Reviews of Xiaomi Poco X6 Neo phone, price, technical specifications, design, screen, software, hardware, battery life, charging, and other specifications of this phone.

Xiaomi Poco X6 Neo review

Introduction

Poco X6 Neo is the most affordable model in the X6 series. The other models in the series, the X6 and X6 Pro, borrow bits and pieces from Xiaomi’s Redmi range of devices. However, the X6 Neo is, for all intents and purposes, essentially the Redmi Note 13R Pro with a different name. Since we haven’t looked at that model either, it’s a good opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

Poco X6 Neo, the cheaper model of this series, loses some of the beauty of the more expensive models. You get a usable camera on the back and the chip drops to a MediaTek Dimensity 6080. 120Hz AMOLED screen and 3x lossless zoom in 108MP camera.

With a starting price of INR 15,999 (~$192), it is slightly cheaper than the X6 and X6 Pro. Let’s see what you get for the money you pay.

Unboxing Poco X6 Neo

The Poco X6 Neo comes in the usual Poco black and yellow packaging. Inside, you’ll find the phone, a 33W charger, and a USB-A to USB-C cable.

A black silicone case is also provided in the box. The bezel doesn’t add much to the thickness of the phone and has a convenient cutout for the fingerprint sensor on the power button, which makes it very easy to locate the button without looking. There is also a flap for the USB port, which is a bit too tight. However, for purely aesthetic reasons, the frame leaves a large opening at the back for the camera, leaving the area exposed to damage.

Read More: Poco X6 review, price, and specifications

Designing

The design of the Poco X6 Neo is one of its outstanding features. As mentioned earlier, this is claimed to be Poco’s thinnest phone yet, and it shows. At only 7.7mm, the phone feels very thin in the hand. Even with the bezel on, the X6 Neo is slimmer than other bezel-less phones.

The X6 Neo is made entirely of plastic, except for Corning Gorilla Glass 5 on the front. However, the choice of materials makes the phone feel much nicer than you’d normally find in this price range.

The sides of the frame are completely smooth with a matte texture. The entire back has a shimmer and arc glow that moves as you move the phone under the light in a way reminiscent of sand dunes. It’s a perfectly fetching pattern that adds a lot of personality to the phone’s design. However, it’s limited to this particular color, as Astral Black and Horizon Blue are quite simple.

Near the top of the phone is a large camera island, which is seen on other Poco X6 phones. Here you will find only two camera lenses, only one of which is actually usable. There’s also an LED flash and a circular pattern that’s really only there for visual symmetry, not functionality. The camera island on this model also has an iridescent look like the rest of the back, but it’s glossy instead of matte. These two lenses also have beautiful shiny rings around them.

As for the rest of the design, you see fairly thin and uniform bezels on the front with a subtle camera notch at the top. All the physical buttons are on the right side, and on top you’ll find a headphone jack and IR blaster.

The overall design of the Poco X6 Neo is really good and belies the price of the device. Even small things like the way the front glass connects to the side bezel without the rubbery edge you see on phones in this price range set it apart from the competition. It also contributes to a fairly robust build despite its plastic construction as well as IP54 dust and water resistance.

Display

Poco X6 Neo has a 6.67-inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 2400 x 1080 with a refresh rate of up to 120 Hz. The screen has a maximum brightness of 1000 nits, 100% DCI-P3 color coverage, and a touch sampling rate of 240 Hz.

As with other Xiaomi/Poco budget phones, you can make basic color adjustments in the settings. By default, the phone is set to the Vivid profile, which claims to adjust colors based on the displayed content but has a cold blue-white point. A saturated profile is always saturated but has a warmer color tone. It seems to target the standard sRGB profile and has a standard white point of D65 with natural colors. You can also adjust the color temperature for all three profiles manually using the color wheel.

In standard mode, the display has good color accuracy. This panel also has sufficient resolution and a good viewing angle.

Maximum brightness was usually adequate, but the way the auto-brightness works is a bit odd. In most modern smartphones, when using automatic brightness, the display can exceed the manual brightness level under bright light. The X6 Neo, on the other hand, doesn’t reach, let alone exceed, the maximum manually adjustable brightness even under the brightest sunlight. You can get more brightness if you manually maximize the brightness instead. It was tested several times and at no point did the auto-brightness max out the brightness under strong light, instead, it was fixed at around 90%.

As for brightness, there’s no HDR support on the X6 Neo.

Unfortunately, like some other Xiaomi/Poco phones, the X6 Neo has the company’s awkward full-time video processing. Whenever you start a video, the phone automatically oversharpens it while also increasing the saturation and contrast, and there’s nothing you can do to turn it off.

