[REVIEW] POCO X6 Pro 5G: High performance and the new HyperOS operating system

Popular POCO brand kicked off the year with its sixth generation of the X series—specifically POCO X6 Pro 5G. The Chinese manufacturer is once again focusing mainly on high performance for an affordable price.

In our detailed review, we’ll look at the refreshed design, the new HyperOS operating system, test the cameras, and share our experience from real everyday use of the smartphone.

Where to buy the POCO X6 Pro 5G?

The new POCO X6 Pro 5G is already available from our Chinese partners at Gshopper and DHgate. Gshopper ships the smartphone from a Chinese warehouse, with customs-free shipping that we’ve personally tested on devices like the POCO F5 and Xiaomi 13T Pro.

DHgate, on the other hand, offers it directly from European warehouses, so your package arrives express in up to 7 days. Based on our experience, delivery usually takes just 3–4 days. Discount coupons are also included, and the seller even offers a full 2-year warranty.

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POCO X6 Pro 5G Global Version

Slovak warehouse, 12 + 512 GB, 2 years warranty 369,90 €SK warehouseSpanish warehouse, 12 + 512 GB, 2 years warranty 207,35 €EU warehouse

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Updated 27. 6. 2025 on 05:32

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Technical specifications

Quality and what’s in the box

The POCO X6 Pro 5G smartphone was delivered by the SPS courier in standard packaging. The phone box was placed inside a protective air cushion and a nylon sleeve.

POCO stays true to its yellow-and-black packaging, with basic accessories including a charger, a USB cable, and a protective case with a pin for opening the SIM slot. This time the case is matte black.

In POCO smartphone packaging, nothing has changed over the past few years, so the contents and packaging quality are still at a very good level.

Design and build quality

We can buy the POCO X6 Pro 5G in black, gray, or the typical yellow color that’s basically the brand’s color. The black and gray versions come with a plastic back, and measure 160.45 x 74.34 x 8.25 mm, weighing 186 g. The yellow variant is 0.1 mm thicker and 4 g heavier. In this case, the back cover is leather (a so-called vegan leather).

We have the yellow variant available for testing, and we really like it. In this color, the smartphone looks fresh and modern—and genuinely great. It’s a shame to cover it with a plain black silicone case included in the box.

The camera module runs across the entire width of the smartphone, so it’s quite large. It includes three cameras and an LED diode, which at first glance also looks like a camera lens.

Nothing has changed in the layout of the smartphone’s individual elements, and the manufacturer is not experimenting in this regard, but sticks to the old good classic. The charging USB-C port is together with the speaker, the SIM card slot, and the microphone on the bottom side. The second speaker, microphone, and one of the sensors are on the top side.

Another design element is also the power button to turn the smartphone off or on, which in this case is yellow—though you can’t see it under the housing either.

CrystalRes AMOLED display

IPS displays are slowly disappearing from Xiaomi smartphones and their sub-brands, and POCO is no exception. POCO X6 Pro 5G includes a 6.67″ AMOLED display with the CrystalRes tag.

Its resolution makes 2712 x 1220 px with a maximum refresh rate of 120 Hz. The default setting is a dynamic frequency that changes depending on the current need, so the smartphone can save power when we don’t need a high refresh rate. If we don’t want to use this feature, we can manually set 60 or 120 Hz.

You’ll also appreciate the high maximum brightness of 1800 nits and support for technologies like Dolby Vision and HDR10+. The display is also protected by Gorilla Glass 5. It has fairly thin bezels—on the sides just 1.3 mm, while the chin is 2.27 mm.

The display is flat, with no rounded sides, and in the middle of the top there’s the well-known cutout for the selfie camera. Visually it looks great: smooth, with vivid colors, and it responds very well to touch. However, color reproduction is slightly cooler, but we can adjust it in the settings. The display also has an integrated fingerprint reader that works very well and reliably.

Despite having an AMOLED similar to other cheaper models with AMOLED displays, the POCO X6 Pro 5G doesn’t offer the normally available full-featured active display (always-on). The settings only let you show the always-on display for 10 seconds after the phone is locked.

