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- This bundle offers the Poco F7 with a 90W charger for a record-low price of £288
- The price has averaged at £342 over the past 90 days according to Amazon – though I believe that this includes some dishonest pricing
- The true average price over the past 90 days is, by my count, £309
- I rated the Poco F7 four stars and gave it the Expert Reviews Recommended award, due to its exceptional performance and battery life and above-average durability
Those looking for a budget phone deal in the Amazon Spring Sale will find that pickings are rather slim, with only a couple of bargains that are worth considering. One such phone is the Xiaomi Poco F7, a cheap handset that stands out from the pack due to its powerful performance, flagship-level durability, impressive battery life and speedy fast charging.
The latter point usually has an asterisk to it, in that the phone technically supports charging speeds up to 90W, but you’ll need to buy a Xiaomi charger in order to hit these numbers – testing it with my 125W Motorola plug saw speeds hovering around the 25W mark. That was fine enough but it’s not making the most of the phone.
Well, this Amazon Spring Sale deal handily sorts out that problem, bundling in a 90W Xiaomi charger with the phone, and offering the whole bundle up for a record-low price of just £288.
The average price is a little complicated – Amazon claims £342 over the past 90 days, I feel that it’s closer to £309 – but we’ll get into that properly below. Either way, this is the lowest price this bundle has ever been and a generally excellent deal on a very powerful phone with some of the best battery life in its class.
Why should I buy the Xiaomi Poco F7?
Before we delve deep into my problem with this deal, let’s talk about the phone itself. Poco is a sub-brand of Xiaomi that’s aimed squarely at the budget phone market. In other words, this ain’t its first rodeo, and it shows.
The design of the Poco F7, while fairly unremarkable, is more refined and polished than we tend to see at this price: the frame is aluminium, the rear is glass, there’s a layer of Gorilla Glass 7i over the display for scratch protection and the whole thing is rated IP68 for dust and water resistance. That’s a flagship grade that means it’s dust-proof and can survive submersion in 1.5m of water for up to 30 minutes.
On top of its impressive build, the Poco F7 has some excellent hardware under the hood. The Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chipset is ridiculously fast, running rings around other phones at this price, and it proved particularly adept at mobile gaming. In my testing, the Poco F7 hit consistent framerates of just under 60fps, surpassing phones that cost over £100 more.
And then there’s the battery. The Poco F7 is fitted with a 6,500mAh cell, which itself is far higher in capacity than most rivals, and it puts it to excellent use: in our looping video battery test, the Poco F7 lasted for 30hrs 36mins, one of the best results we’ve seen from a phone in this price range. With that 90W charger bundled in, you can also see the battery go from empty to 80% in just 30mins, according to Xiaomi.
Throw in the brilliant brightness and colour-accuracy of the 6.83in AMOLED display and the punchy, vibrant images produced by the main camera in good light conditions, and the Poco F7 offers a very well-rounded experience for this bargain price.
What could the Xiaomi Poco F7 do better?
You’ll note I was quite specific when complimenting the cameras there. Night photography is fine enough but it feels more like what you’d expect from a budget phone, with a fair amount of noise and smudgy details. My real problem is the secondary ultrawide camera: this lens produces quite underwhelming shots with low contrast and poor detail, meaning that you only really have one rear camera that’s worth using.
My other main concern is one that’s shared across all Xiaomi phones: the software. The Poco F7 launched with the brand’s HyperOS 2 software, which I find to be a little messy and overly stuffed with preinstalled bloatware. Design choices like shuffling in general settings with the rest of the quick launch tiles in the control centre also continues to confound me, as it just feels obnoxious for the user.
On the bright side, Xiaomi is offering four years of OS updates and six years of security patches, which is very good for a phone of this price.
What’s the problem with the average price?
While my price-checking tool (Keepa) is very reliable, showing exactly what prices an Amazon product has been set at over the years, Amazon itself is a little more difficult to trust. In many cases, we’ll see artificial price increases thrown up for a few days, to then give the impression that the following discount is far more substantial than it actually is.
For example, this Poco F7 and charger bundle has spent the majority of its life at £339, indicating that this is the regular retail price. A few times, however, the price has jumped up quite a bit higher than that for a few days: £405 in late December, £379 last week, both conveniently right before a big sales event (January sales, Amazon Spring Sale).
The average price tool includes these figures when calculating the average over the past 90 days, and I just don’t think that’s actually representative. Snipping out these fluctuations, I estimate the average price to be more like £309. So this is still a discount, just not as substantial as Amazon is trying to present.
If you like the sound of the phone, £288 is an excellent price for this bundle – the Poco F7 is beautifully fast and well-suited to mobile gaming, battery life is among the best of any budget phone, the IP68 rating is more durable than most around this price and the display is sharp, bright and colour-accurate. It’s a cut above what you expect from budget phones and a bargain at this price, even before we factor in the 90W charger.
My ragtag band of coworkers are all hard at work appraising deals just like this one – no misleading offers shall escape our wrath. To see what other offers we consider to be up to snuff, check out our Amazon Spring Sale deals roundup, where we have top picks on everything from headphones to coffee machines and more.
