January is turning out to be a head-turner of a month for smartphones and we haven’t even reached Samsung’s big launch next week. In the house for review is Poco X6 Pro 5G. The biggest feature of the phone is perhaps the HyperOS experience (based on Android 14), right out of the box. Needless to say, the phone is super-smooth and it offers a premium experience. We started using the phone only a few days ago, so here are our first impressions.

Weighing less than 200g, what you get in the box is a biggish phone with all the thrills and frills on the 1.5K AMOLED display, complete with 120Hz refresh rate, 1,800 nits peak brightness, adaptive HDR and Wet Touch tech. And you get dual speakers, plus support for Dolby Vision Atmos.

But what I want to touch upon is performance. The phone has the flagship MediaTek Dimensity 8300 Ultra processor. On paper, the specs are higher than on OnePlus Nord 3 5G, which boasts 1,450 nits of brightness, UFS 3.1 and MediaTek Dimensity 9000 processor. On the new Poco phone everything gets dialled up and you get UFS 4.0, a bigger vapour cooling chamber and slightly better cameras.

Having UFS 4.0 memory ensures a far better experience, especially when paired with 12GB RAM and 512GB storage. Slowly the storage space on phones is increasing, which is a good sign. The Antutu benchmark scores is above 1.4m, which is excellent, and thermals are pretty good for the price point. It’s a capable processor and graphic performance is quite good when playing most Android games.

The phone has the new HyperOS out of the box, based on Android 14, but there is a good deal of bloatware

Having HyperOS has reduced the overall size of the OS, making it more nimble. The biggest visual change can be seen in the lock screen, which is highly customisable because it takes a leaf out of iOS 17. The control centre is far more organised but, once again, has the look of iOS 17. OS is more optimised and every swipe brings in better animation.

In the box is a 67W power brick, which juices up the battery pretty quickly but what’s disappointing is that the cable is USB-C to USB-A, which should be USB-C on both ends. Another quibble is the amount of unnecessary apps that come with the phone but these can be deleted.

The triple camera setup has a mix of OIS and EIS. The main 64MP camera takes good pictures and the 8MP ultra-wide too does a decent job. You can capture 4K videos using the rear camera but it’s restricted to 1080p on the front. Should you get this phone? We are working on an in-depth review but from the few days of experience, Poco X6 Pro 5G (at the time of going to press, the pricing was unavailable) offers a ‘hyper-smooth’ experience.