How to get a full-featured always-on display

There’s a way to bypass the 10-second always-on display and get one that doesn’t disappear after 10 seconds. Just enable developer options and turn off MIUI optimization.

Developer settings are enabled with multiple taps on the item “OS version” in the phone info, in Settings. After this step, we’ll find “Developer options” in Settings, under the item “Additional settings”.

But you’ll look in vain for system optimization here. Even this option is hidden and will only appear after a few taps on the choice “Reset to default values” in the developer options.

Then, the item “Turn on system optimization” will also appear in the options, which we need to turn off. After that, our always-on display won’t turn off after ten seconds anymore, even though the settings still offer only this one option.

However, we have to admit that after these steps, some other elements of the system got worse. Some icons lost their shape, and the battery percentage indicator wasn’t well readable. So it’s not quite an ideal solution.

For the first time, even with HyperOS

POCO X6 Pro 5G comes with the latest Xiaomi HyperOS system already in version 1. Specifically, we used it most of the time after updating to the version marked 1.0.4.0.UNLMIXM. It’s built on the latest Android 14.

Since this is the first smartphone with this operating system that we have the chance to test, let’s take a closer look at it. Let’s start with the design, because it’s the design changes that you notice at first glance.

Compared to MIUI 14, the font style (typeface) has changed slightly, and the locked screen has also gone through design changes. It shows the current time, date, and temperature in fairly large and easy-to-read text. The control center also received a new design—it appears when you swipe down from the right side of the screen. Here, the layout of the individual elements has changed, and the icons inside have also been slightly enlarged.

The settings menu has a different layout too, and the individual settings categories and how smartphone information is displayed have also changed.

Besides design changes, security was also improved. For example, when granting apps permission to access files, you can also choose specific files the app may access—if you don’t want to grant permission for everything.

We also found the Quick Ball feature, which is like a small ball on the display that lets you quickly access selected shortcuts. By default, it includes links to return to the home screen, go to the menu, lock the screen, take a screenshot, and a one-step back button. However, we didn’t find the announced Dynamic Island that Xiaomi was supposed to borrow from a competing iPhone.

Focused on high performance

The new POCO X6 Pro 5G comes with a powerful 8-core processor from MediaTek, the Dimensity 8300-Ultra. It’s built on a 4 nm process and consists of four Arm Cortex-A715 cores clocked up to 3.35 GHz, plus four Arm Cortex-A510 cores with a maximum frequency of 2.2 GHz. It’s complemented by an Arm Mali-G615 MP6 graphics chip clocked at 1400 MHz.

And it’s not just the processor where things look impressive. You also get 8 GB of LPDDR5X RAM and fast UFS 4.0 storage with a capacity of 256 GB. There’s also a higher configuration with 12 GB RAM and 512 GB storage. Since this model uses UFS 4.0, by taking 4 GB away from the storage you can easily upgrade the RAM to 8 GB in the 12 GB version and up to 12 GB RAM in the 16 GB version.

You definitely don’t have to worry about a lack of performance here. The smartphone feels very fast, with no laggy response times. In the well-known AnTuTu benchmark, we achieved a score of 1 334 047 points with this phone.

What about the cameras?

Nowadays, camera quality plays a major role for most customers when choosing a new smartphone. However, the POCO brand has been known in the past for less-than-great cameras, even though the phones offer top-tier hardware while keeping a reasonable price. Let’s start with the specifications of the individual camera modules.

Here we have a similar setup to the past—so a better main camera and weaker remaining cameras: an ultra-wide-angle and a macro shooter. Let’s start with the main camera, which has 64 MP resolution and combines 4 pixels into one, resulting in a pixel size of 1.4 μm. It even supports optical and electronic image stabilization.

Surprisingly, it takes very solid photos. Images are sharp with vivid colors, though they’re generally not overly oversaturated. They aren’t fully accurate or realistic, but they also aren’t extremely overdone—which we personally like.

You’ll also be pleased with the good dynamic range, which is often an issue with cheaper smartphones. As a result, there aren’t too many areas that are unnecessarily underexposed or overexposed.

