- POCO power banks, wearables, and audio could be the brand’s first ecosystem products.
- POCO confirms it won’t be launching tablet devices considering the competition.
- The company further confirmed to differentiate its POCO software from MIUI.
POCO has become a noted brand in various markets, including India, thanks to its value-added product offerings. The company has been smartly focusing on placing its products in the budget, mid-range and premium mid-range segment to cater to a wider demographic. As it gears up to unveil the POCO M4 Pro on November 9th in the global market, POCO’s head of product marketing, Angus Ng in an interview with Android Authority has detailed the ecosystem and its product expansion.
Talking about the ecosystem products, Angus said, “Nothing is actually off-limits,” it’s starting small at first. “Coming out with ecosystem products, I think we still need to stay close to our brand philosophy and product philosophy. So we need to somehow play it more on the safer end, to begin with.” Since the brand is talking about taking things small to big, we can expect products like power banks, wearables, and audio products to be the first towards building an ecosystem.
POCO Tablets
Tablets are a big part of the ecosystem, seeing how iPads connect with MacBook/iPhones and others. However, POCO doesn’t seem to be interested in tablets just yet considering the heavy competition. “On the tablet side, yeah tablets have been huge in the industry in the last year and a half because of the pandemic. But it’s because it’s been huge and kinda crowded, (that) it’s even harder for us to enter from that perspective.“
The company’s upcoming phone, the POCO M4 Pro is said to be a rebrand of the Redmi Note 11 that was introduced in China last week. This doesn’t come as a surprise considering POCO is known to slap its logo on top of Xiaomi and Redmi devices. However, things might change soon.
POCO Software
POCO is further looking to differentiate the software from MIUI. POCO phones come with a POCO launcher but that’s been the most with regards to the differentiating factor. Poco Global head Kevin Qiu says further customisations and aesthetics for the software to bring in line with POCO’s hardware designs are currently being considered.
Regarding software updates, Qiu said, “As of right now we’re actually still discussing and talking to the MIUI team about being a part of that plan. As of right now, I can’t confirm anything about three plus four [three years of OS updates and 4 years of security patches – ed], we’re still staying with two plus three right now for all of our devices.“
No Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 phone
POCO launched a phone with the Snapdragon 870 but hasn’t introduced a model with the Snapdragon 888 chipset. “After internal testing with a lot of our R&D and product managers, we found out that (the Snapdragon) 865 from last year was an amazing chipset. In terms of performance, stability, and cooling in general. And 870 was able to keep all of those great attributes and become even better. When some of the first flagship Android devices pushed out 888, the major concern was overheating and power consumption.“
