Poco F9 Pro review

HyperOS 3 and Android 16

The Poco F9 Pro boots Xiaomi's latest HyperOS 3, which is based on Android 16. And just like the Poco X8 series that came out earlier this year, the F9 series is promised to receive 4 major OS updates and 6 years of security patches.

When it comes tо HyperOS 3 itself, it's basically the same as HyperOS 2 plus a few new features. So if you are used to HyperOS in general, you will feel right at home. Xiaomi does claim to have refined the system animations further, aiming for an even snappier and smoother overall experience, though we can't say responsiveness or fluidity have been an issue on recent versions to begin with.

Home screen • Quick settings • Notification shade

The most prominent new addition to the interface is Hyper Island - Xiaomi's take on Apple's Dynamic Island concept in iOS. It serves up contextual information and quick shortcuts for supported background activities, showing things like ongoing timers, incoming calls, current calendar events or media playback controls for apps such as Spotify.

Hyper Island

System icons are also slightly redesigned - they appear flatter and simpler by default.

Settings menu

The main focus of HyperOS 3.0 seems to be connectivity and AI. In China, Xiaomi has its homegrown XiaoAI assistant, but in international units like ours, Google Gemini is at the helm. The rest of the AI features are the same as before - wallpaper generation, live subtitles, transcription, translator, writing, AI search.

Xiaomi AI and Gemini

Most of the AI-powered features are grouped under the dedicated Xiaomi HyperAI menu. This is also where you'll find the options for configuring Gemini - Google's AI assistant - including how it can be invoked throughout the system.

On the connectivity front, Xiaomi is continuing to expand its Interconnectivity ecosystem. Previously limited mostly to Xiaomi devices signed into the same Xiaomi Account, the feature allowed sharing of things like Wi-Fi passwords, files, notifications, calls and screen mirroring. With HyperOS 3.0, Xiaomi is opening things up further, adding support for select cross-device features with non-Xiaomi Android devices, as well as Apple hardware like iPhones and iPads. Pairing and integration with both Windows PCs and Mac computers is supported, too.

Interconnectivity

Interestingly, Xiaomi says it's possible to read notifications and answer calls directly from your iPad, Mac or iPhone, but we have not tried that.

Benchmark performance

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the Poco F9 Pro is the chipset. It employs the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 V chipset, which is a toned-down version of the flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC.

The V Series chip offers the same set of features, modem, connectivity options and even the same ISP. However, the two prime Oryon V3 Phoenix L cores are clocked at 4.6 GHz, down from 4.74 GHz on the standard version. The other six high-performance Oryon V3 Phoenix M cores are clocked the same - 3.62 GHz.

The biggest change is the GPU, as the Adreno 840 is split into two slices, which is something we haven't seen before from Qualcomm, or at least the company hasn't disclosed this in its past chipsets. It's still clocked at 1.2 GHz, but operates with 33% less dedicated memory. While the regular SD8 Elite Gen 5 features 18MB of dedicated memory, the V Series settles for 12MB.

All in all, we expect minor drop in mainly single-core CPU performance and more notable decrease in graphics. Let's check it out.

Despite the limited benchmark tests we were able to run, the device put up a great performance. The more budget, toned-down Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 V Series chipset offers only minimal performance loss compared to its high-flying counterpart and mostly in the single-core tests. The GPU is the chipset's achilles' heel, although it should be more than enough to run the latest games on Google Play anyway.

More importantly, though, the Poco F9 Pro is one of the best performers in its class, offering nearly unmatched price/performance ratio.

Sustained performance

We put the Poco F9 Pro's cooling capabilities to the test, and observed heavy throttling during the CPU stress test. After all, despite the lower CPU clocks, the SD8 Elite Gen 5 V Series is still a very powerful chipset, so it's hard to keep it cool.

CPU stress test

There are two takeaways from the chart above. The throttling begins relatively later compared to most phones running this SoC, but the throttling is inconsistent. Clock speeds dip for a short while before going back up, which is usually the less liked scenario. Lower, but consistent clock speeds ensure more predictable and smoother performance.