  
Display settings

Well, almost nothing. Thanks to a Reddit comment, we were able to disable this effect by going into the phone’s Developer options and disabling the “Disable HW overlays” option, which turns off all video processing. The only problem is that when the phone is restarted, this option comes back and needs to be reactivated.

The display can refresh up to 120 Hz. The phone actually runs at 120Hz in most apps we’ve tried, including some games, but how it’s implemented leaves a lot to be desired. When running a game that supports a high refresh rate, the phone works at a frequency of 120 Hz. However, the phone is also designed to drop the refresh rate to 60Hz when you’re not interacting with the screen, which is fine when you’re on the home screen but not in the middle of a game. So the moment you stop interacting with the phone, the display and game will be forced down from 120Hz to 60Hz. The games we tried didn’t handle this very well, stuttering a bit when running at 60Hz.

Unfortunately, there’s no developer mode hack we can use to disable this behavior, so unless you’re playing a game where you have to constantly tap the screen, you’ll have this problem unless you manually set the screen to 60 Lock hertz.

Charging speed

The Poco X6 Neo supports 33W fast charging and a compatible charger is included in the box.

In our tests, the phone was able to charge reasonably quickly, with half of the battery charged in the first 30 minutes and a full charge taking about an hour. It’s certainly not the fastest charger we’ve seen, but it should be more than enough for most scenarios.

Additionally, you can disable fast charging through battery settings, which helps extend battery life.

Audio

The Poco X6 Neo has a speaker at the bottom, which is strange when you consider that it also has Dolby Atmos audio processing enabled. Of course, there’s no spatial processing when you’re working with just one speaker, but the Atmos mode adds a bit more warmth and body to the otherwise flat-out tinny sound.

However, there is a headphone jack where you can fully experience Dolby Atmos audio processing and also enjoy Atmos-encoded content, such as Apple Music or videos with an Atmos soundtrack.

You can also use Bluetooth. One thing to note here is that even though the phone lists aptX Adaptive and LHDC in the list of codecs in developer options, it doesn’t support either of them. We’ve noticed this on other cheaper Xiaomi/Poco phones as well, and it’s unclear why the company includes the full list of Bluetooth codecs even when many don’t actually exist. All you have access to on this phone are SBC, AAC, aptX, aptX HD, and LDAC, which are all codecs natively available on Android.

A slightly more frustrating issue with Bluetooth audio on this phone is the absolute lack of Bluetooth audio. This feature has been around for over a decade at this point and syncs the volume levels of a connected Bluetooth audio device and phone so they can be controlled as one. On the X6 Neo, the phone and accessory audio are separate, so you have to adjust both to get the right volume. This feature was present on the cheaper Poco M6 we recently reviewed, not to mention it’s pretty much a staple of phones these days, so we’re not sure why it’s missing here.

Software

The Poco X6 Neo runs on MIUI 14 on top of Android 13. As with other Poco devices, the MIUI version here is slightly different compared to Redmi or Xiaomi branded phones with a different launcher and some minor UI tweaks. As with other MIUI devices, some effects such as transparency are also disabled in the UI (such as notification backgrounds) because this device is inferior.

Despite these differences, this is very much the MIUI 14 we’ve seen dozens of times before, and it’s now on its way out, replaced by Xiaomi’s new HyperOS. However, we are not sure when this particular device will receive that update.

The software you get on this phone is fairly customizable. You can download themes that can update icons, fonts, wallpapers, and more. Unfortunately, while you can change things like your fonts individually, Poco Launcher doesn’t support manually changing icons via downloadable icon packs. The only way to change the icons is through the theme or by downloading another launcher.

  
MIUI 14 for Poco

Another strange thing about Poco phones is the inability to easily lock apps in the memory through the Task Switcher. Normally you can press and hold an app in the Task switcher and tap the lock button, but on Poco phones, you need to go to the Boost speed option in the Security app and then find the Lock apps menu option. Can individually lock programs in memory.

Other than that, it’s pretty much your typical MIUI affair. The Settings app still has a completely different design compared to any Android phone on the market. The search function is also useless because even things that are in the Settings app often don’t show up in search results.

  
Bloatware, spam notifications, and ads

Then there are the more sinister aspects of MIUI, which include bloatware, ads, and notification spam. We counted 10 non-native apps pre-installed on the phone, and the most recommended when you launch Xiaomi’s own app store. Most of the company’s main apps show ads when you open them, and you have to dig into their settings to disable them. The phone is also spammed with ad content notifications, some of which cannot be ignored until you click them.

These are the mainstay of the low-end Xiaomi/Poco device experience, and long-time users have become accustomed to or learned to avoid them. However, it’s important to name and shame them every time because a lot of it is unacceptable, and ignoring it will only make the situation worse.

Function

Poco X6 Neo uses the MediaTek Dimensity 6080 chipset. It comes in either 8GB + 128GB or 12GB + 256GB, and our review unit was the latter.

