Indeed, Night mode shots here are improved, with greater detail and clarity. They’re still not on a par with shots snapped on the likes of the Pixel 6a, the OnePlus Nord 2T, or the Realme 9 Pro Plus, however. The Poco F4 GT is part of a series from Xiaomi that appeals primarily for techies and mobile gamers. Early Poco phones were nigh-on unbeatable in the performance they offered for the money. More impressive is that the Poco F4 proved to be the best choice from the comparators when it comes to gaming, with an outstanding result of 114fps in the GFXBench Manhattan 3 onscreen test, where none of the others made it into triple figures. Offscreen results also saw an impressive showing of 140fps – a figure that only the Google Pixel 6a even comes close to. The Poco F4 easily handled any game I threw at it, smoothly capturing everything from the fast-paced racing action of Asphalt 9: Legends to the simple delights of Candy Crush Saga. Proximity Sensor, Light Sensor, Accelerometer (G-Sensor), Gyroscope Sensor, Fingerprint Sensor, Magnetometer

The results of our standard battery rundown test are less favourable for the Poco F4, serving up the lowest result out of this selection and coming in roughly 10% less than its predecessor. To be clear, a score of over 19 hours isn’t bad by any stretch – you’ll happily get two days of moderate use out of it – but when most new iterations improve upon the battery life, this two-hour downgrade is still disappointing. I had to factory reset the Poco F4 GT to solve this problem. And after letting the battery run down completely, the problem returned —this is something Xiaomi urgently needs to fix. CameraPeak gaming performance is fantastic, netting 10140 points in 3D Mark’s Wild Life benchmark. This is even more abstracted from real-world than a benchmark score usually is, though, as power is massively throttled during successive runs. The Poco F4 GT is made in the style of dedicated gaming phones, like those from the Asus ROG series. It is not what many would define as attractive, but for those in for the ride, Xiaomi has nailed the style. The idea is sound, and so is the execution. But additional buttons mounted onto a thin phone often aren’t much of an upgrade to the virtual on-screen controls designed for the purpose. Screen

The Poco F4 GT is unusually clear outdoors, because the OLED is allowed to reach closer to its true peak brightness outdoors than most. Outdoors clarity is therefore very good.

That’s pretty reassuring, especially when you consider that I switched the display to a permanent 120Hz almost straight out of the box, as I always do. If you keep the phone set to its default Auto state, you’ll buy yourself even more battery headroom. There are three colour modes to choose from: Original, Saturated and Vivid. While Vivid is the recommended and default setting, colour purists will want to switch to the Original mode. We measured an sRGB gamut of 94% and a volume of 94.5% on this setting, which translates to a wide range of colours produced with terrific accuracy. The screen also holds up well in both indoor and outdoor use, hitting a peak brightness of 482cd/m² during testing. Even after dark, the camera holds up well. The night mode effectively brightened the moonlit scene, keeping the sky reasonably free of noise and showing the glow of the moon and the planet without any obnoxious lens flares. When it comes to competing devices, the Poco F4 5G will be going head-to-head against the Realme GT Neo 2 5G, the iQoo Neo 6 5G, iQoo 7 and Motorola Edge 20 Pro just to name a few. Cut to the chase

Its general performance is just as great as you’d hope, with apps and multi-tasking transitions being far faster than those of the OPPO Find X5 Lite I used before the Poco, getting you the flagship experience I’d expect from a phone with this kind of power.Its macro camera is bad, just like all tertiary cameras of this spec. The ultrawide is mediocre too, producing images with washed-out mid-tones and significantly different colour character to the main camera’s photos. There’s a very noticeable step down in quality from the main camera, and images don’t hold up too well when you zoom in. Triangular indents sit in the camera housing, the finish on the rear cover, while the camera flash LED sits inside a lightning strike-shaped cutout.