It seems like just yesterday that we reviewed Xiaomi’s Poco M Four, and what do you know? We have a new generation on our hands. With the new poco? Poco M5s. The pocos just keep coming. So what’s the deal with this one? And could it be the budget Mid Ranger to suit your needs? I’m Wilford PingArena. And let’s find out out in our Poco M5s review.
Poco M5s Overall
The Poco M5s is a new phone, but we’ve actually seen something just like it a couple of times before. It’s a rebrand of the Xiaomi Redmi Note Ten S, which is also the same as the Redmi Note eleven se in India. The features that may set it apart from other Budget Mid Rangers are its bright
OLED display, relatively decent chipset and good battery life. Let’s start off with the Poco M five S’s design. The camera bump has the same design as the Redmi Note Ten series, except for the Poco logo next to it. The back is matte and made of plastic, and it curves into the glossy plastic frame. It’s nice to have ingress protection at this price, even though it is just IP 53 against dust and light splashes of water. The display of the Poco M5s is a 643 inch OLED with Gorilla glass, three protection, a 1080p resolution, and a standard 60 Hz refresh rate.
At this price point, there are always some tradeoffs. The Poco M5s brings OLED tech, but you don’t get the high refresh rate you see on some competitors LCDs. This means that when you’re swiping and scrolling on the interface, it might not feel quite as smooth here. But on the other hand, since this is an OLED, you get excellent contrast and deeper blacks in an LCD. Content is sharp here, and you get fairly accurate colors and a wide vinyl one DRM for 1050 p. Streaming brightness here is pretty good as well. We measured a maximum of 470 nits with a manual brightness slider, and this can boost to nearly 760 nits in auto mode when out in the sun. For audio, the Poco M5s has a headphone jack and a pair of stereo speakers. This speaker has earned a very good mark in our loudness test, but the sound quality is just okay with hardly any bass.
You can wake up and unlock the Poco M5s using the side mounted fingerprint reader that’s built into the power button. It’s fast and reliable. The M Five S comes with 64 or 128 gigs of storage on board, and you can expand that further through microSD card.
The interface of the Poco M5s is a familiar one. It’s. Xiaomi’s Miu Y 13 based on Android twelve It’s a highly customized yet smooth UI that’s pretty much the same that you’ll get on all recent Xiaomi devices. If you’d like to learn more about Miyoi 13 specific features, you can check out our dedicated video. Under the hood of the Poco M5s is a media tech Helio G 95 chipset built on a twelve nm process.
It doesn’t support 5G connectivity, but it provides some pretty solid performance for the prize in benchmarks. Both the CPU and GPU scores are some of the best amongst the competition.
They still aren’t great, but there’s enough power here to run plenty of popular games. The Poco M5s is powered by a large 5000 mah battery, just like many other Redmi and Poco phones. It Acstar battery tests scoring an endurance rating of 132 hours, and with the bundled 33 watt adapter, charging speed is pretty decent. We were able to charge the phone from zero to 53% in half an hour. The Poco M5s has a quad camera setup. On the back one is just a depth sensor, but besides that there’s a 64 megapixel main cam, an eight megapixel ultrawide, and a two megapixel macro cam. The main cameras photos come out in 16 megapixels by default, and they have good colors and contrast, low noise and wide dynamic range. But the detail level is mediocre, and up close it looks heavily processed and over sharpened. Portrait photos are pretty solid for the class. The subjects are well exposed with lively colors, and the subject’s separation is decent. The eight megapixel photos from the ultrawide camera have good detail for this sort of cam, and there are punchy colors, good contrast and low noise. You again get that over processed look here, and the dynamic range is rather average. Two megapixel macro shots are rather poor. They’re soft and over processed looking with narrow dynamic range. These shots aren’t the easiest to take either, since this camera doesn’t have autofocus. Low light photos from the main camera are just okay. The detail level is poor and the heavy processing is noticeable, but the exposure is alright and colors have enough saturation. There is a night mode you can toggle, but for some reason it’s not very effective. These shots take longer to process, and while you do get some restored highlights from time to time, shadows are still dark and these photos are noisy. The lowlight photos from the ultra wide are dark, soft and noisy. There’s no night mode. Support for this camera selfies from the 13 megapixel front facing camera are quite nice. They’re detailed and colorful, with low noise and good exposure and contrast. The dynamic range could be wider, but we still like these selfies. The Poco M5s can record video with its main cam and up to FPS, and electronic stabilization is always on. For the 30 FPS modes, the quality is good. There’s plenty of detail, low noise, good looking colors and wide dynamic range. The ultrawide cam takes 1080p videos, and these are low in detail. And it’s over processed like in the still photos. The dynamic range is all right though, and the colors are accurate. So that’s the Poco M5s. It’s quite a feature packed phone for the budget. You get a splash resistant design, a bright OLED screen, a decent chipset, stereo speakers and great battery life. There are competitors that offer a high refresh rate on the screen, but if 60 Hz doesn’t bother you, then the Poco M5s has a lot to offer.
