Poco F9 Ultra Review

Design

• Premium Dark Cherry finish
• Big, heavy iPhone 17 Pro Max rival
• Rear speaker notification trick

At arm’s length, you could be forgiven for mistaking the Poco F9 Ultra for leaks of the burgundy-coloured iPhone 18 Pro Max. In truth, it’s a bit of a refinement and a tweak on last year’s Poco F8 Ultra design.

The Dark Cherry finish replaces the divisive blue denim model from the previous generation and, in doing so, gives it a much more luxurious or premium look. There is, of course, the usual black finish if you want that, but no Poco Yellow anywhere to be seen. 

It’s a pretty hefty phone, which is to be expected from a phone with a huge screen and a huge battery. Still, for context, it weighs just 2 grams more than an iPhone 17 Pro Max at 235g, and is just marginally thinner and narrower than Apple’s biggest phone. In other words, it’s basically the same size, shape and weight as the Pro Max. 

Poco’s ability to squeeze so much into that same space as the iPhone is what’s impressive here, then.

Where it doesn’t quite meet the standards of more expensive phones is in materials. Rather than Gorilla Glass Ceramic or Victus 2, it uses the slightly less durable Gorilla Glass Victus 7i on the front, and a glass-fibre-infused plastic-like back.

Despite that, it doesn’t look or feel cheap at all. And it has elevated Poco’s design language to do a pretty good job of imitating much more high-end brands. It looks and feels good. It is quite heavy, and far from being an easy one-handed phone though. 

There is something of a trick up its sleeve too. On that large rectangular camera island on the back, you’ll notice the Bose logo on its own circular island. This isn’t just decorative; it features the third speaker (a subwoofer to be specific) and has an LED ring light around that you can program to pulse and flash for notifications, or have it pulse and beat in time with music or video in your favourite apps. 

Poco being Poco, finding the setting for it is a bit more complicated than it needs to be, but it’s a pretty cool little feature. If you happen to place your phone down on its front a lot and need to know when you have notifications, you’ll get a subtle but easy-to-see visual alert. The only downside is that it seems to only pulse in white; you can’t change or customise the colour for different apps. 

Apart from that, it’s got IP68 water and dust resistance – so despite its slightly cheaper build materials, it should survive any downpours or getting dropped in the sink or bath.  

Screen

• Huge, bright 6.9-inch panel
• Superb colour and contrast
• 185Hz gaming support

Look at the Poco’s display spec sheet, and it’s easy to get excited when you see it has a 10,000 nit peak brightness level. That is miles above what most other manufacturers offer, but there is some marketing language going on here. 

Dig further into the specs and you’ll see that only 1% of the screen can hit that level at a time – and that will typically be just bright spots in HDR videos. In fact, the whole screen can’t even hit half the 10,000nit claim, or even a quarter of it. In high brightness mode, the entire panel can get to 2,200 nits at once, and a quarter of it can get to 4500 nits at a time. Otherwise, its typical brightness is about 850 nits.

In other words, most of the time, you won’t notice those epic high brightness claims. But what it does mean is that the display is more than bright enough to be clearly visible in most situations – even outdoors under bright daylight. Its anti-reflective properties aren’t amazing – certainly nowhere near the levels of the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra – but it will cut through reflections pretty well. 

What matters more in most indoor conditions is how that big display marries with the sound system to deliver a superb immersive experience in movies, TV shows and games. 

It measures 6.9 inches diagonally with iPhone-esque rounding of the corner radii, but has great support for various colour gamuts. You’ll get 12-bit colour depth with this phone, and the ability to tune it largely how you want. By default, its Pro setting strikes a good balance between natural and vibrant colour presentation, but you can make it more or less saturated if you want, or tweak the warmth. 

With its really high contrast ratio and the ability to hit as low as 1-nit brightness, it’s exceptionally versatile. And it even works pretty well when it gets wet. 

Its biggest talking point is undoubtedly the refresh rates. Poco has enabled it to reach up to 185Hz in games that support it. I’ll talk more about that in the performance section, but it means a screen that can stay sharp, smooth and clear even when animations are really fast. 

Like I said, though, it’s the combination with the sound that really elevates things. Like the Poco F8 Ultra, this phone boasts three speakers. There are the two stereo, symmetrical speakers – one on either end of the phone – and the subwoofer on the back for adding a bit more bass presence and rumble.

With those three combined, you get audio that’s loud, immersive and rich. It gives you the kind of versatility and range you’d typically need headphones to achieve. Or rather, it’s the kind of ability that means when you go to watch music videos on YouTube, you won’t be reaching for your earbuds to hear the musical layers properly. That is, of course, as long as you’re not in a public space where everyone else is going to have to share it with you. 

It’s no exaggeration to say I haven’t used a phone with this kind of combination of audio and visual performance in a long time. Maybe never. 

Cameras

• Flagship-grade camera hardware
• Heavy-handed image processing
• Strong zoom versatility

You could also make the argument that the camera system is something of a downside to the F9 Ultra. And not necessarily because the hardware is poor – it’s not. It’s got the same 200MP main camera as the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, has a 5x telephoto zoom with a 50MP sensor and a 50MP ultrawide camera. Technically, it’s got a lot going for it.

The zoom camera lets you punch pretty far into scenery and get a sharp photo that’s in focus. Where the ultrawide – which is safely the weakest of the three – means expanding the view to fit more in. 

Its weakness, I’d argue, is in Poco’s processing of the scenery. There were times on bright sunny days where the computational processing takes over and does a lot too much work for my liking. So you’ll see some details almost look too clean and soft – almost painting-like in its presentation on things like bright pebbles on a beach, or any flat surface like a building wall, or the side of a boat. 