Of course, the best results come in good lighting conditions, but it also handles indoor scenes reasonably well. Occasionally, the automatic HDR guesses wrong—it can misread the scene and overbrighten the photo too much.

Photo quality drops slightly in poorly lit areas, where sharpness declines a bit and it’s harder to capture moving subjects—like children. Still, this is generally a challenging area even for more expensive cameras.

Ultra-wide camera, zoom, selfie, and macro

The ultra-wide camera only has 8 MP and is visibly weaker compared to the main sensor. So you get less sharpness—photos show fewer details overall, and the results are simply average. Especially in worse lighting, sharpness drops more noticeably and you start to see an unpleasant amount of noise.

Color output differs from the main camera. The ultra-wide has less saturated colors that are less warm and contain more blue, which leads to a cooler overall color rendering.

On the other hand, the double zoom that’s also available, despite the absence of a telephoto lens, delivers a very similar output to the main camera. The smartphone actually gets it precisely using this lens. Zoomed-in photos are therefore almost equally sharp, detailed, and overall very high quality.

Unfortunately, the macro only has 2 Mpx, and personally we wouldn’t need it here at all since its output isn’t very usable. On top of that, it has a fixed focus point, which isn’t always easy to hit. As a result, many photos come out blurry—good only for deleting. A better choice would be to skip this camera and use the costs needed for it elsewhere.

The selfie camera has a resolution of 16 Mpx, which is already kind of a standard, and manufacturers don’t put much emphasis on it. That’s why the selfie camera quality on smartphones in this class hasn’t changed too much over the last few years. The output is average and offers not many details. However, for video calls and occasional casual selfie photos, it’s enough.

Night mode

Night photos are also quite decent—especially those taken with the main camera. All the lenses deliver the best results on well-lit subjects at night, for example under street lighting.

If we’re taking photos of objects that aren’t lit, or are lit only very poorly, sharpness drops significantly even with the main camera. If we compare the ultra-wide-angle camera and the main camera, the biggest difference is mainly in color rendering. Colors with the ultra-wide lens are much cooler. These photos also visibly have fewer details.

Video

The maximum video resolution is 4K at 30 fps. POCO also includes image stabilization in the X6 Pro 5G model, and even not only electronic but also optical. Stabilization works even at the highest resolution, but it’s not perfect. In the video, you can see slight shakes in certain parts of the shots, but overall it’s absolutely not bad. It’s a shame we only get 30 frames per second.

Lower resolution, 1080p, also supports 60 fps. In the settings, you’ll find a manual option to enable better image stabilization, but this choice will immediately reduce the resolution to 1080p at 30 fps.

Battery and charging

In the battery department, nothing has changed for several years, and it’s the same in this case. Again, we have a 5000 mAh battery that provides an average—about one day—battery life on a single charge. Still, everything depends on intensity and how you use it, so the smartphone isn’t a problem to run out sooner, but on the other hand, it can also last longer than the average.

In the package, you’ll find a 67 W charging adapter with a USB to USB-C cable. Charging is therefore fairly fast, and from 20 % to 100 % it takes about 44 minutes. You can find the charging process in the table below:

Connectivity and speakers

As the name suggests, the new POCO from the sixth series supports 5 G networks, and overall it’s pretty good when it comes to connectivity. In its equipment, you’ll find, for example, WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, or several positioning systems. NFC for mobile payments is also included.

The speakers are placed in both the bottom and top edge, and they sound quite good. Of course, they’re not a market-leading solution, and they could use a bit more bass, but they definitely won’t disappoint.

POCO X6 Pro 5G: Final evaluation

The new POCO X6 Pro 5G really pleasantly surprised us. It offers a 6.67″ AMOLED display with the CrystalRes label, and above all, top-tier hardware while keeping a reasonable price. The smartphone’s brain is a powerful 8-core Dimensity 8300 Ultra processor. It’s complemented by fast LPDDR5X RAM and the latest generation of fast storage — UFS 4.0.

You’ll also appreciate the solid main camera, and the new model definitely doesn’t need to be ashamed of it. We also have Xiaomi’s latest operating system, HyperOS, and the attractive design of the back cover in yellow vegan leather stands out too. Overall, we rate the smartphone very positively.