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Poco X3 NFC looks like another Xiaomi triumph

Xiaomi’s offshoot Poco is back with another budget Android phone, and the Poco X3 NFC brings some big features to this seriously competitive sector.

Even though Poco has only released a couple of phones, it’s already becoming obvious what you’re going to get with one of these. Big specs, flagship features and a low price. With the X3 those boxes are most certainly ticked.

Scanning through the hefty spec-sheet, the highlight certainly seems to be the display which is again a 6.67-inch 120Hz HDR10 panel, with a 240Hz touch response rate for super responsive gaming. Poco also claims this FHD+ LCD has nearly 90% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut covered and a typical 450 nits of brightness.

There’s plenty of potential with the camera too, even if it does feel like there have been extra sensors added simply to be able to call this a ‘quad-camera’ phone. Your main camera is a 64MP Sony IMX682 sensor, then there’s a 13MP ultra wide sensor and a 2MP macro paired with a 2MP depth sensor. Those latter two are easily forgotten, so it’ll be up to the main cameras to do the heavy lifting. You’ve also got a 20MP camera in the small, centrally-located cutout 

There’s no 5G support here, though the Snapdragon 732G chipset is aimed very squarely at gamers, with boosted graphics performance from the Adreno 618 GPU. There’s also a healthy 6GB RAM and either 64 or 128GB of expandable storage.

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The 5160mAh battery is huge and there’s support for 33w charging. You even get a 33w charger in the box, something that is not always a given with more affordable phones. Other features include a 3.5mm headphone port, dual stereo speakers, side-mounted fingerprint sensor and a splash-proof covering. 

It’s the design where the Poco X3 NFC might come fall down a bit. From the press pictures, it looks fairly standard and we’re not huge fans of the large POCO branding on the back. It’s fairly heavy at 215g (expected with that huge battery) and has a plastic back surrounded by an aluminium frame. Maybe our view will soften when we have the phone for ourselves. We’re a little confused by the name too: is shouting about NFC support really a headline-grabbing feature in 2020?

Still, there’s a lot to like here and with a starting price of £199 this could be hard to beat in the budget space. 

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