POCO Brings a Battery to a Chipset Fight
An enormous battery and excellent screen cannot hide a slow processor, stale cameras and pricing with delusions of grandeur.
This is Telangana.Social's opinion — a house verdict formed from the trailer, cast, buzz and reception, not a substitute for seeing it yourself.
The POCO M8 Power 5G has one clear idea: make charging someone else’s problem. Its 8,000mAh silicon-carbon battery genuinely delivers, with reviewers reporting roughly two days of normal use and around eight to nine hours of screen time. At least this party trick works without needing a software update or a motivational speech from marketing.
The 6.9-inch 120Hz AMOLED display is another real strength: bright, colourful and properly suited to streaming, reading and everyday use. The 8.4mm body is impressively restrained for such a large battery, though the roughly 225g weight means your pocket will be conducting its own strength training.
Then POCO installs the Snapdragon 4 Gen 4 and calls the phone “Power”. This is not performance power. It is perfectly adequate for calls, video, social apps and modest gaming, but it sits below faster options available near this price. POCO has effectively renamed endurance as horsepower and hopes nobody checks under the bonnet.
The camera system follows the same budget script. The 50MP main camera is decent in daylight, but the secondary sensor feels like paperwork submitted to meet a specification, while the 8MP selfie camera makes the brand’s AI talk sound especially ambitious. IP65 protection, reverse charging and 5G are welcome, but NFC is missing in India and both storage variants stop at a rather stingy 128GB.
HyperOS 3, based on Android 16, brings a respectable promise of four Android upgrades and six years of security updates. That is good support on paper. In practice, the software remains busy, cluttered and generously stocked with pre-installed apps. Six years is a long commitment when the phone keeps asking whether you would like another shopping application installed.
At ₹24,999 for 6GB/128GB and ₹27,999 for 8GB/128GB, the M8 Power is most defensible only if battery life is your first, second and third buying priority. The display is strong, the endurance is excellent and the phone is otherwise competent. But the pricier model asks premium-mid-range money for budget-grade performance, which is a bold interpretation of value.
Buy it for two-day battery life; everyone else should spend the money on a faster phone before POCO persuades you that “Power” means charging less while doing less.
The verdict: Buy it only for exceptional battery life; otherwise, skip it.