDs). In IPS, a layer of liquid crystals is sandwiched between two glass surfaces. The liquid crystal molecules are aligned parallel to those surfaces in predetermined ...

120 Hz 6.67-inch display, a 48 MP wide, 8 MP ultra-wide, 2 MP macro, and 2 MP depth camera, a 5160 mAh battery, up to 8 GB RAM and a side-mounted fingerprint sensor. There has been lot of criticism with the reliability around the devices mainly with caused by the

PMIC A power management integrated circuit (PMIC) is an integrated circuit for power management. Although it is a wide range of chip types, most include several DC/DC converters or their control part. A PMIC is often included in battery-operated d ...

Specifications

Hardware

The Poco X3 and X3 NFC run on

Qualcomm Snapdragon Snapdragon is a suite of system-on-chip (SoC) semiconductor products for mobile devices designed and marketed by Qualcomm, who often refers to these SoCs as "mobile platforms". They typically integrate central processing units (CPU) based o ...

732G (8 nm) processor with

Adreno Adreno is a series of graphics processing unit (GPU) semiconductor intellectual property cores developed by Qualcomm and used in many of their SoCs. History Adreno is an integrated graphics processing unit (GPU) within Qualcomm's Snapdrago ...

618 to handle graphics. It is equipped with Liquid Cool Technology 1.0 Plus for heat dissipation. They have a 6.67" 1080 × 2400 pixels (20:9 aspect ratio) IPS LCD display which supports 120 Hz refresh rate and 240 Hz touch sampling rate. The display is certified by

TÜV Rheinland TÜVs (; short for , ) are internationally active, independent service companies from Germany and Austria that test, inspect and certify technical systems, facilities and objects of all kinds in order to minimize hazards and prevent damages. T ...

. They are protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 5, plastic frame and plastic back. The phones support IP53 splash-proof protection. Poco X3 and X3 NFC come with 6 GB LPDDR4X RAM, 64 GB or 128 GB UFS 2.1 storage options which is expandable up to 512 GB with

microSD Secure Digital (SD) is a proprietary hardware, proprietary, non-volatile memory, non-volatile, flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA). Owing to their compact size, SD cards have been widely adopted in a variety of port ...

card. The Poco X3 and X3 NFC have quad rear camera set-up with 64-megapixels Sony Exmor IMX682 as the primary sensor, 13-megapixels ultrawide camera with 119° angle of view, 2-megapixel macro camera and 2-megapixels depth sensor. The phone can record 4K video at 30 FPS and 720p slow motion video at 960 FPS. The camera app by default outputs 16-megapixels photos while the PRO-mode in camera can capture in 64-megapixels. The NFC model has a typical battery capacity of 5160 mAh while the non-NFC model has a typical battery capacity of 6000 mAh (

lithium ion A lithium-ion or Li-ion battery is a type of rechargeable battery that uses the reversible intercalation of Li+ ions into electronically conducting solids to store energy. Li-ion batteries are characterized by higher specific energy, energy d ...

). On both models a battery can be charged over USB-C at up to 33 W. A 33 W charger is included in the box. Camera sensors used:

Wide: Sony IMX682_l
Front: Samsung Isocell s5k3t2_l
Ultrawide: Hynix _hi1337_l
Macro: Hynix_hi259_I
Depth: OV_ov02b1b_l

Software

The Poco X3 and X3 NFC come with

MIUI MIUI is a deprecated mobile operating system by Xiaomi for its smartphones and devices, from 2010 to 2023, prior to the launch of its successor Xiaomi HyperOS. MIUI was Fork (software development), based on the Android (operating system), Andro ...

12 for Poco, based on

Android 10 Android 10 (code name, codenamed Android Q during development) is the Android version history, tenth major release and the 17th version of the Android (operating system), Android mobile operating system. It was first released as a developer pre ...

with Poco Launcher 2.0. The Poco X3 can be updated to MIUI 13 for Poco based on

Android 12 Android 12 is the Android version history, twelfth major release and 19th version of Android (operating system), Android, the mobile operating system developed by the Open Handset Alliance led by Google. The first beta was released on May 18, ...

and the Poco X3 NFC can be updated to MIUI 14 for Poco based on Android 12. It also supports third-party operating systems such as the

Android 11 Android 11 is the eleventh major release and 18th version of Android, the mobile operating system developed by the Open Handset Alliance led by Google. It was released on September 8, 2020. The first phone launched in Europe with Android 11 ...

-based

LineageOS LineageOS is an Open-source software, open source Android (operating system), Android operating system for smartphones, tablet computer, tablets, and set-top boxes. It is community-developed and serves as the successor to CyanogenMod, from which ...

18 along with

Ubuntu Touch Ubuntu Touch is a mobile version of the Ubuntu operating system, developed by the UBports community. Its user interface is written in Qt, and is designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. Howev ...

and

postmarketOS postmarketOS (abbreviated as pmOS) is an operating system primarily for smartphones, based on the Alpine Linux distribution. postmarketOS was launched on 26 May 2017 with the source code available on GitHub before migrating to GitLab in 2018. ...

Price

In the European market, Poco X3 Pro was launched at €249 for 6 GB RAM/128 GB storage variant and €299 for 8 GB RAM/256 GB storage variant

Criticism

The Poco X3 Pro and maybe the Poco X3 NFC had a faulty

, which eventually caused the phone to not charge and the memory chip to corrupt, rendering the phone bricked, as you need an authorized Mi account to flash using EDL. Contrary to popular belief it affected both the Indian and the EEA variants. A temporary fix was rebooting the phone into

fastboot Fastboot is a communication protocol used primarily with Android devices. It is implemented in a command-line interface tool of the same name and as a mode of the bootloader of Android devices. The tool is included with the Android SDK package ...

, which caused a "recalibration" of the PMIC. Xiaomi confirmed the issue and gave another 6 months of warranty to the Indian version. Lot of screens were defect, which caused ghost touch issues and random wake-ups. Sometimes it corresponded with a PMIC failure which caused some to believe that the PMIC caused these issues, although Xiaomi has not acknowledged it.

References

External links

POCO X3 NFC

POCO X3 PRO
{{Xiaomi Phablets Xiaomi smartphones Mobile phones introduced in 2020 Mobile phones with multiple rear cameras Mobile phones with 4K video recording Mobile phones with infrared transmitter Ubuntu Touch devices postmarketOS devices Discontinued smartphones