This is yet another Snapdragon 8 Elite Flagship this time from Vivo sub brand IU the Iqoo 13 though it’s a little different from the other eight Elites we’ve been seeing so far for starters it’s aggressively priced and then there is no pro mode.
l here now what Iqoo13 basically done is cut out all the fluff and focus solely on performance now the lower price tag here doesn’t necessarily mean this is a Poco F1 type barebones deal ilk still managed to include a lot of nice to haves like an Sonic fingerprint scanner an IP rating and a 2K display amongst other things so in today’s we’re going
So in today’s, we’re going to First Unbox the IQoo 13
- First unbox the Iqoo 13 and then take a detailed look at what IQ is offering here if this is your first time here or in case you just in this time I picked up the 12 256 version which is the base let me go ahead and cut through the plastic.
- Once we open up the box we AG greet it by the Iqoo 13 itself let me remove it from its protective cover I ended up going for the Black Version this time IQ also offers three other color options now I chose the black because the back here is fiberglass with a matte finish so it doesn’t pick up fingerprints or smudges easily .
- But the metal sides polished so that is a fingerprint magnet now the other three colors they use regular glass for the back I mean the legend Edition or the white it’s got similarly glossy metal sides where the green and the gray their Metal Frames have a matte finish so which color do you think looks best this time.
- Below also while you’re down there which of these two devices would you want me to cover next the xiaomi pad 7 Pro or the realmi gt7 pro let me
- Know you know where okay back to the IU 13 if you notice the display here it’s flat with just 2.5d curve at the very edges but the back it curves on all four sides now the metal sides AR in sharp so they don’t dig into the palm of your hand when you hold it.
- That said that and the corners being rounded do help with ergonomics now this black skew it’s the slimmest coming in at under 8 mm of thickness the rest are slightly thicker and the black is also 6 G lighter than the other color.
- Now here IQ retained the Mi icon style camera array and this time there is no Periscope setup so the camera array is quite slim and the IR Blaster is also built into it.
- Guys this is a performance Focus FL ship right and if you’re even slightly techsavvy I’m sure you know that the best way to you know almost double your performance is by adding RGB so this camera array it’s got a RGB ring around it the camera is the RGB we’ll talk about all that.
Battery Iqoo 13
- Just a minute for now let’s get back to the box we have a card to indicate the BMW partnership along with the SIM ejector tool there’s a quick start guide and then there’s a black TPU case that fits quite well digging further in we get to a USB type-c to type c case cable which has white accents and finally
- There’s a 120 W Vivo flash charger now the io 13 it supports a huge 6150 mAh silicon carbide battery and using The included charger you can get this battery to 50% in just 12 minutes and a full charge in about half an hour.
- Which is pretty darn good while wireless charging has been cut the Iqoo 13 does have an ip68 ip69 rating for dust and water resistance and the fingerprint scanner and display both can be used with wet hands now that’s thanks.
Display OLED Panel
- IQ going with an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner this time and they’ve also placed it right.
- It’s quite comfortable to use now the display here is a 10bit OLED panel sized 6.82 in the resolution is Quad HD Plus or 2K so it’s a very sharp panel with a 510 pixels per in pixel density there is no mention of the glass used for protection.
- Though now this panel has 144 HZ refresh with 80 ltpo Tech so the refresh rate can be varied as needed IU boasts of a brightness Peak 1,800 nits.
My testing the IQoo 13 actually output a little more than
- That 1850 nits refreshing isn’t it there is wil12 in case you’re wondering now even under manual mode the IQoo 13 output are very respectable 850 nits so this panel is plenty bright for outdoor use
- Under low light this 2592 HZ high frequency paw dimming in case you’re sensitive to OLED flicker I really like how IQ not cut Corners here given the competitive price it would have been very easy for them to go for a cheap cheaper 1.5k panel and justify it as hey we’re being aggressive
- I mean there are more expensive Flagship phones that we’ve seen being launched with a 1.5k panel after all right.
- Honestly do you think this is a good call or do you think they should have gone with a 1.5k panel and gotten even more aggressive with the pricing to you.
- Know beat that one phone 2 I’d love to know your thoughts anyway the display here it’s paired with asymmetrically played stereo speakers that are pretty rich the as metric placements ensure you don’t cover both of them up when you’re gaming no matter which way you’re holding the phone.
8 Elite it’s powerful Gaming
- Talking about gaming the Iqoo 13 obviously it’s powered by qualcomm’s Flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite
- This time qualcomm’s talking big gains thanks to using their own custom Orion course and we’ve been seeing mind-blowing synthetic Benchmark numbers but amongst the multiple 8 Elite phones that I’ve covered so far
- One thing’s been common they’ve all struggle to tame this Beast of an so that said io’s probably had the best result so far
- On a stress test it lost a little under half its performance so it performed slightly better than other phones it wasn’t as cool as the honor magic 7 Pro but it didn’t get as hot as say the xiaomi 15 Pro either
- Like I’ve mentioned in those other videos the 8 Elite it’s powerful enough to run most games well despite the throttling and the Iqoo 13 it’s also using their self-developed Q2 gaming chip to help with frame interpolation and frame generation in case you want to do that and by the way the Snapdragon 8 Elite it’s paired with 256 512 gigs or 1 TB of ufs 4.0 storage and 12 or 16 gigs of lpddr 5x Ultra Ram
- what’s that Ultra you ask well that’s just what Vivo is calling their Ram because of the speed now the 8 Elite supports Ram speeds up to 10,667 megat transfers per second but most brands so far have been using 8533 megat transfers per second ram
- Iqoo though they’ve used 9600 here on the Iqoo 13 and hence they’re branding it Ultra now guys this is a part I’m fitting into the video after I was done with it uh because as I was working on the video uh the edits and the camera work and all that I noticed one more thing
- The official IQ website it says that the storage is UFS 4.0 but then yesterday there was a post on Chinese social media web.
