POCO remained in news without launching any smartphone last year. We have all been waiting for the POCO F1 successor after its launch in August 2018, but there has been no news regarding it during the entire 2019. However, in the last month of the year POCOPHONE Global head, Alvin Tse tweeted that more from POCO will be heard in 2020. Although later he removed the tweet.
Xiaomi has now broken silence on the POCO brand and announced that it is making a comeback as a sperate brand. Moreover, recently the company has filed a trademark for POCO F2 name and another smartphone POCO X2 has surfaced on Geekbench. These reports hint that these two phones will be launched soon by the brand.
POCO as a separate brand
Xiaomi India head, Manu Kumar Jain has finally confirmed that POCO is coming back and users will soon see new POCO branded phones in India. Manu also mentioned that these phones will come with totally different features as POCO will now be a separate brand with a separate team, and this new team will decide the future of the brand.
Excited to share: #POCO will now be an independent brand!
What started as a sub-brand within Xiaomi, has grown into its own identity. POCO F1 was an incredibly popular phone. We feel the time is right to let POCO operate on its own.
Join me in wishing @IndiaPOCO all the best.
— Manu Kumar Jain (@manukumarjain) January 17, 2020
Though, he didn’t reveal any timeline on being asked when the next POCO phone is coming. However, he said that hopefully, it is coming very soon. He further explained that the company took time to figure out in what way upcoming phones can be improved.
The company will now focus on speed, gaming, and performance along with a good camera setup for upcoming products and the new POCO team will share more details on it.
POCO prepping for a new logo
It is now clear that POCO will be lead by a separate team. The company has even taken down the profile and cover pictures on its social media platforms and posted new pictures that have ‘Hello World’ written and which is also hidden. This gives users a hint that a big announcement from the brand is expected soon.
Btw looks like @IndiaPOCO coming up with a new logo and banner at their facebook page. pic.twitter.com/uIIB8kEzOk
— abhishekbhatnagar.eth (@abhishek) January 17, 2020
POCO F2, F2 Pro, F2 Lite Coming
According to the latest reports, Xiaomi has filed a trademark for a phone with POCO F2 name. Separately, another smartphone by the name POCO X2 has surfaced on Geekbench.
So, the company could launch more than one phone. There could be POCO F2, the flagship one and successor to POCO F1 and POCO X2 or POCO F2 Lite the lite version and probably the rebranded Redmi K30nand there could be another flagship POCO F2 Pro.
POCO F2, F2 Pro
Just like the Poco F1 which was launched back in 2018 with Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 845 chipset, POCO F2 could also sport a flagship chipset. It is likely to come with Snapdragon 855 plus or even Snapdragon 865 with an aggressive price tag. Apart from this, we could also see a powerful battery with fast charging support.
As per the listing on a case maker website, the POCO F2 is expected to come with a triple camera set-up at the back, pop-up selfie camera and an in-display fingerprint sensor. The case maker shows that Poco F2’s design looks like the Redmi K20 Pro. So, we can expect that the phone could sport an OLED display unlike the LCD display on Poco F1.
Moreover, we can also see a Pro variant of the POCO F2. Just like its arch-rival Realme, Xiaomi could also go for a ‘Pro’ model which will be competing with Realme X2 Pro.
POCO X2 or Poco F2 Lite
Another phone with the name POCO X2 has been listed on Geekbench recently. The listing reveals that the phone scores 547 points in the single-core and 1,767 points in the multi-core test. The name of the motherboard is listed as “phoenixin”.
Interestingly the motherboard name and these benchmark scores are similar to what we have seen for the Redmi K30 last year.
Xiaomi can possibly go ahead and launch the Redmi K30 as the POCO X2 in India. So, POCO X2 will be a lite version in the series as Redmi K30 4G version comes with the Snapdragon 730G processor. The Geekbench listing also shows that POCO X2 is running on Android 10 with 8GB RAM.
These reports are early speculations and the company has not announced anything official as of now. However, with the increase in competition in the market with brands like Realme, Xiaomi by announcing POCO as a separate brand, will surely want to play big. We should soon see some official confirmation on these upcoming POCO phones.
