Poco F9 Ultra

The idea behind the Poco F9 Ultra is to take flagship silicon, wrap it in a huge battery, and undercut the competition on price. This phone in particular not only succeeds at doing this, but it combines performance, battery, camera, and display quality into an absolutely killer device. It sits well below four-figure flagships while carrying the same Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and it's aimed squarely at people who care more about speed, endurance, and screen than about camera pedigree or premium materials.

In practice that formula mostly holds. Battery life is exceptional, the display gets extraordinarily bright with HDR content, performance is flagship-grade, and the speakers are loud and clean. The compromises show up at the edges. The rear cameras are sharp but struggle with high-contrast scenes, the front camera is soft, the back panel is plastic, and the microphone is pretty weak. But, even with all of that, it has a lot going for it. Here’s how the Poco F9 Ultra performed in our tests.

Design

The F9 Ultra measures 163.5 x 77.9 x 8.7 mm and weighs 235 g, with an aluminum frame, Gorilla Glass 7i on the front, and a plastic back. It carries an IP68 rating, meaning it's sealed against dust and survives submersion at the rated depth, and charges over USB-C. The 6.9-inch display fills 91.5% of the front in a 19.5:9 aspect ratio.

Most phones at this price use glass for the back. Plastic is lighter and doesn't shatter, but it scratches more easily and is part of how Poco hits this price point with this hardware inside. At 235 g this is a heavy phone, a consequence of the 8050mAh battery.

Display

The 6.9-inch AMOLED runs at 1,200 x 2,608 for 416 pixels per inch and refreshes at up to 185Hz. 416 PPI is adequate rather than sharp at this size, but most won’t notice.

Brightness is the headline. Manual brightness tops out at 863 nits, which is ordinary, but with HDR content in auto mode the panel peaks at 11,983 nits. That peak applies only to small bright regions. When bright content fills the whole screen, output falls substantially, so a sunlit sky in a movie will blaze while a full-screen white scene won't. The panel holds consistency over time. After 30 minutes of sustained HDR playback, brightness remains stable, so long viewing sessions don't dim out. At the other end, the screen dims to 0.75 nits for dark-room use.

Color accuracy is the panel's weak point. It covers 97% of the standard sRGB range but only 72% of the wider P3 gamut, so vivid HDR content looks less saturated than intended. Tone mapping pushes highlights brighter than the content was mastered for and clips detail in the top portion of the signal range. The result is punchy HDR that sacrifices some extreme highlight detail. Touch latency averages 13.7ms, and combined with the 185Hz refresh the screen feels immediate under the finger.

Performance

The F9 Ultra runs the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with 12GB or 16GB of RAM. CPU results are what you'd expect from the chip: 3,546 single-core and 10,605 multi-core in GeekBench 6. In daily use nothing on the phone feels slow, and it will stay that way for years.

The GPU posts a very high peak but holds 70.9% of that across twenty loops. You'll feel this in long gaming sessions. The first ten minutes run at full tilt, then frame rates settle noticeably lower as the phone heats up. Ray-tracing performance shows the same pattern: strong peak, similar throttling. Browser performance is middling at 16.9 in Speedometer, which doesn't match the CPU results but won't bother anyone outside a benchmark.

Camera

The camera system is a 200-megapixel main sensor at 1/1.4 inches, a 50-megapixel ultrawide, a 50-megapixel 5x telephoto, and a 32-megapixel front camera. For $799 it's a capable setup, and sharpness on the rear lenses is strong. The gaps are dynamic range, which is limited across all three rear cameras, and the front camera, which is soft.

The zoom range extends digitally to 100x, but don't take that seriously. Detail past roughly 10x degrades quickly, and output at the long end is smeared enough to be useful only for identifying what something is. Camera-focused flagships handle deep zoom considerably better. Within each lens's native range the story is good, and the ultrawide is sharper than most.

Main

The main camera pairs the 200-megapixel 1/1.4-inch sensor with a 24mm f/1.68 lens. Sharpness is high in bright light and holds up well as light falls, losing less detail in dim conditions than most main cameras. Cropping from 1x, the high-resolution sensor keeps crops usable through the 2-3x range before detail softens approaching the 5x handoff to the telephoto.

Color tuning leans slightly vivid, with saturation pushed past neutral across lighting. Hue accuracy is good in daylight and drifts as light gets warmer, with a rising yellow cast that points to white balance correction not fully neutralizing warm light sources. Skin tones in bright light land noticeably off reference despite accurate rendering elsewhere in the frame, and they improve in dimmer conditions.

