POCO F7 Ultra: the flagship killer of 2025? My first impressions from Singapore

What matters to us in a good current smartphone? Camera, battery, performance, a good display and a bit of AI. If you want all of that at a high level, you normally go for a flagship and put down 1,000 euros or more. POCO, the Xiaomi subsidiary, knocks that out of the park with the POCO F7 Ultra. This is a first impression: I could only test the device for a few days in Singapore, where POCO presented its new F7 lineup.

Specs and price

The POCO F7 Ultra brings:

• Processor: Snapdragon 8 Elite, the top processor in the Android world, with a new Vision Booster and a cooling system for gamers
• Battery: 5,300 mAh, more than on my Xiaomi 15 Ultra
• Charging: 120-watt HyperCharge wired, 50 watts wireless
• Display: 6.67 inches, 2K AMOLED, 120 Hz, 3,200 nits peak brightness
• Other: ultrasonic fingerprint scanner, glass back in black or yellow, only 212 g

The recommended retail price (RRP) is €749 for 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage and €799.90 for 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB. The F7 Ultra clearly shows that high-end performance doesn’t have to be expensive.

Camera

On paper the camera is pretty good, and in reality even more than good. It consists of a 50-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel telephoto camera and a 32-megapixel ultrawide camera. The selfie camera has 32 megapixels. There is no Leica camera like on the Xiaomi devices, which would probably cut into Xiaomi’s own business. You can judge the sample shots from Singapore in the video yourselves. The F7 Ultra can’t keep up with the Leica camera of my Xiaomi 15 Ultra. But most people don’t need a high-end camera, they need a really good everyday camera, and they get that here.

AI

The POCO F7 Ultra brings everything a current flagship needs: Gemini, Circle to Search and many Hyper AI features in image editing as well as for creating, summarizing, optimizing and translating text.

Criticism

At this price, criticism is hard for me. For €1,500 many points would come to mind, but for €749 you get a really good flagship.

• Design: Personally, I don’t like the back quite as much. The round camera module is probably meant to recall the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, but it looks lost on the side. The device wobbles on the table while you use it. That’s a matter of taste and not an objective criticism.
• Updates: POCO likes to compare itself with Google and Samsung, and with processor and performance they are right to do so. But they only give 4 years of OS updates and 6 years of security updates, putting them behind the competitors. Xiaomi and its subsidiaries are not quite as speedy with their update policy. It has gotten better, especially in the last year, but sometimes you wait far too long for security updates.

Verdict

For €749 RRP, the POCO F7 Ultra delivers a top processor, a big battery, fast charging, a bright 2K display and a good everyday camera. If you absolutely need something to criticize, you’ll find it in the updates. I could only test the device for a few days; for a conclusive picture I would have to use it longer and more intensively.