Xiaomi spinoff brand Poco has partnered with Bose for the second year in a row for its flagship F9 Pro and Ultra phones. The F9 phones double down on amped up audio, with a light-up subwoofer built into the Ultra, along with extremely bright displays, enormous batteries, and what should be Poco’s best cameras yet.
The F9 Ultra sees the return of the Bose-branded 2.1 sound system introduced on last year’s F8 Ultra. Poco has only slightly tweaked the hardware, upgrading each of the two main speakers while using the same subwoofer as before, but has changed the structure of the subwoofer mount to include a small LED ring around it. It’s only white, with no choice of color, but can be used for call and notification lights as well as rhythmic lighting during gaming or music, unlike the extremely limited HiLight feature in the new Pixel 11 phones.
This must be the loudest phone I’ve ever tested, but quality is also genuinely pretty impressive considering the size of the speaker involved. This won’t match the quality of a good Bluetooth speaker, but it’s good enough that I’d happily rely on this for playing music in a hotel room, and it’s a definite upgrade for audio while gaming or watching TV. There are a couple of audio profiles designed by Bose, plus a full customizable EQ. New to the F9 Ultra is support for Bose’s game audio engine, which can do things like accentuate the sound of enemy footsteps in an FPS.
The 6.9-inch OLED display is the other key selling point here, and it also has a gaming element. For starters, it’s extremely bright, with what Poco says is a peak brightness of 10,000 nits. But the 185Hz refresh rate is also impressive, even if Poco says you’ll only hit that top speed during compatible games, of which there’ll be more than 20 at launch, including Clash of Clans and GTA: Liberty City Stories.
Beyond that, the F9 Ultra has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, up to 16GB RAM and 1TB storage, and a capacious 8,050mAh silicon-carbon battery with 100W charging. The cameras sound solid too: a 200-megapixel main camera, 50-megapixel 5x periscope, and 50-megapixel ultrawide. Poco tends to prioritize performance over photography, but it still has Xiaomi’s excellent image processing running the show, so I’d expect good results from this.
The Ultra is joined by the F9 Pro, a similar phone that’s just a little stripped back. The Bose stereo speakers lack both the subwoofer and the notification LED, the 6.59-inch display is a little smaller but just as bright and fast, the 6,330mAh battery is smaller, and the telephoto and ultrawide cameras are worse. Interestingly, it’s powered by the 8 Elite Gen 5 V Series, a binned version of the chip with very slightly reduced performance.
The F9 Ultra starts from a flagship-level €1,099.90 (about $1,275), though is launching at a much lower early bird price of €829.90 ($960). As for the Pro, it’s €899.90 ($1,040), with a €739.90 ($860) initial offer. Both phones will get four years of OS updates and six years of security support.
Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge
Read the full article here
