POCO F8 Ultra - Flagship gaming and cameras meets Sound by Bose speakers
POCO brings a musical twist to its latest flagship F8 Ultra by adding Sound By Bose speakers.
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| POCO F8 Ultra |
If we were impressed by the F7 Ultra's performance last March 2025, POCO drops another banger, but this time with a fancy gesture of adding 2.1-channel speakers tuned by Bose.
What's the difference?
Audio performance
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| The Sound by Bose speakers |
Instead of getting the typical stereo or mono speakers, the F8 Ultra gets three. You'll find the stereo speakers in the upper and lower sections of the phone, which both handle the mids and highs. A large, encircled third unit is situated next to the cameras at the back for low frequencies, thus creating a 2.1-channel effect.
Wider soundstage, deeper bass, and clean vocals
As for the sound experience, well, it truly delivers upgraded audio output; not only is it stronger by default, but we hear more details if compared to a typical stereo setup.
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| Up to 7W power output |
Since it is also tuned by Bose, the sound it produces is much cleaner and fuller with minimal distortion at max volume. We also noticed some sub-bass, which is not usually present in ordinary smartphones.
Overall, this definitely brings a quite leap in terms of our multimedia activities, making our music or video streaming much enjoyable.
Ultra Performance
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| POCO F8 Ultra flagship chipset |
Just like its predecessor, the device maintains the Ultra performance by offering a much powerful processor called the 3nm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. It is also paired with a 12GB or 16GB LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB UFS 4.1 storage.
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| Regular benchmark on AnTuTu and Geekbench |
Our first AnTuTu benchmark immediately showed a 3.7 million score. It shows a dramatic leap in performance compared to the Snapdragon 8 Elite's 2.6M score.
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| Performance mode benchmark |
If you turn on the performance mode, it bumps up by another 100K, making it reach 3.85M AnTuTu points.
For Geekbench, it was able to achieve 3,558 points for single-core and 10,705 points for multi-core.
It also has a VisionBoost D8 Chipset, providing us with improved graphics while keeping the power consumption low.
By having this muscle hardware, we were able to have an ultra-smooth experience from multitasking or gaming.
Handling those multiples, Chrome tabs were a piece of cake while playing our favorite games like Genshin Impact, Mobile Legends, and PUBG at max settings was no sweat either.
We would also like to highlight its large 6,700 mm² cooling, allowing the phone to handle demanding tasks at extended sessions.
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| Inside the box and it's 100W USB-C HyperCharge |
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| The battery usage |
Meanwhile, its battery performance was also remarkable. We started using the phone around 6am and reached 17 hours and 13 minutes by around 11pm.
That includes social media browsing, video streaming, playing music, heavy photo shoots, and some video recordings. At around 19 percent battery, you will still have at least 6 hours of juice based on the phone's estimate.
Legit long lasting battery
That is made possible with the 6,500mAh battery. An upgrade from its predecessor's 5,300mAh capacity.
We charge the phone at around 50 minutes from 8 percent to full, thanks to the supplied USB-C 100W HyperCharge power brick.
It also offers 50W wireless HyperCharge, which is great for hassle-free charging during your trips.
Large Stunning Display
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| The display |
For the display, the phone uses a MASSIVE 6.9-inch POCO HyperRGB AMOLED panel with 120Hz refresh rate, 2600 x 1200 resolution, 3,500 nits peak brightness, and up to 2,560Hz touch sampling rate. It also has 12-bit colors, DCI-P3, and POCO Shield Glass protection.
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| Precise colors on screen |
In our experience, even if the panel is not LTPO, it offers highly detailed quality with accurate and rich colors, deep blacks, making it suitable for watching videos from YouTube, Facebook, or TikTok.
The POCO F7 Ultra didn't have eSIM support, but the POCO F8 Ultra gets one, so you'll have more flexibility when changing SIM cards whenever you go in and out of the country.
For OS, the phone offers Android 16 out of the box with HyperOS 3 skin on top. It brings a smarter and more fluid animation from scrolling to touching.
The POCO F8 Ultra also features HyperConnect for a unified cross-device function for seamless file sharing from phone to laptop.
The Xiaomi HyperAI enabled us to achieve enhanced productivity with the AI Writing. It simply lets you organize your thoughts, improve your text, summarize, expand, polish, and even check the spelling and grammar of your work.