- Where the official IQ handle mentioned something about ufs 4.1 I’m not sure if this is for a specific SK or if they actually launched it with ufs 4.1 and later on they’ve just activated it it was running at ufs 4. speeds and it got activated things are not really clear at this point.
- Once I get more information on this I will update the description or a pin comment down below so do check that space.
- Course when you have such top shelf internals you’d expect the user experience to be very good and origin OS 5 here built it up Android 15 it’s been excellent.
- Now when this phone launches globally it will not be running on Origin OS but rather fun touch OS but it is a safe bet to expect the user experience experience to be just as good.
- The software here is pretty similar to what we saw with the X200 Pro Mini with one major exception we get options to control that led ring to the back
- We can set up different scenarios to trigger it like when charging or getting a notification or call with some games you can even have them light up based on onscreen actions of course you aren’t going to be seeing.
- It but if you want to do it as some kind of game of flex then you can origin os5 also brings with it a bunch of AI functionality like AI eraser that lets you remove something in an image after it’s been shot there’s Also AI generation for wallpapers which worked fine anyways let’s not talk cameras over the years IU flagships have predominantly been performance focused smartphones.
- Last year though IU tried to changeed that they tried to cater to a wider audience by stepping up their camera game with the IU 13 they seem to have walked that back
Camera Performs Review Iqoo 13
- The primary here it’s actually a downgrade last year what we got was the 50 megap omnivision OV h a 1x 1.3 in sensor but on the IQ 13 this time they’ve gone for a much smaller sensor.
- The Sony IMX 921 or light 702 whatever you want to call it it’s a 1x 1.56 in sensor that’s paired with an optically stabilized F 1.88 lens.
- Now as long as the light is good pretty much every phone camera these days performs more or less well between a mid-range sensor and a flagship the main difference under good lighting conditions it’s going to be the dynamic range and even with that this sensor it performs above average
- Not as good as camera Focus flagships but not bad at all now low light performance that’s going to be the litmus test and here the IQ 13 it’s still competent the processing is fine let’s see this the Highlight control is good but definitely not as good as we saw on say.
- The fex 8 Pro or the OnePlus 13 so the primary here is definitely a step below other flagships we’ve been seeing and guys here’s where I noticed a weird issue as I was shooting samples and the L light I started seeing images like this.
- Turns out the camera lens got fogged up and that wasn’t an isolated incident either later on in the night when I was shooting these samples I ended up shooting this as you can see foged up once again to be fair the temperature where I am is low I mean it’s 0° right now almost 4:00 a.m. uh another all nighter so if you guys appreciate,
- Point is this kind of fogging should not really be happening I’m not I’m not even going to say for a phone in this price it shouldn’t be happening on any phone at any price point we did see this happening last year with Iq and xiaomi and this year it’s not happened with xiaomi and it’s a little disappointing that it’s still happening with IU anyways what wasn’t disappointing was video in fact I was pleasantly surprised 8K 30 was actually stable and usable 4K 60 a few drops but mostly detailed smooth and stable footage I mean this makes me even more mad at the state the xiaomi 15 pro has been launched
- I mean guys if iku with downgraded Optics on a phone that’s not even focusing on cameras can get the primary camera to shoot shoot such beautiful video
- I have no idea what xiaomi is doing now talking about jetri video IU offers that too but via the selfie camera this camera can shoot 4K 60 which was added after an update
- But as you can see this is not good 4K 60 this 32 mapix camera does a fair job with Stills though detailed selfies with slightly boosted saturation.
- Now the secondary camera is a 50 megapixel Ultra wide the Samsung jn1 and it has autof Focus so it does pull double duty for macros shots such as this the third camera here’s the other downgrade
- No Periscope this time instead we get a Sony IMX 816 a 1x 2.93 in sensor that’s paired with another optically stabilized f1.9 lens this gets you two EX optical zoom.
Camera Portraits Iqoo 13
- It’s basically there for portraits and it’s good IU’s also provided a few options for these portraits once again I like the black and White’s best I guess I have a thing for monochrome I suppose and talking about presets you enter the humanistic Street snap camera mode that’s a mouthful
- When you swipe up from the regular camera interface
- This gives you all pro controls and a bunch of presets to shoot images like this it’s for quick street photography I suppose so that’s exactly what I ended up doing
- so overall the Optics here I’d call it competent just not great it’s definitely the area where IUS cut most Corners so if cameras are a primary priority for you this phone.
At you, who is this phone for?
- It’s probably not aimed at you so who is this phone for if that’s your question the answer is it’s probably aimed at people who are willing to tolerate the downgrade in optics for this competitive price
- In China the IQ 13 starts at $39.99 remm which converts to about $550 us or 47,000 Rupees Indian this makes the Iqoo 13 one of the least expensive Snapdragon 8 Elite phones today and honestly
- I like a lot of what IQ’s done here the choices they’ve made the choice to not go with a pro model the choice to not compromise on the display the choice to go for an IP rating the choice to still provide a charger in the box so anyways that’s everything IQ 13 what do you guys think about this phone on a scale of 1 to 10 what would you rate the Iqoo 13 let me know in the comments thanks for
