The POCO F3 may not be the return of a true Poco smartphone that fans of the brand were hoping for

Last week, it emerged that Xiaomi has registered the Redmi K40 in Singapore under its POCO brand, having been released in China with the model number M2012K11AC. The C suffix denotes that the model would be sold exclusively in China, so the M2012K11AG should be the global version. The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) only revealed that the M2012K11AG would be a POCO device, but the FCC has gone one better.

While the FCC only refers to the POCO device as the M2012K11AG, two IMEI numbers nestled in one report reveal its true identity. Searching these IMEIs reveals that the M2012K11AG is the POCO F3, as the screenshot below shows. It remains unclear when Xiaomi will unveil the POCO F3, but we do know what hardware it will feature.

Specifically, the POCO F3 will have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 SoC, a minimum of 6 GB of RAM and at least 128 GB of storage. Additionally, the device will have a 4,520 mAh battery and will ship with MIUI 12. MIUI 12.5 will arrive as an over-the-air (OTA) update, but this will probably not be until the second half of the year at the earliest.

The POCO F3 will have Samsung's E4 AMOLED display too, which we expect Xiaomi and POCO to make a big thing of in their marketing. The E4 has a 120 Hz refresh rate combined with a 1,300 nit peak brightness, among other many impressive specifications. Incidentally, Xiaomi is expected to bring the Redmi K40 Pro to global audiences as the POCO F3 Pro, but the Redmi K40 Pro Plus' fate remains unknown.

Ultimately, this latest leak underlines that the POCO brand will not spawn an original device as the Pocophone F1 was. Instead, it continues to be a way for Xiaomi to repackage devices that it has already released, like with POCO F2 Pro and the POCO X2 last year. Hence, it seems unlikely that Xiaomi will ever release a true successor to the Pocophone F1, despite the enduring popularity of the 2018 smartphone. In short, the Poco F3 will not be a return to the roots of its namesake.

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