Like the last few years, Xiaomi has created a buzz in the Indian smartphone space in 2018 as well. One of the key reasons behind the successful year for Xiaomi is because of the popularity that the company’s first phone from its sub-brand — Poco — gained. The Poco F1 has been one of the best value for money phones this year. The Poco F1 has broken records for being the cheapest Snapdragon 845 powered phone. In fact, after the recent price cut, Poco F1 is not only the cheapest but also the first under Rs 20,000 phone powered by the Snapdragon 845. With the success of the Poco F1, consumers are eagerly waiting for its successor, the Poco F2.

On Friday, the Poco F2 made its way to the Geekbench benchmark site, which means that Xiaomi’s sub-brand is currently in the developing stage of the phone. This also hints at the imminent launch of the phone. Although the launch timeline hasn’t been revealed yet we expect the smartphone could go official in the next few months or so considering it has already been spotted on Geekbench. Interestingly, the benchmark listing has revealed some of the key specs of the Poco F2 but the details might not bring happiness to a lot of people.

This is because the listing shows the Poco F2 running on the same old Snapdragon 845 chipset. The main reason why the Poco F1 gained all the popularity that it did, is because of being the cheapest phone with the latest flagship processor by Qualcomm. After the Poco F1 consumers expected the same from the Poco F2. They, of course, expected that the next Poco phone will come with latest Snapdragon 855 chipset which is said to power the OnePlus 7, 7T, Samsung Galaxy S10, S10 Plus, Mi 9, Mi Mix 4 and other flagships coming next year. But now going by the Geekbench listing looks like Poco F2 might not carry the same strategy.

The Geekbench listing reveals that Poco F2 will not have a lot of things changed compared to the Poco F1 as far as the core hardware is concerned. The benchmark listing shows that the phone will be powered by Snapdragon 845 paired with 6GB of RAM memory. The Poco F1 comes in 6GB RAM and 8GB RAM variants, which is why we expect an 8GB RAM model for the Poco F2 too. Notably, performance has been one of the key highlights of Poco F1. Similar will be the case with the Poco F2. The Geekbench listing of the Poco F2 reveals that the phone scored 2321 on single core and 7564 on multi-core.

We believe that Poco could launch the Poco F2 with the Snapdragon 845 chipset with some software improvements that will ensure to upgrade the overall user experience. The Geekbench listing shows that the Poco F2 will launch running on the latest Android 9 Pie based on MIUI 10, unlike the Poco F1 which was launched with Android 8.1 Oreo-based on MIUI 9.6 and has been upgraded to MIUI 10 based on Pie a couple of weeks ago.

Poco F2 could focus more on design, camera

Now that Poco is planning to continue with the same hardware inside the Poco F2 as in the Poco F1 we might expect Poco to bring some improvements in the design and camera department. Overall, the Poco F1 has almost everything in it and is one of the best and the most powerful phones available at its price segment right now. But there are still some areas where the Poco F1 could have been better like the design and camera performance. The Poco F1 boasts off a plastic back cover which feels extremely cheap in the hands. Although with the Armoured edition Poco did try to improve some bits of the design but wasn’t very successful.

Compared to the competitors the Poco F1 isn’t too attractive to look at, hence, this could be one area where the company could work on for the Poco F2. It is possible that Poco might use metallic or glass finish for the Poco F2 to improve the overall look of the phone and also move from the tradition notch to waterdrop notch design.

Next could be the camera. In our review of the Poco F1 too we had clearly mentioned that the “camera could have been better.” A good camera in a phone is very important for any smartphone user these days, and hence we can expect Poco to improve the camera performance of the upcoming Poco F2 over the Poco F1. Considering Xiaomi goes out of its way to offer the best in “honest pricing” there are high chances that Poco F2 might come with triple cameras on the rear panel. Well, all these are just speculations and should be taken with a pinch of salt.