Fresh from attending the POCO Partners Southeast Asia (SEA) Forum 2023 in Bangkok, where they shared market insights, one of the interesting findings we learned is the top features that people look for in a smartphone—specifically in the midrange segment. The top 3 features include great battery life, a powerful processor, and large storage. The latter is an intriguing one, as mid-range phones from the likes of Redmi, realme, and OnePlus are starting to offer a 1TB storage option—albeit only in China.

Being intrigued about this, we asked POCO Global Product Marketing Manager Angus Ng in an exclusive interview if they have plans of launching a phone with a 1TB storage option for global markets like the Southeast Asia region. After all, since they made a surprise of offering a 512GB option on the POCO F5 Pro in the Philippines—and that some mid-range phones in China do have a 1TB storage option—there will be a POCO phone in the future that will have a 1TB storage option as well, right?

Ng did reveal that POCO did have plans of offering a 1TB option in the F5 Pro, but settled for 512GB instead. “We didn’t have enough time to make the 1TB option available to the F5 Pro because it was a late decision,” Ng explained.

Aside from lacking time, Ng also explained that there are other factors that POCO needs to consider before coming up with a phone that has 1TB of storage. Among these include getting the necessary certifications and carefully studying overall costs to keep their phones within the $500(~Php 30k) segment. Given POCO’s “Everything You Need, Nothing You Don’t” mantra to offer serious value for money with its phones, Ng added that having bigger RAM and storage is a great way to gain traction in the mid-range market—something that the F5 Pro has proven and something that brands followed through by offering a 512GB option as well. 

As much as POCO does have in its roadmap to offer a 1TB option eventually, POCO is taking its sweet time to iron out all things before making it accessible to consumers. “We want to make sure that we can still make it affordable and at a strong price point so that more people can actually enjoy it,” Ng said. 

That being said, our advice to those who want a mid-range phone with a terabytes’ worth of storage is to wait it out. With mid-range phones now offering as much as 512GB of storage these days, it’s simply a matter of time before mid-range phones with 1TB storage become widely available globally.