Mobile Tech

Poco M7 Pro Review: Nothing “Pro” about this one


Poco M7 Pro Intro

Companies are getting more and more comfortable using Pro and Ultra monikers on all kinds of phones, and the Poco M7 Pro is the latest example.

This model comes alongside the Poco F7 Ultra and F7 Pro, but it’s a part of a more budget line, to say the least. It employs the old Poco design, a pretty midrange chipset, and doesn’t have an ultrawide camera.

The price of around 300 euros puts it right next to models such as the Galaxy A26 and the Motorola G Power (2025), and today we’re going to explore the potential reasons you might want to choose this phone over the competition.

Our composite review score tries to encapsulate the most important areas of the smartphone experience, and the values in each category have their own weight. Trying to be absolutely objective, each category consists of subcategories, with the idea to give you an overall score that reflects the phone’s strengths and weaknesses. In this case the Poco M7 Pro scored low in Camera and Performance, mainly because of the lack of an ultrawide camera and the missing support for 3DMark testing software.

Poco M7 Pro Specs

Strange Dimensities (it’s the chipset!)

Let’s start with an overview of the Poco M7 Pro specs and a comparison with the F7 Pro model:

Poco M7 Pro Design and Display

Amazing display for the price

The design of the Poco M7 Pro is pretty solid. The phone doesn’t feel cheap; the build materials are good, and the overall build quality is great.

There’s Gorilla Glass 5 covering the display, and the same glass can be found on the back in a frosted variant.

Speaking of design, the colors available are quite interesting and include Lunar Dust, Lavender Frost, and Olive Twilight. We got the green variant, and it looks quite original with a nice 3D effect applied to a portion of the surface.

Now, the camera bump on the back is quite big and the rings are also huge, but strangely they fit the overall aesthetics of the phone. The device is rather thin and comes with an IP64 dust and water resistance rating.

Even at this price point, Poco has managed to offer a robust retail package. In the box you will find the phone, a 45W charging brick, a USB-C cable, and a silicone back cover of similar quality to the ones bundled with the Xiaomi 15 series.

The 6.67-inch AMOLED panel is probably the best feature of the Poco M7 Pro, apart from its price tag. It’s a great piece of tech, featuring an FHD+ resolution and pixel density pushing 400 PPI. The refresh rate is also high at 120Hz, and the promised brightness sits at 2100 nits. Let’s check those claims and see how the Poco M7 Pro tackles our display tests.

The Poco M7 Pro aced our display tests and scored a great brightness result of around 1800 nits at 20% APL. The result is so similar to the Redmi Note 14 5G because these two phones share similar hardware, including the display panel (which is identical).

As far as minimum brightness, color accuracy, and color temperature metrics are concerned, the Poco M7 Pro also delivers some pretty decent results. Good job, Poco (or should we say Redmi… or Xiaomi?).

The optical fingerprint scanner under the display works fine; it’s not the fastest one out there, but it gets the job done. There’s facial recognition on board as well, but it uses just the single front camera, and it’s not very secure.

Poco M7 Pro Camera

Single camera

Well, Apple proved that you can launch a single-camera phone in 2025 with the iPhone 16e, but Poco’s not Apple. The M7 Pro features one wide camera sporting a 50 MP sensor under a lens with f/1.5 aperture. 

The resulting focal length is 26mm, and the sensor itself is on the small side at 1/1.95″. The camera has phase detection autofocus and optical image stabilization, so that’s an added bonus. There are no ultrawide or telephoto cameras to accompany the main shooter, but there’s a 2MP depth sensor to add bokeh when needed and spice up those portraits. 

Surprisingly, the main camera can produce some decent photos, especially if there’s enough light hitting the sensor.

And while this phone won’t threaten your regular iPhones or Galaxy devices, the camera gets the job done. There’s enough detail and dynamic range, and colors look okay, albeit not too saturated (which might be a good thing).

There’s some softness and flatness to the images in some scenes, and the low-light performance is not the best out there, but for general purposes the camera on the Poco M7 Pro is quite usable.

