Poco F9 Pro review

A familiar 6.59-inch OLED display

Although the Poco F9 Pro looks ilke it has the same display as its predecessor, this one is actually a better performer in key areas - brightness and refresh rate. The F9 Pro has a 6.59-inch OLED display with 1,156 x 2,510px resolution and support for 12-bit color depth, 185Hz refresh rate and all the HDR standards you can ask for - HDR10+, Dolby Vision and HDR Vivid.

As we already mentioned, the display is advertised as brighter than before and our tests confirm that. According to our measurements, the maximum brightness on a 75% white patch is almost 1,300 nits, and that number jumps to around 4,100 nits on a 10% white patch.

Poco F9 Pro

These results suggest that you will have an excellent HDR experience and comfortable use outdoors even on a bright sunny day.

The minimum recorded brightness is 1 nit, which is sufficiently dim for pitch-black environments.

Refresh rate

As already mentioned, the display supports up to a 185 Hz refresh rate, but only in certain conditions. Games that have uncapped (or at least support HRR gaming) frame rate will be the only apps that will allow you to get the most out of the display.

Under the Default refresh rate setting, you are looking at a maximum of 120Hz. We found that to be true for pretty much all apps we tried, including Google's Chrome web browser, which is often capped at 90Hz on other phones for no apparent reason.

The system dials down to 60Hz when the screen is not in use or when watching videos on YouTube and Netflix.

Battery life

The Poco F9 Pro comes with a 6,330 mAh battery, which is a modest increase over last year's 6,210 mAh unit that powers the Poco F8 Pro. Despite the small bump in capacity, however, the F9 Pro posted significantly higher results from our battery tests.

The Active Use Score is 19:06, which is a sizeable increase over the previous generation and there's a notable jump in the web browsing and video streaming scenarios.

Even compared to most rivals, the Poco F9 Pro's battery endurance can be considered "excellent." The only handset on the list that has longer battery life is the Xiaomi 17T Pro, which carries even bigger 7,000 mAh battery.

All in all, the F9 Pro's battery endurance is quite impressive, considering the battery capacity.

Charging speed

The Poco F9 Pro supports the same 100W HyperCharge proprietary charging protocol as its predecessor, but also adds 50W wireless charging that can only be achieved with one of Xiaomi's proprietary charging stands. Reverse wired charging is also possible - the wired is capped at 27W while the wireless is 22.5W. Even though the fastest possible charging can be achieved via a compatible Xiaomi HyperCharge charger, the company also promises the phone can achieve the highest 100W rate over PD PPS.

The Poco F9 Pro is competitive enough, especially in the last lap (after 30 minutes), but it's notably slower than the previous generation. The Poco F8 Pro and the F9 Pro both feature roughly the same batteries and support the same 100W HyperCharge protocol, so we have no logical explanation for why this is.

In case you are not a fan of the speedy charging or you don't really need one, you can use the Standard charging mode, which limits the charging speed, or you can limit the battery's charging to 80%. This will also, in theory, extend your battery life cycle.

Speakers

The Poco F9 Pro comes with a hybrid stereo speaker setup with one full-fledged speaker at the bottom and one that acts as an earpiece at the top. Interestingly, the top speaker, which is usually notably quieter, isn't too far behind the main one in this regard.

Another notable thing about this set of speakers is that they are tuned by Bose, but unlike the Poco F9 Ultra, the Pro doesn't have a dedicated subwoofer.

Still, we are very happy with the loudness and the sound quality. The F9 Pro earned a "Very Good" -24.0 LUFS loudness score and delivered very clean, yet warm music tracks. It has relatively prominent bass compared to most rivals while keeping the highs and vocals clean.

We definitely like the F9 Pro's tuning more than the F8 Pro's. The only handset offering better sound tuning is the Samsung Galaxy S26.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.