Enhanced Durability, Clean Aesthetics
The POCO F8 Ultra bears a similar look to the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max due to its rectangular camera island. Instead of a large display at the rear, it is replaced with a circular speaker grill.
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| Team Blue or Team Black? |
We received the Black color model, but it is also available in Denim Blue. Both offer minimalist looks and matte finish, making them an eye catcher for those who don't want a glossy finish.
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| Does denim-inspired bring you back to the 90s era? |
The Denim Blue model stands out with its textured finish, like the ones you see on your jacket or jeans, thus offering a better grip and feel as well.
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| Black model |
Our Black model feels smooth to the touch and just provides plain bold looks. Both phones are also free from fingerprint smudges, which is a plus for users with sweaty hands.
Ultra Cameras?
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| POCO F8 Ultra |
The POCO F8 Ultra gets a 50MP Light Fusion 950 main sensor with a 1/1.31-inch size, f/1.67 aperture, AF, and OIS.
It is accompanied by a 50MP ultra-wide snapper with f/2.4 aperture and another 50MP f/3.0 5x telephoto camera with OIS.
Rear Camera Samples
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| Ultra wide and 1x outdoor shot |
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| 2x and 5x zoom |
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| 10x zoom and 100x zoom |
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| Indoor 1x and 2x |
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| 5x and 10x indoor |
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| Food photos in Bali |
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| Shot on donuts |
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| Shot with fruits |
We immediately noticed that its picture quality is already a step above the F7 Ultra across multiple aspects.
The main sensor can capture highly detailed image quality in our daylight, outdoor, and indoor shots, as well as during our evening photowalks.
We attribute this primarily to the larger main camera, which allows more light to enter the sensor, thereby providing us with better detail, more vibrant colors, good shadows, and textures.
POCO also boasts its 5x optical quality, which means you'll have sharper details even when shooting at a range.
Even the 10x digital zoom provides lossless quality, as POCO claimed. We can definitely see a lot of details retained, although there's a noticeable change in color as you zoom further.
The 100x zoom works. While the output is pixelated and shows visible noise, the fact that you can capture so much detail from such a distance represents a significant upgrade.
For ultra-wide, the sensor was able to maintain good quality as well, while providing you with more space, even in tourist spots with a lot of people visiting.
We were also impressed with its portrait mode. The bokeh effect is much cleaner now, giving a good separation from your subject and the background.
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| 1x night shot |
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| 2x night shot |
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| 5x night shot |
For evening shots, the device's AI can easily detect when you are shooting in low light. It will adjust accordingly to get you a brighter and less distorted quality.
Our building subject turned out to have good exposure across different focal lengths and retained the right colors, whether you zoom in or out. Although at night we also notice reduced dynamic range as evident on the tress that appeared soft.
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| 2x and ultra-wide |
The ultra-wide will get you a darker output. But you'll get a wider and scenic shot. In our case, the light's reflection on the water gave a curved effect, adding a little bit of art to our shot.
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| Daylight selfie outdoors |
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| Indoor selfie |
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| Selfie night shot |
The 32MP front-facing camera is unchanged from the previous model, but it continues to deliver excellent selfies.
The images it produces are characterized by a nice level of detail with skin textures and fine hairs clearly visible, and exhibit pleasing, natural skin tones and color accuracy.
For videos, the phone can shoot up to 8K 30 fps, 4K 60 fps, or up to 2.8K 30 fps for ultra steady mode.
At 8K quality, you'll need to have steady hands or use a 3rd party gimbal stabilizer to achieve better results.
Killer price
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| The price |
The POCO F8 Ultra begins at PHP 40,999, starting SRP for the 12GB/256GB model. But it gets a 34,999 introductory price from November 26 to December 9.
The 16GB/512GB model gets an SRP of PHP 42,999, while the early bird price is at PHP 37,999.
Our thoughts
If you're looking for an updated 2025 to 2026 flagship specs but don't want to splurge at more than PHP 50K, the POCO F8 Ultra is an easy choice.
This will also be the 2nd Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in the Philippines. Meaning you'll have to wait until the first quarter of 2026 before you can get your hands on the latest Qualcomm flagship for other smartphone makers. Well, POCO lets you achieve that before the year ends.
Overall, it checks all the boxes for us in terms of performance, cameras, multimedia, battery, and even the price.
What do you guys think?
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