[First Cut] Poco M3: This Yellow Fellow Could Give its Competition the Blues

It might have started out as a potential OnePlus killer, but in its second coming, Xiaomi’s brand Poco has been more in the Redmi zone, delivering well-specced phones at surprisingly affordable prices. And the Poco M3 follows this newer template. The phone brings a very good spec sheet to the table at a starting price tag of Rs 10,999.

Mind you, if you get your hands on the yellow variant (called Poco Yellow, and you also get Cool Blue and Power Black) of the device, you will be too busy staring at the device initially. Yellow is not exactly a popular color in smartphones, and we have not seen anyone handle it so well since Nokia with its Lumia series and of course, the “banana” feature phone. The jet black almost rectangular camera unit on the top with Poco written vertically opposite the cameras themselves makes a striking contrast, and also makes this phone the most gaze-worthy device in its segment by some distance, especially from the back. The back incidentally is slightly textured plastic and will keep scratches away, but we would advise handling it with clean hands as we suspect dirt will show up very prominently on it.

The view from the front is more routine with a 6.53-inch display (Corning Gorilla Glass 3) and a drop notch. The right side has a power and display button which is also a fingerprint scanner – we have said it before, but this is our favorite location for a fingerprint scanner as it does not add an additional button to the device and also clutters neither the front nor the back. The right side also has the volume buttons, while the left has the dual SIM card tray, with a dedicated microSD card slot in it. There is a USB Type C port on the base of the phone while the top has a 3.5 mm audio jack and an infrared sensor. The sides do not exactly blend into the display, which seems a little “raised” from them, but all in all, this is a very good looking phone. It is not the smallest, but it is very well designed and feels lighter than its 197-gram weight – this is a very clever design.

Its spec sheet on the other hand definitely feels heavier than its relatively lightweight price. The phone features a Full HD+ display, stereo speakers (yes!) as well as a 48-megapixel main camera, all of which are not common at this price point. There is also a hefty 6000 mAh battery with an 18W fast charger in the box. Running the device is the task of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 chip aided by 6 GB of RAM and 64 GB UFS 2.1 storage or 128 GB of UFS 2.2 storage, depending on the variants you choose. This is not a benchmark killer processor but nevertheless a very capable one, especially at this price point. Yes, the two additional 2-megapixel cameras for macros and depth on the back seem more for form than function, and the 8-megapixel front-facing camera is also not exactly in the rave range specs-wise, but all said and done, the Poco M3 delivers a fair lot for its price – Rs 10,999 for 6 GB/ 64 GB, and Rs 11,999 for 6 GB/ 128 GB.

That is a very good price indeed and places it right in line with another formidable phone, its brother from the same mother, the Redmi 9 Power, which comes with broadly similar specs at around the same price, although it has publicly trained its guns at the Realme 7i (cue the “Real Killer” line). Of course, how all this actually translates into performance, will be revealed in our review. Stay tuned. As of now, all we can say that is this yellow fellow has the potential to make the competition get the blues…or turn green…