FRI, MAY 24
NimishAndAkriti
It is a truth that sounds right out of the Marvel universe: with great gaming phones come great price tags. The reason is simple: good gaming requires good hardware - a good processor, a good display, lots of memory, good sound, good battery and so on. And all of that costs money. A lot of money. So much so that if you actually want to play games at the highest settings on your phone, you will need to shell out something in the region of Rs 50,000 or more! Unless you buy the just-released Poco F6. It is a phone that can handle hefty gaming. And it is priced at just Rs 29,999! Yep, you read that right. For the first time in years, we have a gaming phone that has actually got a mid-segment price tag!
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Now, Poco does have a habit of surprising us with devices that come with good performance at surprisingly low prices - this is the brand that gave us the Poco F1 so many years ago - but the F6 has got to be one of the biggest surprises of the lot. Because in terms of hardware, the phone literally cuts no corners.
You get pretty much everything you want in a good gaming phone - a 6.67 1.5K AMOLED display with 120 Hz refresh rate, RAM and storage variants of 8 GB/ 256 GB, 12 GB/ 256 GB, and 12 GB/ 512 GB, and that too LPDDR5x RAM and UFS 4.0 storage, which are used in most gaming phones, there are stereo speakers, special game optimisations and some very good thermals too, ensuring the phone does not become a hot biscuit during intense gaming sessions!
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Most importantly, you get the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 processor, which is very close to the top of the line Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip seen in the likes of the Galaxy S24 Ultra and the OnePlus 12. It is a chip designed to handle pretty much any game out there, be it Call of Duty or Genshin Impact or Asphalt or even good old FIFA! You are not going to have to fiddle with settings on this phone - it plays most titles maxed out!
Of course, some corners have been cut to accommodate all that expensive hardware at a relatively low price. The back of the phone and its frame are plastic, and while the design is smart enough, it is not exactly a stand out one. Our titanium model (it is the name of the colour, not the material) with its shiny back and large-ish camera circles, neither turned heads nor turned them away! The cameras ( 50 MP+ 8 MP on the back, 20 MP selfie) are decent rather than exceptional. Mind you, the 5000 mAh battery with 90W charging and a 120W charger in the box are pretty good for the price point. The software is Android 14 with HyperOS on top, but with a fair deal of bloatware (third party apps and games - again, something you will not see in many gaming phones)
The Poco F6 has three variants and each of them is crazy value for money if you are into gaming: 8 GB/ 256 GB at Rs 29,999; 12 GB/ 256 GB at Rs 31,999 and 12 GB/ 512 GB at Rs 33,999. For the sake of comparison, the OnePlus 12R which has slower storage and RAM and has a slightly older flagship processor (Snapdragon 8 Gen 2) is priced at Rs 39,999. Heck, you get the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ and the OnePlus Nord 3, which are both considered very good mid-segment devices at around Rs 30,000! This thing is a freak!
f you are not too much into gaming, then there are way better looking phones than the Poco F6 out there, with better cameras out there. But yes, if you are the type that logs into Call of Duty or Genshin Impact for hours, the Poco F6 is pretty much THE phone to get if you are on a tight budget. It does everything reasonably well, but in gaming, pretty much hits it out of the park and can be considered on par with the likes of the OnePlus 12 and the Samsung Galaxy S24. Not bad for a Rs 29,999 phone, eh?
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