Performance in the X6 Neo was a bit mixed. The phone performs well most of the time, but there may be noticeable stuttering when starting some activities. This could include opening an app or starting a YouTube video. These slowdowns usually last a second or so, after which performance is fine. Similarly, there may be an occasional issue when navigating through some apps like Chrome or the Play Store that never quite goes away.

In our opinion, this is an optimization issue that needs to be investigated. The hardware seems capable, but the software isn’t polished enough to take full advantage of it right now. Maybe the cores aren’t ramping up fast enough, or there’s a bottleneck somewhere else in the system. Regardless, there is room for further improvement as performance is otherwise very good.

  
Stock watches • Watches with Antutu open • Watches with other apps

Before we get into the benchmarks, we want to note that the Poco X6 Neo cheats on Antutu. We noticed that the phone tends to overclock all of its cores, maxing them out as long as the Antutu app is open. This behavior is usually seen when you enable performance mode on some Android phones, but this phone doesn’t have that option. Nor does it do so in other programs or even other metrics.

This means Antutu’s results should be taken with a grain of salt, as the phone clearly performs differently in this particular app than in others. We really hoped we were past the age of benchmark cheating, but clearly not.

Camera

The Poco X6 Neo has a dual camera system on paper. You have a 108MP f1.8 main camera and a 2MP depth sensor. This means that you actually only have one camera to contend with. However, the phone has a trick up its sleeve, which is 3x lossless digital zoom, but more on that later.

The camera app on the X6 Neo is somewhat basic. It has all the commonly used features, including Pro mode, but lacks the option to capture RAW images. However, the Pro mode has some nice features, such as histogram, focus peaking, and zebra pattern for metering.

  
Camera app

But let’s go to the image quality. The 108-megapixel rear camera can take nice pictures in 1x mode, provided the HDR option is turned on. Color reproduction and white balance are good, and there’s reasonable detail without too much sharpness. Unfortunately, the Auto HDR option is fiddly and may not always kick in when necessary (and there’s no way to force it), so some images can be highlighted.

  
  
  
12-megapixel main camera

You can also choose to shoot in native 108MP mode. We’re happy to see that these aren’t just 12MP images pushed up to 108MP, but native photos from the sensor. Unfortunately, the phone turns off a lot of its image processing, including HDR, for this mode, so unless the lighting is perfect, expect to see a lot of washed-out highlights and colors.

  
108-megapixel main camera

The X6 Neo doesn’t have a telephoto camera, but it does have a 3x lossless digital zoom. In this mode, the camera takes a crop from the middle of the original 108MP image, resulting in fairly detailed and beautiful images. The results were absolutely stunning, as you’d be forgiven for thinking they came from a native 3x telephoto camera.

  
  
  
3x main digital camera

The thing about this camera is that this quality is only possible in the 3x option. The 2x mode (or rather anything between 1x and 3x) simply takes a crop from the 1x image, which can make the 2x image significantly worse than both the 1x and 3x images. Similarly, anything beyond 3x is also a crop of the 3x image, so they don’t look great either, although we have to say they still look better than 2x, which can be noticeably bad at times.

  
  
2x main digital camera

Image processing can also be different between these modes. The 2x image (or anything less than 3x) only inherits the 1x image processing while the 3x and above have the same processing (or lack thereof) as the native 108MP image. This can cause back-to-back shots from 1x, 2x, and 3x to look noticeably different at times.

We feel there’s room for further camera optimization here so that 3x images look a little better in terms of colors and dynamic range. Similarly, 2x images could benefit from a reduction in post-processing, as they can look overwhelming at times. However, for a phone that doesn’t have a true telephoto camera, we were quite impressed with the X6 Neo’s three times lossless shooting.

When it comes to video, you’re limited to a maximum of 1080p at 30fps. There’s digital image stabilization, but you don’t get any clever zoom tricks here, as the video is basically cropped from the middle of the sensor.

The video quality is average. While the image is good in terms of color and dynamic range, it is noticeably soft and lacks detail. Still, the image stabilization works well enough, so it’s not unusable if you just need something for TikTok or Instagram loops.

Summary

Poco X6 Neo is a really well-designed and well-made phone with a high-quality display. The design alone makes us want to recommend it, as it feels good in the hand, making it far better than many more expensive smartphones. Performance, for the most part, is good, as is overall camera quality.

The only downside is the software experience, particularly the intrusive nature of ads, notifications, and bloatware. A single speaker is underwhelming even at this price, and certain areas of the software could use more optimization to improve performance. We are also not interested in detecting benchmarks and artificially increasing device scores.

However, for the price, the X6 Neo is really good value and we’re happy to recommend it.

Source: GSMARENA.COM

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