What is Poco doing launching an Ultra phone with flagship-grade gaming hardware?

Some smartphone brands get to enjoy the limelight. Samsung, Apple, Google – these are the phones that people are always talking about. Then you have giant brands like Xiaomi, that gets people talking with phones like the Xiaomi 15 Ultra. If you listen to the critics, it has one of the best smartphone cameras you can get.

But what happens when you take a budget brand from a lesser-known manufacturer and release an Ultra phone? You end up with the Poco F7 Ultra, a phone that, to some extent, shouldn’t exist – but I’m glad that it does.

Who is Poco and why is it launching an Ultra phone?

Poco is a sub-brand of Xiaomi. It was launched in 2018 as a brand to appeal to a younger audience, with its phones a little more focused on affordable gaming. That’s what you see in the Poco X7 Pro, a phone that I reviewed recently, and I was pleasantly surprised. Writing on Trusted Reviews, I said:

And that’s what Poco is doing launching an Ultra phone. It’s taking a solid foundation and moving into flagship hardware, to take this affordable phone brand to new levels.

So what do you get for your money?

I’m interested in the Poco F7 Ultra hardware

First and foremost, the Poco F7 Ultra is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite. Yes, that’s the hardware in the OnePlus 13 and (almost) the power behind the Galaxy S25. That’s two flagship phones right there. But Poco is going to be asking for £649 for its phone (12/256GB), where OnePlus is £999 and Samsung starts at £799.

Currently, the cheapest Snapdragon 8 Elite phone that I can find (available in the UK), is the Redmagic 10 Pro that you can get for a ridiculous £579. So while Poco is offering a cheap route to flagship hardware, it’s not the cheapest.

Poco has done this before with the Poco F6 Pro, but that phone launched in 2024 with Snapdragon hardware that was a year old. That’s not happening in the F7 Ultra.

But what else do you get? Poco is keen to mention the VisionBoost D7 Chipset, which is claimed to boost the performance of the Snapdragon 8 Elite. To emphasise this, Poco is sharing benchmarks, which I’ll take with a pinch of salt. It’s claiming that you’ll get sustained gaming performance at 120fps on intensive games, but the D7 chip is also credited with enhancing graphics, boosting HDR effects and ensuring the frame rates, a little like having a discrete GPU. Will it make a difference? That remains to be seen.

Roll that into the 6.67-inch display with a 3,200 x 1,440 pixel resolution, pumping out 3,200 nits and you’ve got the makings of a great gaming phone. Add in a 5,300mAh battery (which doesn’t sound huge) and 120W wired charging (which definitely is huge) and you’ve got quite the package.

So what’s the catch with the Poco F7 Ultra?

That’s the question. First of all, you’re not getting a flagship-bothering camera here. There’s a 50-megapixel main camera based on the Light Fusion 800 sensor, which was in last year’s Poco F6 Pro. It’s joined by a 50-megapixel 2.5x telephoto and a 32-megapixel ultrawide. There’s a lot of megapixels and while I’ve no idea how well they will perform, it’s a comprehensive camera for a Poco phone.

The real catch comes with HyperOS 2. I’ve seen two phones on HyperOS 2 so far, the Poco X7 Pro and the Xiaomi 15. The latter phone is more premium and has fewer adverts in the user interface, so it’s slightly better. But both suffer from bloat, duplication and the general wrangling of Android away from the clean experience that you’d find elsewhere.

So that’s going to be your compromise here: once you’ve fired up Genshin Impact and you’re gaming at 120fps, you might not worry too much. Seriously, this phone could be a stealth gaming hit.