Xiaomi launched its Poco F1 smartphone in August last year and the device has been nothing short of a revelation since it has changed the mid-range smartphone game. But with great things at a reasonable price come drawbacks and the Poco F1 is no different. There was the issue with the screen bleeding at the start which caused the excessive brightness around the edges and then lack of Widevine L1 support which didn’t allow the Poco phone to play videos on Amazon Prime and Netflix in HD quality. While the latter has since been solved through a software update, there’s now a new issue with the Poco F1, one that has recently popped up, after some usage period if not long.
The issue
We’ve bumped into a Poco F1 unit which had a yellow spot on one side of the phone. The spot wasn’t present initially but came as a result of some usage in the last few months. To shed some light on how old the device had been used for, need I remind that this Poco F1 was personally purchased by myself during the start of February 2019, after I decided to settle for a balance between the good things and the bad that the device came for.
The unit had been my primary device since the purchase and months after a smooth run with barely any gameplay usage, I noticed that a small yellow spot had started appearing on the left side of the display of my unit. This occurred overnight since the spot wasn’t visible the night before the device was in use. Slowly and gradually, the yellow spot started spreading longitudinally with the initial spot now assuming a light purple colour after Pixel burning.
Are there others?
Moments after I noticed the spot, I did what I thought would be a sensible thing to do and search for similar reports on Twitter and the web. Surprisingly, there had already been a few incidents regarding the yellow spot on Poco F1, most of which confirmed that the issue started to appear after a usage period of two to four months. There were reports of the yellow spot on a handful of MIUI forum threads as well. The Mobile Indian also spoke to some owners of the Poco F1 and found that roughly 3 out 10 individuals are facing from the same issue.
Why do yellow spots often occur on phone displays?
This is not the first device to face such an issue as many phones, even the ones from Apple, have been reported to be greeted with yellow spots. Such an issue arises as a result of a poor manufacturing process as several parts of the front panel including the LCD matrix touch sensor, protective glass, display and the polarizer are glued together using an adhesive. When this special adhesive isn’t applied on the device properly, it gets reheated through the heat generated by the phone through regular usage and then interacts with the display, causing the pixels to burn or behave abnormally.
After observing that the problem had arisen due to Xiaomi’s own poor quality manufacturing instead of the way I use my phone, I wasted no time to get my unit checked at the Mi Service centre. The only thing that stopped me from doing so, was my scepticism about the quality of service that Mi would offer. I felt that way after I read a couple of tweets where Xiaomi had resolved the yellow spot on the Poco by replacing the display but while doing so, had wrecked the IR sensor on the front which is significant for the Face Unlock feature of the phone. Another set of tweets also noted that Xiaomi didn’t offer any replacement of display units.
How Xiaomi resolved the issue
However, my scepticism took a beating as the yellow spot has nearly turned into a yellow + purple spot pattern on the left side of the display. The first Mi Service centre I visited said it’d at least take 3 working days to resolve the issue and suggested I go to another one if I wished to get it sorted before the day’s end. However, things got smoother when I reached the second Mi service centre as I was promised a replacement, though they took their share of time to sort out all the formalities and verify whether the device was tampered with or damaged physically.
The spot was fixed nonetheless but the folks at the Mi Service couldn’t give a single explanation as to how the problem even arises in the phone in the first place, just two months after purchase. All the team could answer was simply denying that such an issue had previously not been reported and they haven’t repaired or replaced the display other than cases when the phone was externally damaged.
Having gotten a newly calibrated display on my Poco F1, all I could now wonder is how long till the current will pan out till I see a yellow spot again. Considering that fact 30 percent of the Poco F1 users we spoke to had a similar problem, it goes to say that while Xiaomi and Poco managed to offer a game changer in the mid-range market, will the end user remain just a one-time user of the Poco brand? Will the upcoming Poco F2 be any different and come with better quality checks? Only time will tell.