Ever since iPhone entered smartphone market, there were only two flagship killers. OnePlus One and Poco F1. I still remember he kind of hype created for Poco brand and how F1 absolutely lived up to justify the hype. For the first time since Mi entered India, they achieved success in flagship space and they finally had a brand for which consumers are ready to pay 30k or more. Many went ahead and paid upto 30k for the top spec carbon fibre finish model of F1. That was the time when everyone compared the Poco F1 with iPhone, Galaxy S series, OnePlus series.
The Poco F1 truly stood tall. For just 21k, buyers got a phone with top of the line Snapdragon 845, UFS storage, excellent camera system, IR face recognition, dual stereo speakers, liquid cooling etc. Xiaomi was able to sell truckload of units of Poco F1. A year later , there was huge amount of buzz and every Poco fan was waiting for the successor to Poco F1.
And they waited.
Finally, Poco announced a new Poco smartphone, the Poco X2. It was nothing like the F1. Poco management went to extreme ends to compare it with Realme X2 smartphone. They went so overboard that I think they promoted Realme more than their own brand. There were Twitter fights between Manmohan and Realme India head Madhav Seth. It was ugly and it was unncessary.
Still, Poco F1 fans waited for the next flagship killer from Xiaomi.
And they waited.
And they waited.
Xiaomi tried their luck again with flagship space by launching Mi 10 Pro, pricing at 50k INR and it was dead on arrival. With little bit of corner cutting, had Xiaomi created a 35k Mi 10 without 5G, curved display etc and named it Poco F2, it would’ve taken the fight to Oneplus 8 series which is having hard time selling due to camera/display issues.
Poco released a new phone, the Poco M2 Pro which is just a rebranded Redmi 9 Pro with faster charger and now, the comparison was with Redmi phones and Realme 6i/Narzo phones. The backlash from Poco fans was severe this time. Yes, Poco does sell lot of phones but that is more due to low price good value and there is no passion towards the X2 or M2 Pro. The passion that you see with Poco F1 is missing. For X2 or M2 pro, it is ‘either this phone or other phone, whichever is cheaper’. But with F1, it was ‘if you do not get F1, you are going to miss a lot’. It someone says F1 is bad, they would get massive backlash from F1 fans, reminiscent of Apple fanboys.
In a matter of two years, Mi/Xiaomi turned a brand that was competing with OnePlus/Oppo/Vivo/Samsung into a copycat brand that fought for breadcrumbs. In this same duration of 2 years, Realme evolved from a low cost phone brand into a brand that brought 5G smartphone to India, created stunning phones like X2 series, X3 series, X50 etc. While Poco brand value plummeted, Realme’s went through the roof. A flagship killer became budget brand and a budget brand became champion in sub 30k range.
