Poco’s new budget entrant phone, the Poco C55, is going to change how you look at budget smartphones. It packs quite a hardware in every aspect. The brand boasts about the large display and the 50MP camera at this price. Sure the hardware looks great on paper but how does the smartphone actually perform in real-life conditions? Let’s find out all about this smartphone in this in-depth review of the Poco C55 smartphone.
Poco C55 Review
The POCO C55 is launched at a price of INR 9,499, and we have got the Cool Bue color of it for review. Here is our in-depth review of the Poco C55. But first Let’s go through all the accessories that you get with the phone inside the box.
Poco C55 Unboxing
- Poco C55 Smartphone
- 10 Watt Charger
- Micro USB cable
- Sim tray ejector
- Quick Start guide
Poco C55 Design and Build Quality
The Poco C55 comes with a unique yet familiar design used in many of its smartphones. The front of the phone is mostly a display with a significant amount of chin at the bottom. The rear panel is where things get very interesting and you can clearly see the Poco-styled camera module. The back panel is all polycarbonate with a leather stitched pattern that looks good and is better than a plain polycarbonate back. This type of patterned back on smartphones tends to pick up fewer scratches and scuffs during usage.
The smartphone comes with a volume rocker and a power button on the right side, the left side has the SIM card tray slot. The bottom edge includes a multipurpose micro USB port, along with the primary microphone and the loudspeaker. A 3.5 mm headphone jack is provided on the top side if you want to use wired headphones with the Poco C55.
The weight of the phone is 195 grams but since the body of the smartphone is slim, it doesn’t feel like you are holding a heavy smartphone. Poco has provided a fingerprint sensor at the rear of the phone for unlocking the phone with a touch. However, to make the phone look more aesthetic, the fingerprint sensor is placed a bit higher. If you have small hands like me then you have to adjust your grip to reach the fingerprint sensor at the back.
To handle a few raindrops, the smartphone comes with an IP52 water and dust resistance which makes this smartphone one of the very few budget phones to have an IP rating. Sadly, there is no protective case provided inside the box so you need to purchase a case for this phone, separately. Overall the smartphone is comfortable to hold in hand, all thanks to its slim form factor and modern design.
Display
The Poco C55 boasts a large 6.7 inches LCD display with HD+ resolution and 60Hz refresh rate. This display got a 120Hz touch sampling rate to give you a better experience when comes to touch sensitivity. Even though the Display is HD+, we didn’t notice any pixelation on the display, thanks to the high pixel density of 268 PPI. The display has got a dewdrop notch which is a dated implementation compared to modern phones, to place the selfie camera.
The viewing angles of the display are also great, with no color inversion or color deterioration when we see it from the sides. The brightness of the display is also appropriate for all types of lighting conditions. You do need to turn up the brightness to the max when using the device outdoors under the sun. In our testing, the brightness meter showed a value of 269 LUX which is a decent number. Overall the display is really good and if you love to watch movies a lot then this smartphone will give you a great experience.
Performance
When it comes to performance, this smartphone surely packs a punch according to its price tag. Since the Poco C55 comes with a MediaTek Helio G85 processor paired with 6GB RAM and 128GB internal memory. The smartphone can easily handle day-to-day tasks without any lag or visual delay. We tested the storage for read-write speeds and found the storage type on this phone to be eMMC. This will not affect any day-to-day tasks until the storage starts to fill up.
During our testing, we got very much positive results in gaming. We tried Asphalt 9 as well as Call of Duty Mobile, and both games ran smoothly without any stutter or lag. The loading times sure are high because of a slower eMMC storage.
Let’s talk about the benchmarks now, on AnTuTu Benchmark, the Poco C55 got a total score of 2,58,811 which is okay for a budget device like this. Multitasking is also great on this smartphone because of the 6GB RAM.
Camera
The camera is one of the USPs of this smartphone since the type of camera hardware you are getting in this phone is uncommon on budget smartphones. Poco C55 packs a 50MP sensor that is paired with a QVGA sensor for depth sensing. On the front, you get a 5MP selfie shooter for all your social media needs. The smartphone can record 1080p FHD videos at 30 fps max and it got some really amazing camera features as well.
The rear 50MP camera of the smartphone captures impressive pictures in the daylight but when you step inside, the photo quality starts to deteriorate. The camera app comes with a bunch of features that you see on other smartphones as well, but the camera app itself looks very obsolete. It starts to struggle at night, even after using the dedicated Night mode, the picture quality doesn’t improve. The selfie camera is a 5MP shooter and being honest, this camera is not for indoor photography at all.
Overall the camera on this smartphone is pretty decent but I cannot say the same for the front-facing camera. Here are some of the best camera samples that we took with the smartphone, you can check them out and decide for yourself.
Software
On the software front, it comes with MIUI 13, based on Android 12 OS which is good enough on a budget smartphone. However, one thing that I’ve noticed about this smartphone is that the MIUI that comes pre-installed on this phone is a lite version of MIUI 13. There are too many things that make it feels like you are running some lite version of MIUI. It lacks a few design elements which you see on the regular MIUI 13 on mid-range or flagship Xiaomi smartphones.
We cannot blame Poco to provide a dated UI in their smartphone but when it comes to practical usability, it seems pretty smooth throughout the usage. There is a lot of bloatware pre-installed installed on it but you can easily disable or uninstall most of these bloatware apps and regain your storage.
Connectivity and Battery
The Poco C55 comes with a triple-slot SIM tray so you can easily use two SIM cards and a microSD card slot. The smartphone also comes with Bluetooth 5.0 and it even supports the 5GHz Wi-FI band which is again a good thing to see on a budget smartphone like this. The only thing that is outdated according to today’s smartphone industry standards is the micro USB port. We expect to see a Type-C port on a budget smartphone as well.
The Poco C55 smartphone rocks a 5000 mAh battery paired with a 10Watt in-box charge. During our testing, the smartphone got a really great battery backup. If you do not do long gaming sessions, then you can easily get more than a day’s battery backup. Even after intense usage, you can easily squeeze out a complete day of usage. A 10W charging brick is provided inside the box, which takes about 2 hours to charge from 1 to 100 percent.
Pros and Cons
After spending my time with it, here are the pros and cons of the POCO C55, to summarise my review.
Pros
- Big display
- Fresh design
- IP52 rating
- Decent Primary Camera
- Large battery
Cons
- Selfie shooter is mediocre
- Only 10-watt charging is supported
POCO C55: Final Thoughts
The Poco C55 is almost an all-rounder smartphone when we look at the under INR 10,000 price range. As it has got a big display, a powerful processor, a 50MP camera, and a big battery. Poco has cut corners to bring this hardware at INR 9,499, but those things can be managed. With back offers, you can buy the POCO C55 for even less from Flipkart.
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