Poco M7 Pro Performance & Benchmarks

Steady pace

Another naming conundrum lies in the chipset of the Poco M7 Pro. The phone comes equipped with the Mediatek Dimensity 7025 Ultra, which is a midrange chipset built on a 6nm node and not very ultra in performance.

The phone is available in two memory configurations, one featuring 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, which we feel is the bare minimum in 2025. The upper variant comes with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

Performance Benchmarks:

Synthetic benchmarks show that the Poco M7 Pro manages to stick with other phones in the same price range and even outperform some of them.

In day-to-day use, the M7 Pro feels good, nice, and smooth with almost no lag or stutter. We would say the experience is very similar to what you get from the Galaxy A26.

Poco M7 Pro Software

The software situation is not very exciting. The Poco M7 Pro comes with Android 14 out of the box and Xiaomi’s HyperOS UI on top.

There’s some bloatware on board, although you can uninstall it easily, and for the most part, the customization is good—you can switch between a drawer or no drawer, change the themes, the layout, how app icons look, you know, normal Android-type things.

What’s missing is Xiaomi AI, and the reason might be due to the chipset not supporting some of the on-device features. But given the state of that particular AI system at the moment, we wouldn’t say it’s a big loss.

And furthermore, Gemini is available, and you can use Google’s processing power via the magic of the internet to tackle tasks with AI help if you’re on the LLM train.

In terms of software support, the Poco M7 Pro comes with four years of major Android updates and six years of security patches (in the EU). Versions in other markets feature shorter support, just two years of major OS updates and four years of security patches.

Poco M7 Pro Battery

Old but gold

Unlike its siblings from the F-series, the Poci M7 Pro doesn’t feature a silicon-carbon battery hybrid but a more conventional lithium-ion battery. Nevertheless, the 5,110 mAh capacity looks pretty hefty, at least on paper, and coupled with the midrange chipset, should result in good battery life.

PhoneArena Battery Test Results:

Our expectations have been confirmed! Compared to other phones with similar battery capacity, the Poco M7 Pro manages to pull ahead and deliver 2 more hours in our composite battery score.

The 15 hours and 23 minutes of non-stop browsing is an impressive result, and so is the 11 hours of video streaming. The phone can run 3D games for around 9 hours on a single charge, but we won’t be recommending it as a gaming device.

Charging on these phones from Chinese brands is always good, and even on this budget device, the wired power caps at 45W. This is more than what your average Galaxy S25 can offer, and the phone charges from zero to 100% in about an hour. Compared to the competition, the charging is a bit faster. There’s no wireless charging on board, but it’s to be expected at this price point.

Poco M7 Pro Audio Quality and Haptics

There’s a stereo system on the Poco M7 Pro, and it’s actually pretty decent. The earpiece doubles as a second loudspeaker, but there are three holes in the frame at the top that help with the soundstage. The sound itself is pretty loud, and the quality is decent. The phone also has support for Hi-Res audio at 24-bit/192kHz. No headphone jack, though.

The haptics are also solid, with good, strong vibration, and you can also select from three different levels—low, medium, and strong. It’s not the tightest one out there, but it gets the job done.

Should you buy it?

The smartphone market is so saturated nowadays that companies try to think of ways to cover even the smallest patches of unallocated space. This might sound complicated, and it sometimes is. Take Motorola, for example. The brand has tons of models, series, and variations in every imaginable price point.The same thing can be observed with Poco. The brand started as a budget Xiaomi spin-off, but this year Poco has an Ultra that costs 600 euros. Well, the M7 Pro follows the main Poco idea; there’s nothing Pro about this model. It’s a budget phone.

In a nutshell, the display is quite good, and the battery life and charging are also pretty decent. But in this price range, there are so many options that the M7 Pro might have a hard time making any impression. People will inevitably reach for the Galaxy A26 that offers similar things at a similar price plus the Awesome Intelligence AI system or get one of the Redmi Note 14 models, which offer better cameras.

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