Following the launch of its souped-up gaming handset, the Poco F1 , in 2018 there was a lot of hype surrounding Xiaomi's subsidiary Pocophone – and then it all went rather quiet.
A whole year went past without any mention of a successor, the imaginatively titled Poco F2, until Pocophone's Alvin Tse let slip on Twitter that the brand was working on something due in 2020.
In reply to a tweet, the Global Head of Pocophone said: "You will hear more from POCO in 2020," followed by a love heart emoji. This tweet has since been deleted, but not before it was screenshotted and posted far and wide, putting Poco fans into a frenzy.
Xiaomi launched its Pocophone sub-brand in 2018 and unveiled its first – and currently only – handset, the Poco F1 , in August that same year. At the time of launch, it was the first of Xiaomi's phones to be sold in the UK.
Despite being powered by Qualcomm’s then-fastest-ever mobile processor, the Snapdragon 845 , alongside up to 8GB of RAM and a choice of either 64GB or 128GB of storage, it was sold for a mere £330 – an absolute bargain.
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The sacrifice made for such premium specifications in a mid-range phone were that the plastic chassis left much to be desired. It also didn't come with modern staples such as NFC or an IP rating, but it was sold as a gaming phone and it delivered.
When put through Geekbench 4’s duo of single- and multi-core CPU benchmarks, it achieved near-identical scores to the OnePlus 6T and Pixel 3 , and surpassed similarly priced competitors such as the Vivo V11 and Nokia 7.1 .
Xiaomi's Pocophone will need to perform a similar feat of mastery with the Poco F2, not only to match the F1's impressive positioning but because the delay appears to have created a significant amount of expectation.
