Poco M8 Power 5G First Impressions: A Familiar Face At An Unfamiliar Price
· Free Press Journal
Poco M8 Power 5G, the company's latest budget smartphone, arrived earlier this month with a design that borrows rather liberally from Apple's playbook, particularly around the camera island. In our Blaze Orange review unit, that resemblance to the iPhone 17 Pro Max becomes even harder to unsee. The phone enters a segment that has suddenly got crowded, with the Redmi Note 17 5G priced around Rs. 27,999 and the OnePlus N6x undercutting both at Rs. 20,999. At Rs. 24,999 for the base variant, the M8 Power sits right in the middle, leaning on a large battery and a sizeable display to justify that position. Here are our first impressions after a few days with the device.
Poco M8 Power 5G Design
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The Poco M8 Power uses a polycarbonate back panel paired with a metallic middle frame, a fairly standard combination at this price point, but one that feels more premium than the specification sheet suggests. The matte finish on our orange unit resists fingerprints well and the rounded corners on the camera module do most of the heavy lifting in that iPhone-adjacent look. Ports and buttons are sensibly placed, with the USB Type-C port, speaker grille and SIM tray along the bottom edge, and the volume rocker and power button on the right spine, both easy to reach with a thumb.
At 169.70x79.14x8.4mm and 225 grams, this is not a phone built for one-handed use, and the 6.99-inch display makes that abundantly clear the first time it slips out of a shirt pocket. That said, the curved frame edges and grippy matte back mean it never feels precarious in hand, even if reaching the top of the screen requires some finger gymnastics.
Redmi Note 17 5G First Impressions: Big Battery, Bigger FootprintPoco M8 Power 5GPoco M8 Power 5G Display
Poco has fitted the M8 Power with its first 6.99-inch OLED panel, sourced from Samsung's E4 line, running at FHD+ resolution (2396x1080 pixels) with a 120Hz refresh rate and a claimed peak brightness of 1,800 nits. The screen also gets a 240Hz touch sampling rate, DCI-P3 colour coverage, a 5,000,000:1 contrast ratio, and Corning Gorilla Glass 7i on top, along with 960Hz PWM dimming paired with DC dimming to ease eye strain in low light.
In the limited time we have spent with it indoors, the panel looks punchy and the blacks appear genuinely deep, which is not something we expected to say about a phone at this price. Outdoor visibility, colour accuracy under different lighting, and how the dimming systems hold up during long reading sessions are things we will test more thoroughly for the full review.
Poco M8 Power 5G Battery
The headline spec here is the 8,000mAh silicon-carbon battery, a chemistry that until recently was reserved for phones costing several times more. Poco pairs it with 45W wired fast charging and a 22.5W reverse wired charging feature, and claims up to 28 hours of continuous video playback on a single charge.
Our brief usage window does not allow for a verdict on real-world screen-on-time yet, though the phone did not show any alarming drain during setup and initial app installs. A full charge cycle test, along with actual video playback and mixed-use numbers, will be part of the detailed review.
Poco M8 Power 5GPoco M8 Power 5G Processor
Powering the Poco M8 Power 5G is Qualcomm's Snapdragon 4 Gen 4, an octa-core chipset built on a 4nm process with two performance cores clocked at 2.3GHz and six efficiency cores at 2GHz, paired with an Adreno 613 GPU. The India units come in 6GB and 8GB RAM configurations, both with 128GB of UFS 2.2 storage. Again, I am not satisfied with the cap at 128GB. With smartphone usage at its peak, the base should be, at the very least, 256GB.
This is squarely an entry-level 5G chipset, and it handled the basics of app switching, camera previews and setup without any stutter in our initial run. Sustained performance, thermal behaviour and gaming benchmarks will need more time and are best saved for the full review.
Poco M8 Power 5G Camera
The rear setup includes a 50-megapixel primary AI camera with an f/1.8 aperture and a 5P lens, accompanied by a secondary sensor, while an 8-megapixel camera handles selfies and video calls up front. Poco has bundled its usual set of AI photography modes aimed at low-light shots, portrait bokeh and colour enhancement.
Early daylight shots from the primary sensor show reasonable detail and colour reproduction, in line with what one would expect from a 50-megapixel sensor at this price. Low-light performance, video stabilisation and how the secondary sensor holds up will be examined closely in the full review.
Poco M8 Power 5GPoco M8 Power 5G UI
The phone runs HyperOS 3 layered on top of Android 16, and Poco is promising four years of Android version updates alongside six years of security patches, a fairly generous commitment for this segment. The interface feels largely familiar to anyone who has used a recent Xiaomi or Poco device, with the usual set of customisation options and a reasonable amount of preloaded bloatware that most buyers will want to uninstall on day one.
Poco M8 Power 5G First Impressions
The Poco M8 Power 5G looks like a phone that knows exactly what it wants to be. A big-battery, big-screen device that undercuts the Redmi Note 17 5G while offering a display that punches above its price bracket. Whether that translates into genuinely strong battery endurance, reliable camera performance and smooth day-to-day use over weeks of real usage is something only the full review can answer, and we would rather not promise more than the phone has shown us so far. For now, the design, display and battery specifications make a strong first impression, except the 128GB storage cap. The Snapdragon 4 Gen 4 chipset will need to prove it can keep pace with what the rest of the hardware promises.
Poco M8 Power 5G