The Poco F9 Ultra could be the best value flagship phone available today – 185Hz, 200MP, and Bose sound

With prices rising across the board, some smartphone shoppers might look to alternative brands for their next flagship phone and Poco, one of the champions of affordable alternatives, might be worth your attention.

But before we get started, the £899 price isn't exactly what we'd call cheap – until you see what you get for your money in the Poco F9 Ultra. How about Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 power, a 185Hz AMOLED display and 100W charging?

Put a 200-megapixel main camera on the rear and Bose sound, with Dolby Atmos, and you've already ticked a lot of boxes.

Fans of the Poco brand – a sub-brand of Xiaomi – will know that this isn't unusual. Poco is known for packing its phones with plenty of specs, designed to challenge premium phones without putting too much strain on the buyer's pocket.

But what about pricing? The Poco F8 Ultra launched at £749 in 2025, so the £899 starting price is something of a bump for the 12GB and 256GB version. That reflects the strain that the smartphone industry is under, with everyone from individual brands to IDC saying that the era of the cheap phone is over.

What you are getting though is an Ultra phone, where many of the rivals will now want to charge you closer to £1,000.

Poco also has a reputation for great gaming devices, thanks to the youthful market that this brand appeals to. There's flagship-grade hardware here in the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, with a graphics boost provided by the VisionBoost D8 chip, which powers that 185fps display performance.

There's a 6.9-inch AMOLED display, with a brightness up to 4500 nits, which challenges most flagship phones like the Pixel 11 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra – but with a peak HDR brightness of 10,000 nits.

There's power and there's display brilliance, but with Bose behind the audio, it's no surprise to find Dolby Atmos support. It's a 2.1 experience, with an independent subwoofer for a richer and more rounded sound experience.

The battery isn't small either: it's a huge 8,050mAh silicon-cabon cell with 100W charging and the claim of 2 days of battery life. Wireless charging at 50W is supported with a compatible HyperCharge charger.

Finally the camera: the 200-megapixel main camera is just the starter, with a 50-megapixel telephoto and 8-megapixel ultrawide. With the focus on performance, it's typically the camera that's the weaker side of Poco phones – along with the software experience.

That's a slight dampener – Poco phones often come with a fair amount of bloat in the HyperOS software, while the four years of Android updates and six years of security updates won't quite compete with Samsung.

At the core of it, even with a price increase, the Poco F9 Ultra still gives you a lot of phone. It's no longer cheap, but in 2026, you might have to pay a little more for this sort of specification.