Poco’s two-SKU launch is a lesson in not making one phone do two jobs

Poco has launched two phones in India rather than one: the X8 Power 5G at Rs 35,999, built around a 10,000mAh battery with 100W HyperCharge fast charging, and the standard X8 5G at Rs 29,999, with a more conventional 9,000mAh battery and a Snapdragon 6s Gen 4 chipset.

The interesting decision here isn’t the spec sheet, it’s the segmentation. Poco could have built one phone that split the difference between maximum battery life and a leaner, lighter form factor. Instead it built two, letting the customer choose which trade-off matters to them rather than forcing a compromise on everyone.

That’s a distinct product decision from feature-bloating a single SKU. A phone optimised purely for battery life inevitably gets heavier and thicker, at 229g and 8.65mm for the X8 Power, that’s a real physical cost. Bundling every feature into one product and calling it “comprehensive” often means nobody gets exactly what they wanted.

The pricing gap, Rs 6,000 between the two models, does real segmentation work too: it’s wide enough to signal a genuinely different product, not just a minor spec bump, letting each buyer self-select based on priorities rather than being upsold to features they don’t need.

For any product team debating whether to add a feature to their main SKU or spin up a distinct variant, Poco’s approach here is a useful reference: when two customer segments have priorities that pull in opposite directions, a single compromise product often serves both worse than two focused ones would.

Camera hardware on the Poco X8 5G includes a 50-megapixel primary sensor paired with a 2-megapixel secondary lens, along with a 16-megapixel front camera.

The Poco X8 Power’s 10,000mAh Silicon-Carbon battery is paired with 100W HyperCharge fast charging, aiming to offset the downside of a larger battery with quicker top-up times.

Poco has positioned both phones squarely in the budget-to-midrange segment, competing against similarly specced offerings from Redmi, Realme and other Chinese-origin brands in India.

Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (representative Poco smartphone image)