A device that’s believed to be Xiaomi’s upcoming Pocophone F1 recently passed through mobile benchmarking tool AnTuTu, scoring over 285,000 points, or approximately 3,000 points more than the OnePlus 6 that has been dominating the charts of the Chinese smartphone testing service ever since being released in late May. While benchmark scores are hardly a perfectly accurate indicator of real-life performance, they can serve as an approximate guideline of how powerful a given device is, and between the newly emerged listing and previous rumors about the handset in question, it appears that the Pocophone F1 will be a full-fledged Android flagship aimed at competing with the very best the mobile industry has to offer this year.
The new handset lineup from the Chinese electronics manufacturer is expected to debut in the coming weeks, possibly as early as the next iteration of IFA, an annual trade show taking place in Berlin, Germany, whose new edition is running from August 31 through September 5. The device is widely expected to feature the Snapdragon 845, Qualcomm’s latest and most powerful mobile system-on-chip to date which is also found inside high-end devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S9, LG V35 ThinQ, and the HTC U12 Plus. The base model of the Pocophone F1 should have 6GB of RAM and 64GB of flash memory, whereas its most premium variant is expected to be introduced with twice as much storage space and 8GB of RAM.
While the AnTuTu listing doesn’t reveal any hardware specifications of the handset, previous rumors pointed to a 20-megapixel front camera and a rear-facing two-lens setup with a 12-megapixel sensor supported by another 5-megapixel module which is likely to be used for depth mapping and bokeh effect generation. A recent product certification also suggested the Pocophone F1 may feature some kind of a liquid cooling system, an unconventional solution that’s essentially unheard of in the context of smartphone applications. While the Xiaomi-made handset has already been certified by the FCC, it’s unlikely to ever be officially sold in the United States.