A great phone for your binge-watching sessions

Besides the great design, this is also an amazing phone for content consumption. POCO has upgraded to
an AMOLED display this time, which is a major improvement over the IPS LCD panel on the M4 Pro 5G.

POCO M4 Pro 4G - Display 2

Protected by Gorilla Glass 3, this 6.43” Full HD screen delivers great colors thanks to the wide DCI-P3
gamut and pitch-black contrast with inky blacks and bright whites. Its viewing angle is equally great with
no noticeable off-axis color shift. The phone is also Widevine L1 certified for HD playback on OTT
platforms like Netflix, but do note that this budget phone lacks any form of HDR playback.

Moving on, I have no issue with the brightness on this thing though. POCO says the M4 Pro 4G achieves
700 nits under the High Brightness Mode (HBM)—whereas it can hit a peak brightness of 1000 nits.

This AMOLED upgrade doesn’t come at a sacrifice of a higher refresh rate or Always on Display support
either. Because I’ve used a loooooot of phones with a 120Hz refresh rate, this 90Hz screen doesn’t feel
all that special to me but if you’re coming from a regular 60Hz display, the M4 Pro’s smoothness is
bound to be a visual treat.

And it’s adaptive as well, meaning the screen intelligently switches between 60 and 90Hz to save
battery. Unfortunately, this display is subject to micro-stutters and jitters—which is something we’re
well familiar with budget and mid-range phones from Xiaomi and POCO with a high refresh rate. This is
most vividly noticeable once you’re scrolling through your Google Feed.

Is the chipset to blame for the micro stutters?

Other than this, I also noticed micro stutters when going over my apps on the POCO launcher and
occasionally even when scrolling through a website on Chrome or opening the recent apps screen. It’s
not that the POCO M4 Pro 4G has an incompetent chipset or anything since the Helio G96 powering the
phone is equipped to handle up to 120Hz FHD displays. Hopefully, a fix is on the way!

MediaTek Helio G96 - 120Hz Support

Complementing this display is a set of stereo speakers, where the earpiece doubles as the secondary
speaker unit. The M4 Pro gets fairly loud enough and is fine for listening to podcasts or binging your
favorite shows. And there’s not much distortion at the max volume either. But the audio sounds almost
flat when playing something with a high dynamic range as it boosts the mids and high frequencies over
everything else.

How’s the performance then?

On to the performance of things, the POCO M4 Pro 4G is powered by MediaTek’s Helio G96. Apart from
the aforementioned issue of micro-stutters, this 12nm chip handles usual everyday tasks pretty well.
With 6GB RAM even in the base variant, you can expect a decent multitasking experience too. I usually
juggle between 5-6 apps at a time and the M4 Pro managed to keep them in memory just fine.

Seems like Xiaomi has really improved RAM management with MIUI 13. It does come with a bunch of
bloatware apps and games but you can uninstall most of them. However, the M4 Pro is still on Android
11 and not the latest Android 12-based MIUI 13. Although it’s more than likely that this phone will get
the Android 12 update, that’s about it.

I DON’T THINK ANDROID 13 IS ON THE CARDS FOR THIS BUDGET PHONE.

And whatever happened to POCO UI, right? POCO had confirmed its custom UI to arrive by the end of
2021 but we’re well into 2022 and it’s still a no show.

Xiaomi MIUI 13 - Global

Regardless, you can enjoy some casual gaming on the POCO M4 Pro 4G. PUBG Mobile maxes out at HD
graphics and High frame rates but I prefer the stable 40 fps gameplay under Smooth graphics and Ultra
frame rates instead. Yet, this 12nm chip does show its thermal inefficiency as the phone gets warm quite
quickly.

After just 8 minutes into the game, I clocked the CPU and battery temperature at 42 and 38°C
respectively. Relatively less taxing games like Asphalt 9 and Mobile Legends play without any frame
drops either.