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Overall, the Poco F5’s camera is perfectly acceptable for the money, but it lags behind mid-range rivals such as the Redmi Note 12 Pro Plus and with its impressive 200MP main camera, as well as the Redmi Note 12 Pro and the OnePlus Nord 2T with their larger Sony IMX766 image sensor. Google’s Pixel 7a and Pixel 6a, of course, remain mid-range camera stars for the same or much less money respectively. Performance There’s a certain symmetry to the top and bottom bezels, which is always nice to see in a cheaper phone. You still only get an IP53 rating, however, which is inferior to the likes of the Pixel 7a and the Samsung Galaxy A54. There’s Gorilla Glass 5 around front, which beats the Pixel 7a’s GG3 for toughness.
One way in which it’s actually gotten a little worse, however, is with a touch sampling rate of 240Hz rather than the Poco F4’s 360Hz. For the vast majority of users, this won’t be remotely consequential. But given that Poco often courts the gaming crowd and bigs up the gaming performance of its phones, it’s not a particularly good look, at least on paper. The Poco F5 is quite clearly a better phone than the Poco F4, with impressive performance, a nicer design, and superior battery life adding to an already impressive AMOLED display.The triple lens cameras in the F5 and F5 Pro are identical, consisting of a 64-megapixel main lens, an 8-megapixel ultrawide, and a 2-megapixel macro lens. You also get a 16-megapixel selfie camera in each phone, and while you can dig into settings to snap a full 64-megapixel shot, I don’t advise it. Likewise, for extreme close-ups, you might dig into the menu to find the macro option, but you can expect woefully inferior shots. Proximity Sensor, Light Sensor, Gyroscope Sensor, Accelerometer (G-Sensor), Fingerprint Sensor, Infrared Sensor
You’re getting MIUI 14 layered on top of Android 13 with the Poco F5, just like with the Poco F5 Pro, not to mention the Xiaomi 13 and the Redmi Note 12 Pro. It’s no less cluttered or clumsy here. But really, you shouldn’t have to work that hard straight out of the box. Other mid-range phones, most notably the Pixel 7a and the Motorola Edge 40, don’t make you jump through so many hoops. Battery life You’ll have to activate it in the Settings menu, however, and this iteration of Xiaomi’s MIUI doesn’t always seem to be particularly well prepared for it. The default camera widget doesn’t resize properly, as you can see from the pictures.The camera has no trouble turning out shareable photos in good lighting, and the selfie camera is fine. The portrait mode on the main and selfie lens struggles with edges and stray hairs, but it produces a decent bokeh effect. The main camera has a night mode that does a passable job, but inevitably noise creeps in the darker it gets. It cannot match something like Google’s Pixel. Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone brand is launching the Poco F5 and F5 Pro later. The new products are expected to be top contenders in the mid-range smartphones market. Ultimately, like the Poco F5 Pro, the Poco F5 is something of a mid-range specialist, offering a strong media and gaming-focused experience for decent money. If your priorities lie elsewhere – flagship-level design, clean software, or a genuinely good camera, say – there are plenty of better options for similar or even less money.
If you're looking for a phone that can handle even the most demanding games, the POCO F5 is a great option. It doubtless helps that my test model came with a generous 12GB RAM, which is the only spec available in the UK. You’ll get 256GB of storage in that sole model, too, which is similarly generous. It would have been nice to have a lower-capacity option (perhaps 8GB/128GB) at a cheaper starting point, though.Shots from the main sensor also tend to be a little too saturated, and the noise levels tend to increase in darker areas, with images becoming over-sharpened in this case. This is solved when you switch to Night mode, which does a solid job of lifting the brightness and reducing noise, likely owing to OIS that allows for slower shutter speeds. On the other hand, the default Photo mode doesn't produce bright shots at night.
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