POCO has today launched the F9 Ultra. It is the top phone in POCO’s F9 series and starts at $799 for 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The 16GB/512GB model is $949 and the 16GB/1TB model is $1,199. Early buyers get $70 to $150 off. POCO has published the full spec sheet and sales began the same day in selected countries. Kenya is not yet among them.
POCO is a Xiaomi sub-brand. The F9 Ultra is the Redmi K100 Pro Max that Xiaomi sold in China from 11 August, with a smaller battery and a new name. We went through that battery gap this morning.
The screen
The F9 Ultra has a 6.9-inch AMOLED screen at 2608 x 1200 pixels, which Xiaomi markets as 1.5K. It runs at up to 185Hz. Refresh rate is how many times per second the screen redraws. Most flagships stop at 120Hz. POCO’s footnote says 185Hz applies only in games built for it, and its list of native 185fps games runs to just over 20 titles. In normal use you will see 120Hz or less.
POCO quotes two brightness figures: The screen hits 4,500 nits with 25% of it lit, perfect for reading outdoors and day to day use. It also hits 10,000 nits across 1% of the screen, which is for a small bright spot in an HDR film. The F8 Ultra peaked at 3,500 nits. POCO says the panel’s new M11 material draws 20% less power than the F8 Ultra’s for the same brightness, based on its own lab tests. The glass is Corning Gorilla Glass 7i. The F8 Ultra used POCO Shield Glass.
Dolby Vision and HDR10+ are supported.
Make tech-ish your favourite source
Star us on Google — you'll see more tech-ish in Top Stories and AI results.
Processor and memory
The chip is the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, the same processor as the F8 Ultra and most Android flagships since late 2025. Qualcomm has not released its successor. POCO’s internal AnTuTu score is 4,165,108.
A second chip, the VisionBoost D8, generates extra frames in games and upscales lower-resolution images. It is how POCO reaches 185fps in games that render more slowly. RAM is 12GB or 16GB of LPDDR5X and storage is UFS 4.1, up to 1TB.
Cameras
The main camera is 200MP with optical stabilisation and an f/1.68 aperture. The sensor is 1/1.56 inches, smaller than the 1/1.31-inch 50MP sensor on the F8 Ultra. More pixels on a smaller sensor means each pixel collects less light, so expect sharper daylight shots and not much guaranteed gain at night.
The 50MP periscope telephoto has 5x optical zoom at a 120mm equivalent, optical stabilisation and an f/3.0 aperture. POCO rates it for 10x lossless zoom. The 50MP ultrawide covers 17mm equivalent. The front camera is 32MP.
Battery and charging
The battery is 8,050mAh, up from 6,500mAh on the F8 Ultra. It uses silicon-carbon chemistry, which packs more capacity into the same space than a standard lithium-ion cell. POCO quotes two days of use and a full charge in 50 minutes on the 100W charger. The F8 Ultra charged in 38 minutes. Wireless charging is 50W.
That capacity places the F9 Ultra in the list of the biggest phone batteries we ranked on 30 August, below the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max at 10,000mAh and the Redmi K100 Pro Max at 9,070mAh.
Everything else
The speakers are a 2.1 system: two stereo drivers and a separate subwoofer, tuned by Bose. Connectivity is Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6.0, NFC and USB-C at 3.2 Gen 1 speed, which is 5Gbps.
The tray takes two nano SIMs, or one nano SIM plus an eSIM. The phone is IP68 rated for 1.5 metres of fresh water for 30 minutes. It runs HyperOS 3 on Android 16, with four Android upgrades and six years of security patches under the policy Xiaomi announced in April 2025. Colours are Black and Dark Cherry.
POCO has not given a Kenyan price or launch date. The F8 Ultra reached Nairobi retailers at KES 109,000 to KES 111,000 as of late August 2026, and we explained in December why phone prices have been rising.
Join the discussion