This Amazon Spring Sale phone deal is a deal — but there’s a problem
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- This bundle offers a The Poco F7 with a 90W charger at a record low price £288
- The price has reached £342 in the last 90 days according to Amazon – although I believe this includes the price of dishonesty
- The average real value over the past 90 days, by my count, is £309
- I rated Poco F7 with four stars and gave it Expert Reviews Award recommendeddue to its exceptional performance and battery life and durability above average
Those looking for a budget phone deal in the Amazon Spring sale will find that the selection is slim, with only a few stores worth considering. One such the phone is Xiaomi Poco F7an affordable handset that stands out from the pack thanks to its powerful performance, flagship-level durability, impressive battery life and fast charging.
The last point usually has a star in it, as technically the phone supports a charging speed of up to 90W, but you will need to buy a Xiaomi charger to hit these numbers – testing it with a 125W Motorola plug saw a speed around the 25W mark. That was fine but it doesn’t work well with the phone.
However, this Amazon Spring Sale deal solves that problem, bundles a 90W Xiaomi charger with the phone, and offers the whole bundle for a record low price of just £288.
The average price is a bit complicated – Amazon is claiming £342 in the last 90 days, I feel it’s closer to £309 – but we’ll get into that below in a proper way. Either way, this is the lowest price ever for this lot and a great deal for a very powerful phone with best-in-class battery life.
Why should I buy Xiaomi Poco F7?
Before we dive into my problem with this deal, let’s talk about the phone itself. Poco is Xiaomi’s sub-brand that is always aimed at the budget phone market. In other words, this isn’t his first rodeo, and it shows.
The design of the Poco F7, although it doesn’t look good, is more refined and polished than what we usually see at this price: the frame is aluminum, the back is glass, there is a layer of Gorilla Glass 7i on top of the display to protect from scratches and everything is rated IP68 for dust and water resistance. That’s a premium rating which means it’s dustproof and can survive submersion in 1.5m of water for up to 30 minutes.
In addition to its impressive design, the Poco F7 has excellent hardware under the hood. The Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chipset is ridiculously fast, outperforms other phones at this price, and has proven to be particularly capable in mobile gaming. In my tests, the Poco F7 hit framerates below 60fps, outperforming phones costing more than £100 more.
And then there’s the battery. The Poco F7 is equipped with a 6,500mAh cell, which in itself is higher than many competitors, and it uses it very well: in our loose video battery test, the Poco F7 lasted 30hrs 36mins, one of the best results we’ve seen on a phone in this price range. With that included 90W charger, you can also see the battery go from empty to 80% in just 30 minutes, according to Xiaomi.
Throw in the brilliant brightness and color accuracy of the 6.83in AMOLED display and the sharp, bright images produced by the large camera in good lighting conditions, and the Poco F7 offers a very well-earned experience at this price point.
What can Xiaomi Poco F7 do better?
You’ll notice that I meant it when I praised the cameras out there. Night photography is good enough but it feels very similar to what you’d expect from a budget phone, with a fair amount of noise and dirty detail. My real problem is the second ultrawide camera: this lens produces a very small shot with low contrast and poor detail, which means you really only have one rear camera to use.
One of my main concerns is one that is shared across all Xiaomi phones: the software. Poco F7 launched with HyperOS 2 version software, which I find messy and overloaded with pre-installed bloatware. Design choices like shuffling through the standard settings with all the quick launch tiles in the control center also continue to confuse me, as it feels a bit jarring to the user.
On the bright side, Xiaomi offers four years of OS updates and six years of security patches, which is pretty good for a phone of this price.
What’s wrong with the average price?
Although my price checking tool (Keepa) is very reliable, showing exactly what prices Amazon products have been placed at over the years, Amazon itself is very difficult to trust. In many cases, we will see artificial price increases for several days, to give the impression that the next discount is much bigger than it really is.
For example, this Poco F7 and charger bundle has spent most of its life at £339, indicating that this is a typical retail price. A few times, however, the price jumped much higher than that for a few days: £405 in late December, £379 last week, both before the big sales event (January sale, Amazon Spring Sale).
The average price tool includes these figures when calculating the average over the past 90 days, and I don’t think that’s really representative. If I exclude this variable, I estimate the price to be equal to £309. So this is still a discount, just not as much as Amazon is trying to present.
If you like the sound of the phone, £288 is excellent value for this lot – the Poco F7 is reasonably fast and well suited to mobile gaming, the 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 more of a reduction than you’d expect from a budget phone and a bargain at this price, even before we include the 90W charger.
My ragtag team of colleagues are hard at work analyzing deals like this – no misleading offer will escape our wrath. To see what other offers we consider to be top, check out our Amazon Spring Sale deals roundup, where we have the top picks for everything from headphones to coffee machines and more.
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