Poco X4 gt full phone review
Xiaomi Poco X4 GT specs at a glance:
Unboxing the Xiaomi Poco X4 GT:
It has all the usual user manuals along with the appropriate 67W charger, transparent silicone case and a USB-A to USB-C cable, also used for data transfer.
Design and Handling:
The handset is entirely made of plastic, with the back panel mimicking frosted glass.The front is now protected by Gorilla Glass 5, which is a downgrade from the Gorilla Glass Victus on the X3 GT.
Unfortunately, Xiaomi does not mention of ingress protection. We suspect the added 3.5mm audio jack could be the reason.
Xiaomi went for a boxy design this time around, as the back panel is almost completely flat with more prominent and sudden curvatures towards the edges. The frame around the device is also completely flat, with the buttons on the right side. On the side is the volume rocker and the power key which doubles as a fingerprint reader on the right side, both are easy to reach and well-placed.
The camera bump sticks out quite a bit, and the lenses protrude even further, that causes the phone to wobble when placed on a flat surface.
On the bottom is the USB-C connector, the SIM card tray and the grille for the loudspeaker. On the top, is another grille that likely serves as an echo chamber for the left channel speaker, the IR blaster and the audio jack.
The front is house to a centered punch-hole for the selfie camera, the cutout is relatively bigger than on an OLED panel, and side bezels are somewhat thick, especially the bottom one. X4 GT measures 6.6-inch diagonal.
Poco X4 GT camera review:
The Poco X4 GT features a familiar triple-camera combo widely used even in upper mid-range devices. The set-up is a modest upgrade over its predecessor "X3 GT". The main 64MP sensor is a 64MP, f/1.9, 1/1.72", 0.8µm shooter. There is a second 8MP, f/2.2, 1/4.0", 1.12µm ultrawide camera offering 120-degree field of view. The third camera is used solely for macro - 2MP f/2.4. Poco X4 GT relies on a 16MP, f/2.5, 1/3.06", 1.0µm shooter for its selfies.
The camera app is a rather straightforward implementation. You can change modes with side swipes (on the black bezel!), and you can also tap on the modes you can see to switch to those directly. Adding, removing, and rearranging modes is in the main rolodex, simply go to the More tab and navigate to the edit button, and you can access that from the settings menu as well.
The unused modes will still be in that More tab, but you can switch to a pull-out pane that's summoned from a line next to the shutter release. Additional options, including the Super Macro mode, plus the icon to access the settings can be found in the hamburger menu, plus a tiny live histogram and a toggle for zebras. A flash mode switch, an HDR switch, an AI toggle, a shortcut to Google Lens, and a magic wand is next to the hamburger menu. There's a Pro mode where you can tweak the shooting parameters of the primary, the ultrawide and even the macro cameras yourself.
You have an option to pick one of 4 white balance presets or dial in the light temperature with a slider, present is a manual focusing slider and shutter speed and ISO control with the range depending on which camera you're using.
This review can't be complete without mentioning that once you switch over to the ultrawide camera for video recording, switching back to the main camera will default to 1080p, which is annoying, and you should keep an eye on the resolution toggle since you might mistakenly record in 1080p instead of 2160p while using the main sensor.
The camera app hosts some extra modes, including Long Exposure with its own set of different presets - moving crowd, neon trails, oil painting, light painting, starry sky, and star trails. The extra modes in the "More" sub-menu can be displayed with bigger thumbnails for easier navigation.
Picture quality review:
Moving on to the photo quality of the main shooter, Poco X4 GT main camera produces some nice-looking daylight photos, especially when compared directly to some of its competitors. The contrast is great, colors are punchy (although not the best we've ever seen), dynamic range is okay. The general softness and visible noise (of the lowlights pictures), which sometimes is taken care of by the noise suppression algorithm at the expense of the detail, ruin the overall quality of the pictures. We strongly recommend using the Night mode at all times as it improves overall image quality by adding a little bit of sharpness and clearing out the annoying grain (though, the difference isn't going to break any record).
The main camera is capable of recording 2160p@30fps videos, 4K footage looks sharp enough with accurate color reproduction, there is little to no noise and high enough contrast. Though, dynamic range need some improvement.
Ultrawide camera
Next is the ultrawide camera, the quality of the shooter looks decent, though, dynamic range is limited, and the sharpness needs improvement, particularly near the edges. There's a good amount of detail and the lively colors and good contrast bring out the best from the ultrawide snapper.
The ultrawide camera is struggling to deliver usable images at night with the standard Photo mode. Though, the Night mode helps with delivering decent enough images, by improving the sharpness. 1080p video of the ultrawide camera is considerably softer and has an even narrower dynamic range. The fuzziness makes it hard for us to recommend using the shooter for videos.
Macro camera
And finally on the rear, we've got the usual 2MP macro camera that delivers lackluster images with washed-out colors, insufficient contrast and a limited amount of detail. Lack of autofocus makes close-up shots challenging, so do take a couple of shoot at varying distances to compare.
The phone produces surprisingly good portraits are surprisingly good for a phone in this price range. The sharpness and dynamic range looks good, and color reproduction is excellent.
Front camera
Flipping to the front camera, the selfies are unimpressive for a phone in this price range. Though, the selfie's Portrait mode produces somewhat sharper-looking images with more details. Probably, because the HDR is not active in the Portrait mode (as some HDR algorithm implementations are known to cause sharpness issues).