Dynamic range is the main camera's real limitation. High-contrast scenes clip highlights, and tonal gradation isn't smooth through the shadows, so backlit shots lose detail that better-tuned flagships retain.

Ultrawide

The ultrawide is a 50-megapixel 1/2.88-inch sensor behind an 18mm f/2.4 lens at 0.7x. In good and moderate light it's the sharpest lens on the phone, resolving more fine detail than the main camera. Sharpness drops substantially in the dark.

Color is near-neutral in daylight but develops a pronounced warm yellow cast under dim lighting, the strongest white balance drift of any lens here. Saturation thins out in the dark. Dynamic range is weaker than the main camera's, with clipped highlights in contrasty scenes.

Telephoto

The telephoto is a 50-megapixel 1/2.75-inch sensor at 120mm f/3.0, a 5x optical zoom. At its native length it's sharp in good light and respectable in dim conditions, and it has the most accurate color of any lens in bright light. Stabilization is solid, which matters at this focal length.

Pushed beyond 5x, detail holds for the first stretch of digital zoom and remains usable into the low teens, then falls apart. Shots at the extreme end are more suggestion than photograph. Dynamic range is the weakest on the phone. High-contrast telephoto scenes come out flat, with blown highlights.

Front

The front camera is 32 megapixels at 21mm f/2.2, and it's the soft spot in the system. Sharpness is low across all lighting conditions, so selfies lack the fine detail the megapixel count implies. Color tuning leans cool and slightly muted, staying consistent across lighting. Skin tones are reasonable in moderate light and less accurate in bright or dark conditions.

Dynamic range is the front camera's genuine strength, the best of any lens on the phone. Backlit selfies retain both face and sky with smooth tonal gradation. Video stabilization is weak, with visible wobble in handheld selfie footage.

Battery

The 8,050mAh battery is the F9 Ultra's defining spec, and the results match it. Video playback ran 42.9 hours before the phone died, which translates to two to three days of typical mixed use. Even at maximum brightness it managed 36 hours, longer than most phones last at default settings.

Five hours of continuous web browsing drained 15%, so a full day of heavy browsing barely dents it. Our hour-long gaming stress test drained 22%, meaning serious gaming sessions won't send you to a charger. Overnight standby cost 3%.

Charging

Wired charging runs at 100W, reaching 24% in 10 minutes and 61% in 30 minutes. Those percentages matter because 61% of 8,050mAh is more energy than a full charge delivers on many phones, so a half-hour top-up buys well over a full day of use. A complete charge takes longer than smaller-battery rivals simply because there's more to fill.

Wireless charging at 50W hits 17% in 10 minutes and 42% in 30 minutes, fast by wireless standards and faster than some phones manage over a cable.

Speaker

The speakers reach 75dBA at maximum volume, enough to fill a room, and they stay clean doing it. Distortion at full volume is low, so music doesn't buzz or crackle when pushed. Bass is fuller than typical for a phone, with meaningful output down to around 180 Hz before rolling off, and the midrange is even. Overall this is one of the stronger speaker systems we've tested, particularly for cleanliness at volume.

Microphone

The microphone is well below average. Frequency response is uneven enough that recorded voices sound colored and unnatural, showing in both voice memos and video audio. If you record interviews, content, or music on your phone, this is a real limitation.

Other

The ultrasonic fingerprint reader unlocks in 128ms on average, fast enough that the phone is open before you've consciously registered touching it. There's no hardware-based face unlock; camera-based face unlock exists but lacks the dedicated depth hardware that makes it secure enough for payments.

The USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port sustains around 420 MB/s in both read and write, so moving a large video library to a computer takes minutes rather than hours. Storage comes in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB configurations.

Conclusion

The F9 Ultra delivers on the flagship-killer premise more completely than most phones that attempt it. The battery is in a class of its own, the display pairs huge HDR brightness with a fast, responsive panel, and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 means performance isn't a compromise, GPU throttling under sustained load aside. The speakers are a bonus you don't usually get at this price.

What you give up is refinement at the margins. The cameras resolve plenty of detail but can't handle high-contrast scenes the way camera-first flagships do, selfies are soft, the back is plastic, and the microphone is poor enough to matter if you record audio. For a buyer who wants endurance, speed, and screen above all else, those are easy trades at $799. For anyone whose phone is primarily a camera, the money is better spent elsewhere.