Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Cheap Smartphone Battle! Poco M3 vs Poco X3 vs UMIDIGI A7 Pro”.
What’S up folks how’s, it going so watch hope you guys are all doing well and today we’re going to be talking about my favorite ultra low budget smartphones that are currently available in early 2021.. We’Re going to be taking a look at three different devices, ranging from my price point of under 250 dollars, all the way down to about a hundred and twenty dollars. Now those numbers are a small fraction of some of the premium and smartphones that you can get samsung galaxy s 21. Ultra iphone 12 pro max sometimes go well over two thousand dollars, given certain configuration. What we’re trying to understand is when you go bottom of the barrel, with these ultra cheap smartphones, are they really worth it from a reliability quality perspective, and can you use them on a day-to-day basis either for work or for general use? Now the specific devices that we’re going to be talking about in this article are the omni digi a7 pro and the xiaomi poco x3, as well as the new m3 that got released just a few weeks ago. Now i’ve been testing out the omni digi a7 pro for almost 11 months now, and you could typically find these for around 140 all the way down to 120 on amazon.com and ca. Now i’ve been using the poco x3 pretty much on a daily basis for over four months now, and i got it originally off of aliexpress for around 220 dollars, and these days it even goes on sale for around 208 dollars and uh.
The xiaomi m3 just recently came out a few weeks ago. I got it for around 130 dollars, which is pretty darn insane, considering its specifications and overall capabilities now. Firstly, let’s get into the overall physical form factor, build quality things like that in terms of materials. Basically, the a7 pro and xiaomi m3 are pretty much identical in terms of build quality, with the exception that you do have gorilla glass on the front of the xiaomi phone versus.
You don’t have that on the a7 pro it’s pretty much plastic front to back and kind of a generic glass finish on the display. Now the poco x3 is definitely the best in terms of overall build quality. We have grill glass 5 on the display, as well as an aluminum frame construction internally. So it’s definitely more rigid and solid in terms of its overall fit and finish. The plastic also feels a little bit more premium in the hand as well.
Now, unlike the more premium smartphones out there, which take away the headphone jack, we actually have a 3.5 millimeter connection, as well as a usb-c connection on all three devices which is nice to see, as well as a fingerprint scanner which is side mounted on the xiaomi Phones and rear mounted on the yumi digiphone. Furthermore, in terms of the overall footprint dimensional, differences will throw up the weight, as well as the overall footprint and thickness of all three devices. But all this is going to be really governed by the size of the display, which the x3 has the largest at 6.6 versus 6.5 on the m3 and the a7 pro is the smallest display at 6.3 inches funny enough. The m3 and the a7 pro have the exact same native resolution of a 2340 by 1080, but since we have the smaller display on the a7 pro, it has a higher ppi count about 409 versus 395 on the m3. The x3 does have a slightly higher resolution than the other two phones, but not by much 2400 by 1080p, with a ppi count about 395, the same as the m3.
Now the one absolute killer feature of the poco x3 is the 120 hertz hdr 10 certified display. That’S pretty much unheard of for a smartphone in this price range. You typically have to go to a super high premium, smartphone to get to anything above a 60 hertz in terms of the screen refresh rate and it’s a feature seriously lacking by most smartphones, including the new generation of iphones and in terms of the overall color rendition And everything like that, certainly the x3 is the best it’s ips again hdr10 certified. We also have an ips display on the xiaomi m3 and it’s fairly similar in terms of color rendition, although it’s not as bright we’re at 400 nits versus 450 nits on the poco x3.
And although, given the high resolution of the a7 pro, which renders out a very sharp overall details, it’s definitely a very usable display. Just the color rendition, brightness and overall accuracy of the display isn’t up to par compared to the xiaomi phones, but certainly a passable display. For day-to-day use, for most people out there now in terms of the internal specifications, what’s really cool about the xiaomi phones. Is that you’re pretty much getting the same internal hardware? That’S found in other popular android devices like on the google pixel, the huawei phones, as well as oneplus all use qualcomm socs to power their devices, specifically on the poco x3 we’re using the eight nanometer snapdragon.
732 g: it’s comprised of a two performance cores clocked around 2.3 gigahertz and six high efficiency cores clocked at around 1.8 gigahertz integrated adreno, 618 gpu, as well as six gigabytes of ram and either 64 or 128 gigabytes of long term storage. And luckily, with all three of these devices, you have the option to expand your memory via the micro sd card slot, which is nice now. The even cheaper poco m3 uses a qualcomm 662 8 core cpu with an adreno 610 gpu, four gigabytes of ram and similar storage configuration, and one of the big reasons why the a7 pro is at its price point of in the low 100 is the fact that It’S using a mediatek soc, specifically the 6763, which is literally like a four to five dollar part, and even though on paper it looks kind of similar to the qualcomm chips. It’S really not.
You still have eight cores, as well as an arm melee gpu clocked at 700 megahertz and four gigabytes of ram and 128 gigabyte storage, which is nice to see at this price point. But if you take a look at our geekbench 5 assaults, both on the multi-core and single core performance, the xiaomi m3, with the qualcomm 662, is almost getting double the performance rating compared to the a7 pro and the poco x3 is getting around 561 points on the Single core performance and over 1700 points on the multi-core performance, pretty much uh, putting it right in line with the performance that you’re going to get on the google pixel 5.. Furthermore, in terms of the antutu benchmark results which factors in uh the gpu performance we’re getting uh just about 111 000 points on the a7 pro about 176 000 points on the m3 and over 265 000 points on the poco x3. Now, in terms of actually using each smartphone, certainly the most fluid seamless experience is going to be on the poco x3.