In these same situations where there are dark shadows in the scene, it attempts to tame highlights and lift shadows a bit aggressively, leaving the darker parts of what it thinks is the subject looking a little foggy. 

It does also have the tendency to make images, in general, a little too warm and a little too saturated and contrasty for my liking in its default, out-of-the-box auto setting. Most of the time though, I was left with the feeling that it’s a more than capable system in most situations, regardless of lighting levels. 

The zoom camera has an equivalent optical zoom level of 5x, but can still take pretty sharp images at 10x, giving you a lot of range to punch into those scenes. Whether you’re shooting a building in the distance or a boat on the horizon. Just be prepared that oftentimes the texture doesn’t look entirely authentic, like the AI processing has taken over a little too aggressively.

Even though the ultrawide isn’t as strong as the other two, it’s not the obvious weak point I’ve found on a lot of other phones. Colours don’t always match the main and zoom lenses, but there’s no excessive distortion or warping at the edges, and it doesn’t suffer as much from grain and poor light capture as I’ve found in a lot of other ultrawide lenses. 

It struggles a little more than the primary lens does in the nighttime, when the automatic night mode algorithm kicks in. Sometimes struggling to focus at times, and it’s not quite as crisp and clean as the main sensor – but that’s to be expected from the poorer sensor quality. And the colour and contrast levels are worlds apart when compared to the main camera, which, like in daytime shots, eggs up the warmth, saturation and contrast a bit too aggressively at night.

As for the zoom – at night – that exaggerates its daytime tendency to oversoften details to make them a bit too clean and paint-like. 

Still, a lot of this is nit-picking, because for a phone in the current market where prices are inflated, it more than holds its own against some pretty expensive phones. So if you wanted to save a little money – and have a great camera – you’re really not losing out on much, if anything, if you go with the Poco for its performance and media experience. 

Performance

• Snapdragon flagship power
• Smooth high-end gaming
• Limited 185fps game support

The F9 Ultra is every bit a flagship under the hood; it sports the top-end Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, coupled with a fairly generous 256GB, 512GB and 1TB and either 12- or 16GB of RAM in today’s inflated market. Of course, it needed a beefy processor to hit that magic 185fps claim.

It can, but the caveat to this support for up to 185fps is that the game itself needs to support those levels in order to get them. And, as of right now, there aren’t many games that do. Poco told us there were more than 20 titles that are able to hit those levels, which means most do not. 

Still, it does mean that it won’t have any trouble hitting 120fps in the games you do play. It can cope with Genshin Impact, Wuthering Waves, Call of Duty or Destiny Rising in their higher settings.

I mostly played Destiny Rising with the graphics rendering set to Max and the frame rate set to 90fps, which was no trouble at all for the Poco F9 Ultra. I did feel it start to get a little warm after about 10/15 minutes of constant gameplay, but not uncomfortably hot. And it didn’t seem to drop frames significantly.

Combined with the superb touch response rate and 200Hz gyro sampling rate for motion sensing, it’s a great phone for gaming on. Layer the epic audio on top, and it’s hard to imagine you could get a much better gaming experience on a smartphone. 

Software

• Feature-rich but cluttered
• Bloat needs clearing out
• Six years of security support

If there’s a catch to any of this, you could make the argument that it’s Poco’s iteration of Xiaomi’s HyperOS software. It’s very feature-rich, but often arranged and implemented in a way that can be confusing and obstructive. You’ll find lots of Xiaomi-made bloat, redundant apps and features – like the lock screen carousel – enabled by default. 

So, as with every Poco phone I’ve used, I spend the first little bit of time taming all the features I don’t like, disabling them, hiding them and trying to keep my Home Screen and software experience as clean as I can. And while there, also familiarising myself with where the features have been hidden in the Settings menu.

One of its strengths is in customisation, in that you can change every aspect of the main experience. There are loads of always-on display, wallpaper and fingerprint effects to choose from. 

There’s an entire section in the Settings menu for AI features too, including the usual speech recognition, translation, search and subtitle features you’d find on most Android phones. So there’s lots to do here if you’ve got the time to sit down and figure it all out. 

As for software updates, this is another area Poco falls a little behind some of the more mainstream brands. You’ll get 4 generations of OS updates with the F9 Ultra, and 6 years of security patches. 

Battery life

• Massive 8050mAh battery
• Two-day use is realistic
• 50-minute charging claim

Just as an example of the kind of battery performance you’d get from the mega-capacity 8050mAh found in the F9 Ultra, streaming an hour of The Gentlemen on Netflix with the screen set to 50% brightness only dropped 2% of the battery level. Conceivably then, you could stream fifty hours of video on a full battery. 

Doing anything more graphically demanding will, of course, drain it more quickly. So around 17 minutes of Destiny Rising was enough to drain about 4% of the battery, with the game set to 90fps and Max render quality settings. So, as always, the amount of battery life you get from this beefy cell will largely depend on the type of tasks you use it for. 

Still, for someone like me who mostly uses their phone quite casually and barely tops 3 hours of screen time in a day – and mostly uses it for social media, WhatsApp and video – it’s not even hard to get to the end of a second day with this thing. Three days isn’t out of the question.

More demanding users can take solace in the fact that even if you put it through the wringer, constantly using it all day for everything, you should still comfortably end the day with the battery level higher than the dreaded red zone below 20%. 

And when you want to charge it up again afterwards, it’s pretty speedy for a battery of this size. Poco claims you can do a full refill in just 50 minutes, which is a pretty astonishing speed for an 8050mAh battery. To achieve that, you’ll need a 100W charger – preferably a proprietary Xiaomi HyperCharge one for the very fastest speeds – and to enable the fastest charging speeds in the settings. 

SQUIRREL_PLAYLIST_10208723

Should you buy it?