From around the web
Poco X4 GT Software review:
On software side, Poco X4 GT runs on a slightly tweaked "MIUI 13 for Poco" on Android 12. MIUI offers an abundance of features, some are a bit niche, and yet some of Android 11 and 12 intrinsic features are missing. Those in question are re-designed widget interface, notification history, and privacy dashboard.
The phone uses an IPS LCD panel, so there's no always on display here. MIUI 13 promises some improvements such as better better CPU utilization, RAM management, and more effective storage use. The looks haven't changed, though, and previous MIUI users will feel right at home. What we noticed right away was the unusual DPI. The phone has a standard 1080p+ resolution, but the DPI makes it look as if it's 1440p+. UI elements are sharper-looking and smaller. Though, you can change the UI scale in settings, of course.
The split between notification and control is enabled by default. And for those who don't like it, you can always revert back to the standard notification shade with quick toggles in one place.
There's an app drawer which you can't change, as opposed to standard MIUI that gives you an option to choose between an app drawer and displaying all your apps on the home screen. There are preset app categories and custom opinion as well, the search bar is located at the bottom.
The side bar notably differs in different scenarios. In games, the Sidebar provides a couple of gaming-related features, while in video apps, the Sidebar becomes a Video toolbox. It lets you launch video apps in pop-up windows, Screenshot, Record screen, Cast, and Play Video with the screen off, including on YouTube without Premium subscription.
MIUI has come with a pre-installed system Security app that protect the phone from malware. The can manage your data usage, battery behavior, manage the permissions of your installed apps and free up some RAM. Plus, you can apply restrictions to only certain apps and as well ability to define battery behavior to selected apps.
There's Game Turbo which you can use to launch your games as well as an in-game utility for improving your gaming experience.
You can some ads called "recommendations" in the pre-installed apps, in case you get annoyed by the ads, you can always disable it.
For the security, there's a 2D face unlock (insecure) and a finger print scanner mounted to the power button that you can set to touch or press(your are better off with the on press option).
A 144Hz IPS LCD panel with standard 1080 x 2460px resolution in a 6.6-inch diagonal is baked into the Poco X4 GT. The touch sampling rate of this configuration is punching at 270Hz (only at 90Hz refresh rate or below). The panel also bust HDR10 and Dolby Vision support, as well as DC Dimming and 7 steps of refresh rate control. When it comes to brightness, the screen gets pretty close to what you can get from an OLED solution. In our testing we got approximately 480 nits in manual mode and 600 nits in Auto mode with the usual brightness boost.The contrast ratio isn't impressive as we have seen LCDs with deeper blacks.
The HRR control is dynamic, the default is 50Hz, while in some app it gets to 60Hz and other times, it get to 120Hz. In our testing it didn't get to 144Hz at any point. You can always choose between the custom modes as well (60, 120 and 144Hz).
Poco X4 GT performance review:
Moving to the main selling point of Poco X4 GT (the chipset). X4 GT IA a house to MediaTek's Dimensity 8100. The octa-core chip uses 4x Cortex-A78 cores clocked at 2.85 GHz and its power efficient 4x Cortex-A55 cores clocks at 2.0 GHz, for the graphics is Mali-G610 MC6. The setup promises 20% better performance over Dimensity 8000. There's a capable NPU and ISP. The MediaTek Imagiq 780 ISP can simultaneously record HDR videos with two cameras or 4K@60fps HDR10+ footage using one camera, it can also do lossless zoom and AI-powered noise reduction and HDR imaging.
Benchmark tests
Here is the benchmark test results:
The X4 GT outperformed similarly priced phones is our CPU test results, even the snapdragon 8 Gen 1. We its because Geekbench doesn't utilize the big Cortex-X1 and Cortex-X2 cores in the multi-core test.
Poco X4 GT has some gaming-ready capabilities, like, an improved LiquidCool Technology 2.0, which means that the handset has a large cooling surface area and heat sinks to combat CPU and GPU throttling during long gaming sessions. Xiaomi says the cooling area is 32% larger when compared to its predecessor (X3 GT and has 7 layers of graphite.
Dimensity 8100 isn't one of the most demanding chipsets to support during heavy loads, but we love it that the system is capable of maintaining 94% of the Dimensity 8100 theoretical performance after an hour-long 100% CPU load. Interestingly the phone didn't get that hot even after rocking 100% of its power.
Poco X4 GT battery life test:
In our battery life test, Poco X4 GT reported some respectable figures:
Using the charging brick that Xiaomi provided, it gets the phone from 0 to 77% in 30 minutes and a full charge took about 56 minutes.
Poco X4 GT audio quality:
Poco X4 GT uses a standard stereo speaker setup. The audio quality from this setup is above average. The bass is good for the price range. Anyways, there's nothing too fancy about the audio system.
Poco X4 GT pros and cons:
Pros
- Dimensity 8100
- Good performance/price ratio
- Good battery life
- 144Hz sampling rate
- Good stereo speaker setup with Dolby Atmos tuning
- Fast charging
Cons
- Not AMOLED display
- 2x zoom of the selfie camera need some enhancement
- Gorilla glass victus of it's predecessor is gone
- No IP rating
Poco X4 GT alternatives:
Below is a list of some of the best alternatives to Poco X4 GT
- Poco F4
- Realme GT Neo3
- Galaxy a53 5g
- OnePlus 10R
- Realme 9 Pro+
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