Poco X6 Neo hands-on review

Display

The Poco X6 Neo has a 6.67-inch, 2400 x 1080 resolution AMOLED display with a refresh rate of up to 120Hz. The display has a claimed peak brightness of 1000 nits, 100% DCI-P3 color coverage, and 240Hz touch sampling rate.

Like other Xiaomi/Poco budget phones, you can do basic color tuning in the settings. By default, the phone is set to the Vivid profile, which claims to adjust colors based on the content displayed but has a cool blue white point. The Saturated profile is always saturated but has a warmer color tone. The Standard profile seems to target sRGB and has a standard D65 white point with natural colors. You can also adjust the color temperature for all three profiles manually using a color wheel.

In the Standard mode, the display has good color accuracy. The panel also has ample resolution and good viewing angles.

Peak brightness was usually sufficient but the way the automatic brightness works is a bit odd. On most modern smartphones, the display can go beyond manual brightness levels under bright light when using auto brightness. The X6 Neo, on the other hand, doesn't even reach the max manually adjustable brightness level even under the brightest sunlight, let alone go beyond that. You can get higher brightness if you manually max out the brightness instead. This was tested multiple times and at no point did the auto brightness ever max out the brightness under bright light, instead settling for around 90%.

On the topic of brightness, there is no HDR support on the X6 Neo.

Unfortunately, like some other Xiaomi/Poco phones, the X6 Neo has the company's distasteful video processing enabled full-time. Any time you start a video, the phone will automatically oversharpen it while also boosting saturation and contrast, and there's nothing you can do to turn it off.

Display settings

Well, almost nothing. Thanks to a Reddit comment, we were able to disable this effect by going into the phone's Developer options and toggling the 'Disable HW overlays' option, which turns off all video processing. The only issue is that this option switches back when the phone restarts and needs to be enabled again.

The display can refresh up to 120Hz. The phone does actually run at 120Hz in most of the apps we tried, including some games, but the way it's implemented leaves a lot to be desired. Launching a game that supports high refresh rates, the phone will run at 120Hz. However, the phone is also designed to drop the refresh rate to 60Hz when you aren't interacting with the screen, which is fine when you are on the homescreen but not in the middle of a game. So the moment you stop interacting with the phone, the display and the game are forced down to 60Hz from 120Hz. The games we tried didn't quite handle this well and would stutter quite a bit when running at 60Hz.

Unfortunately, there is no developer mode hack that we could find to disable this behavior, so unless you are playing a game that requires you to constantly tap the screen, you will run into this issue unless you manually lock the screen to 60Hz.

Charging speed

The Poco X6 Neo supports 33W fast charging and a matching charger is provided in the box.

In our tests, the phone managed to charge reasonably quickly, with just over half the battery charged in the first 30 minutes and a full charge taking about an hour. Certainly not the fastest charging we have seen but should be perfectly adequate for most scenarios.

Additionally, you can also choose to disable fast charging through the battery settings, which should help prolong the lifetime of the battery.

Audio

The Poco X6 Neo has a single loudspeaker at the bottom, which is odd when you consider it also has Dolby Atmos audio processing enabled. Of course, there is no spatial processing to do when you are only working with a single speaker but the Atmos mode adds a little more warmth and body to the sound, which is otherwise quite tinny and quiet.

There is, however, a headphone jack, where you can experience the full extent of the Dolby Atmos audio processing as well as enjoy content encoded in Atmos, such as on Apple Music or videos with Atmos audio track.

Alternatively, you can use Bluetooth. One thing to note here is that even though the phone lists aptX Adaptive and LHDC in the codec list within the developer options, it supports neither of them. We have noticed this on other cheaper Xiaomi/Poco phones as well and it's not clear why the company includes the full list of Bluetooth codecs even when many are not actually present. All you can access on this phone are SBC, AAC, aptX, aptX HD, and LDAC, which are all the codecs natively included in Android.

A slightly more frustrating issue with Bluetooth audio on this phone is the lack of Bluetooth absolute volume. This feature has existed for over a decade at this point and syncs the volume levels of the connected Bluetooth audio device and the phone so they can be controlled as one. On the X6 Neo, the phone and accessory volume are separate so you need to adjust them both to get proper volume levels. This feature was present on the cheaper Poco M6 we checked out recently, not to mention is a staple of almost every phone these days, so we are not sure why it's missing here.