Six months after the launch of the Poco M3 Pro 5G, Xiaomi’s sub-brand Poco Global has announced the launch of its successor, the Poco M4 Pro, in select markets. The new phone improves upon the existing M3 Pro with incremental upgrades to the design, camera, and the rest of the hardware. Xiaomi has done a great job at masking the fact that the M4 Pro is just a rebranded Redmi Note 11 — a phone that is only on sale in China as of this writing.
Like other Poco handsets, the Poco M4 Pro has an in-your face design that’s largely accentuated by the bright color options: Poco Yellow and Cool Blue. Only the Power Black variant offers some degree of subtlety. The rear panel of the phone draws heavily from another low-cost Poco offering from 2021 — the Poco M3 — and is designed to make the camera module look much larger than it actually is.
As for the camera hardware, there are tangible improvements here. The ones that are the most noticeable include the higher-resolution (16MP) selfie camera and the addition of an ultrawide-angle lens (119-degree field of view) at the rear, which is a feature that was sorely missed on the Poco M3 Pro. The primary camera sensor also gets a resolution bump from 48MP to 50MP.
The Poco M4 Pro sports a 6.6-inch IPS LCD screen — slightly larger than the 6.5-inch panel on the M3 Pro. The display retains the 90Hz refresh rate capability but now supports 240Hz touch sampling rate (the M3 Pro only supports 180Hz). At 450 nits, it is also brighter than its predecessor by a slim margin of 50 nits.
When the Poco M3 Pro was announced earlier this year, it became the first Poco phone to sport a MediaTek chipset. Six months on, Poco seems to have reaffirmed its faith in MediaTek and has decided to use the MediaTek Dimensity 810 chipset on the Poco M4 Pro. Based on a 6nm manufacturing process, this new system on a chip is a slight upgrade over the Dimensity 700 that the M3 Pro features. While we do not expect this chip to offer blazing performance, it should be more than capable of handling daily tasks with ease. At launch, the Poco M4 Pro will run Poco Launcher atop Android 11-based MIUI 12.5.
The Poco M4 Pro retains the 5,000mAh battery from the M3 Pro. Only this time around, you will be able to charge it faster using the supplied 33-watt charger. Using this adapter, Poco claims a 0 to 100% charging time of 59 minutes. Like most other devices in this price range, the Poco M4 Pro accepts dual SIM cards and also integrates a microSD card slot within the SIM tray for memory expansion.
In Europe, the Poco M4 Pro will be sold in two RAM/storage options — 4GB/64GB and 6GB/128GB. Prices for the base version start at 230 euros ($270) and go up to 250 euros ($290) for the 128GB option. Both the variants will go on sale beginning November 11, 2021.
