POCO M8x Review: A Sign of Changing Times

Remember when ₹20,000 used to buy you a “flagship killer”? Times have changed. The smartphone market is in a weird place right now due to the memory crisis. Components are getting pricier, inflation is hitting hard, and brands are backed into a corner. To keep phones under that crucial 20k sweet spot, manufacturers are forced to make a choice: either hike the price tag into the next tier or aggressively spec-down parts of the phone to protect your wallet. The POCO M8x is a poster child for the latter approach. It is a fascinating, deeply compromised experiment that sacrifices core essentials to give you two very specific, massive features. But did POCO cut too close to the bone this time? Let’s dive in. 

Design

On the back of this phone, you are greeted by a faux-leather finish. Look, let’s be entirely real here; the leather-inspired back is nothing new anymore. Every second budget phone has used this exact trick over the last couple of years to masquerade as a premium device. The illusion fades the moment you actually handle it. It’s slightly soft, with a decent grip that does a wonderful job of hiding greasy fingerprint smudges, but it isn’t going to turn any heads at a tech meet. The overall aesthetic is just… safe. It looks like a phone designed by a committee trying not to offend anyone.

What is genuinely impressive for a phone in this price band is the IP64 rating. Using it at a time when sudden, unannounced downpours were a regular occurrence was a lifesaver. I got caught in a nasty drizzle while trying to navigate my way back from a meeting, and while I was getting soaked, the phone handled the water splashes without skipping a beat.

However, you absolutely cannot talk about the design without talking about the sheer, undeniable heft. Because of the monster power cell trapped inside, this thing feels like a literal building brick. It is incredibly thick, and at around 232 grams, it is a heavy lifter. My wrists were genuinely aching after a 20-minute doom-scrolling session in bed, and let me tell you, dropping this phone on your face while reading at night is an experience you only want to suffer once. It’s a utilitarian, industrial build disguised in casual, faux-premium clothes.

Display & Sound

On paper, a massive 6.9-inch display running at a buttery-smooth 120Hz refresh rate sounds like a media consumer’s absolute dream. I was actually excited to load up some videos and use it as a mini-tablet on my daily commute. In reality? It’s where the financial cost-cutting hurts the most, and it serves as the most painful compromise on this device.

I cannot sugarcoat this: launching a smartphone costing upwards of ₹20,000 with a 720p (HD+) display is a massive, jagged pill to swallow. Spreading a measly 720 x 1600 pixels across a massive 6.9-inch canvas completely ruins the visual experience. The first time I opened my banking app, I noticed the text looked fuzzy and soft around the edges. App icons lack sharpness, and if you hold the phone at a normal, comfortable viewing distance, you don’t even need a magnifying glass. You can literally spot individual pixels.

Without HDR support, watching movies or streaming TV shows on YouTube and Netflix is a genuinely dull, washed-out experience. I tried watching a dark, moody episode of a sci-fi series on my train ride home, and it was a disaster. The contrast simply isn’t there; blacks look like a muddy grey, and the colours lack any sort of punch. On the bright side, POCO slapped Corning Gorilla Glass 7i on the front, which handles keys and loose coins in your pocket beautifully without scratching. But that’s a very small consolation prize for a display panel that feels like a technical throwback to 2018.

As for the audio, the stereo speakers are painfully mediocre. POCO hypes up a “300% Ultra Volume” mode, which sounds great in marketing materials. In practice, turning it past 100% just introduces a mountain of distortion. I tried listening to a podcast while making breakfast, and at high volumes, the audio sounded incredibly harsh, shrill, and tinny rather than actually loud or rich. Thankfully, they kept the 3.5mm headphone jack. The moment I plugged in my trusty old pair of wired IEMs, the audio experience was instantly saved, allowing me to bypass the built-in speakers entirely.

Performance

The POCO M8x 5G gets plenty of bragging rights for being India’s very first phone to feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon 4 Gen 5 CPU. It is a modern, highly efficient chipset built on a cutting-edge 4nm process. When I ran my initial app setups, the chip itself seemed eager to perform. But POCO paired this brand-new, capable brain with something I frankly wouldn’t imagine seeing at this price point: a measly 4GB of RAM in the base variant, maxing out at just 6GB on the top tier.

In everyday use, that 4GB cap acts like a chokehold, completely suffocating the processor. While the 120Hz refresh rate tries its absolute best to keep UI animations looking fluid, the moment you try to do two things at once, reality hits you like a wall. Apps redraw constantly. I would be copying a text snippet from Google Chrome, switch over to WhatsApp to paste it, and by the time I switched back, Chrome had already been aggressively killed in the background and had to reload the entire webpage.

Trying to keep more than three moderately heavy apps open at once triggers noticeable stuttering and micro-lags. It feels exactly like buying a capable sports car but being forced to drive it with a permanent valet speed limiter turned on. If you plan to play heavy games like BGMI, Call of Duty, or Genshin Impact, the base variant is going to test your patience to its absolute limits. Casual puzzle games run fine, but anything demanding will cause the phone to drop frames as it desperately hunts for free memory.

Camera

The camera department makes it clear that photography was very low on POCO’s priority list for this device. The setup is as basic as it gets for a modern phone. You get a 50MP main shooter on the back, flanked by a largely useless auxiliary depth sensor, and an 8MP selfie camera up front. There’s no ultra-wide lens here, which I sorely missed when trying to capture a wide architectural shot during a weekend walk.

In bright, vibrant daylight, the main camera is perfectly passable. It captures decent images with acceptable colour reproduction and okay sharpness. It’s totally fine for snapping a quick photo of your lunch or a bright outdoor landscape to throw onto your Instagram story.

However, the moment the sun goes down, or you step into a dimly lit restaurant, the camera struggles significantly. My low-light test photos came out grainy, full of digital noise, and the shadow details were completely lost to darkness. Furthermore, the shutter lag becomes quite severe in low light. I tried taking a photo of my pet cat moving across the living room at night, and every single shot came out as a blurry, unusable smudge because the camera couldn’t capture the movement fast enough. The 8MP selfie camera is equally average—serviceable for quick office video calls, but it struggles mightily with backlighting and tends to aggressively soften skin details to hide its lack of resolving power.

Battery Life

This is the entire reason this phone exists. This is why the screen is low-res, why the RAM is low, and why the phone weighs as much as a brick. If POCO starved the display and multitasking capabilities, they poured every single remaining resource into the battery bank. Packing a colossal 7,900mAh battery, the endurance on this device is absolutely ridiculous. It is an unstoppable tank.

To put it into perspective, I took the phone off the charger on a Tuesday morning at 100%. I used it for GPS navigation for an hour, streamed music over 5G and 4G, took several calls, checked emails constantly, and watched a couple of hours of video, all while capturing videos and photos, as well as sending WhatsApps. By Wednesday night, the phone was still sitting at a comfortable 32%. I managed to get a full two and a half days of heavy use out of a single charge. If you are a casual user who only checks your phone occasionally, you could easily stretch this to four days without looking for a wall socket. It simply refuses to die.

When you finally do manage to run out of juice, the 45W fast charging gets this massive cell back up to speed in a very reasonable timeframe, taking a bit over an hour and a half to fully top up from empty. Plus, the 22.5W reverse wired charging is an absolute lifesaver.