It’S pretty much on par with again, most of the mid to premium and smartphones that you’re going to find out there and the big experience difference is going to be the 120 hertz. A refresh rate. Everything looks super smooth super fast in terms of response time. The camera loads up very, very fast, it’s very efficient in terms of downloading different applications and playing games.
It’S pretty much a no compromise phone from a performance perspective. The m3 is very similar. It can get a little bogged down at times, but i would say, 95 to 98 the same overall experience that you’re going to get with the x3 and from a pure utilitarian standpoint. The a7 pro is certainly a functional android device.
It’S compatible with all the modern day applications you’re going to use on a day-to-day basis. But as soon as you start, loading up any graphically intense applications or just doing a whole bunch of heavy-duty multitasking is going to ball, get down and you’re going to notice. Some dramatic performance loss certainly is not recommended for anybody. That really depends on their smartphone for a day-to-day use, and certainly, if you’re going to be working on your smartphone, it’s definitely going to be a challenge possible.
Nonetheless, but a challenge. It’S a great smartphone for small kids, teens, specifically on a budget, it’s very capable and certainly usable as well, but just not as fast as fluid and as seamless as the other smartphones or what you’re going to get from an iphone or other premium or mid-grade android Devices now on the big plus side is that the a7 pro does utilize a stock android ui. There is no overlays done by the manufacturer or any kind of skin that you’re gon na have to take off or deal with any bloatware, which is really cool. On the xiaomi phones, you are looking at the my ui interface, which, on the surface, looks very clean, similar to the stock android experience. I have no problem of the aesthetics and overall form function of the ui interface. Some people might have some concerns with xiaomi’s alliances with the chinese government, spying on north american or other users of their smartphones, and the privacy matter is definitely a big concern. That’S one of the main reasons why you can’t really buy these phones in north america and other parts of the world officially, and if you are concerned about that, you might want to stay away from xiaomi altogether. But there are some workarounds that you can do to make your data a little bit more safe and secure, whether that’s changing the ui bootloader things like that, although some people might argue no matter what you’re gon na do no matter what smartphone you’re using privacy on The internet may never really exist in this day and age now, moving right along. Let’S talk about the camera performance on all three of these devices, starting with the front facing side now. The poco x3 has a 20 megapixel steels capabilities, 8 megapixels on the m3 and 16 megapixels on the a7 pro.
Although the resolution and overall lens configuration is different from each camera, i think the front-facing quality of the stills are very similar, including at the video from each device, not a big difference based on my experience, but on the flip side of the facing camera. There is quite a big difference: you’re looking at 64 megapixel steels capability on the x3, with phase detection, auto focusing as well as a maximum aperture rating of f 1.9. It also has a 13 megapixel ultra wide, as well as a 2 megapixel depth and a 2 megapixel macro camera, and it’s the only smartphone in this lineup that can actually shoot 4k video at 30 frames per second, as well as 1080p, at 120 frames per second. So certainly the most capable from a stills and video perspective.
The m3 is uh, also not too far behind 48 megapixel standard, wide camera, f, 1.8 aperture and no ultra wide camera on this phone, but you do have a 2 megapixel depth and macro camera. And lastly, on the a7 pro we have a 16 megapixel primary wide camera f. 1.8. It also has a 16 megapixel ultrawide camera, as well as a 5 megapixel depth and macro camera in terms of the actual stills performance.
Again, i would put the x3 on the top definitely renders out the best overall detail. Both the xiaomi phones actually have phase detection, auto, focusing and one of the things you’re going to notice on the a7 pro is that the camera focusing system and the overall speed and responsiveness of the camera app is fairly laggy and slow and the photos, although very Passable at times, do tend to be a little bit overexposed and again, the uh details are not as sharp as what you were seeing, certainly on the x3 and even on the m3, which renders out better photos and videos. Based on my experience now last, let’s talk about the battery performance of all three of these devices and, interestingly enough, these cheapo smartphones actually have some of the biggest batteries found on a modern day, smartphones, starting with the m3, which has a whopping, 6 000 milliamp hour Battery next we have the x3 with 5160 milliamp hours and even the ultra cheap a7 pro has a 4150 milliamp hour battery, which is just slightly lower than the note 20 ultra from samsung, and we typically like to do a video playback test where we run a Video on loop on the vlc, app 50 brightness in airplane mode and just see how long the smartphones last and here the results over here. Basically, the winner is the m3 with logically, the largest battery got a run time of over 20 hours and 28 minutes. After that was the x3 at 17 hours, 51 minutes and the a7 pro got 14 hours and 47 minutes very impressive to say at the least and when it comes to actually using the smartphone from a day-to-day perspective. You’Re definitely gon na have no problem getting more than a day, if not two days on most of these phones, certainly with the m3, it’s probably rivaling some of the best battery life that you’re going to experience on a current day, smartphone, but really on that guys And that’s really it i’d.
Definitely love to hear your thoughts on what you think is the best ultra low budget smartphone. For my money, i don’t think you can get better than either the m3 or the x3 from xiaomi. If you can get over some of the privacy concerns by doing some of the workarounds that are available online, i think it’s an unbeatable smartphone that pretty much has the same internal hardware and architecture that you find on a google pixel phone on a oneplus phone, but You’Re not really paying the extra price for the brand marketing and things like that and uh you’re gon na check out the links in the description down below where you find more details about everything we’ve talked about.
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