iQOO 13 Review
Introduction
This is yet another Snapdragon 8 Elite flagship, this time from Vivo sub brand iQOO. The iQOO 13 though, it’s a little different from the other 8 Elites we’ve been seeing so far. For starters it’s aggressively priced and then there is no pro model here.
Now what iQOO 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. iQOO still managed to include a lot of nice to haves like an ultra-sonic fingerprint scanner, an IP68 rating and a 2K display amongst other things.
So, in today’s review, we’re going to first unbox the iQOO 13 and then take a detailed look at what iQOO is offering here. So, let’s get started.
iQOO 13 Review – Pricing
So, in China the iQOO 13 starts at $39.99 Yuan which converts to about $550 us. In India iQOO 13 has launched at the price of 54,999 Rupees for 12GB/256GB and 59,999 Rupees for 16GB/512GB model. This makes the iQOO 13 one of the least expensive Snapdragon 8 Elite phones today.
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iQOO 13 Review – Unboxing and Build
This time I picked up the 12GB/256GB version which is the base. Once we open up the box, we are greeted by the iQOO 13 itself, I ended up going for the black version this time. iQOO also offers three other colour 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 are polished, so that is a fingerprint magnet. Now the other three colours, 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 grey, their metal frames have a matte finish.
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 are in sharp, so they don’t dig into the palm of your hand when you hold it. That said 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 grams lighter than the other colour skews.
Now here iQOO 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 and this is a performance focused flagship and if you’re even slightly tech savvy, I’m sure that the best way to almost double your performance is by adding RGB. So, this camera array, it’s got a RGB ring around it. We’ll talk about all that later.
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 cable which has white accents and finally there’s a 120W Vivo flash charger.
iQOO 13 Review – Battery
Now the iQOO 13 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 good. While wireless charging has been cut, the iQOO 13 does have an IP68/IP69 rating for dust and water resistance. The fingerprint scanner and display both can be used with wet hands. Now that’s thanks to iQOO going with an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner this time and they’ve also placed it right, it’s quite comfortable to use.
iQOO 13 Review – Display
Now the display here is a 10bit OLED panel sized 6.82 inches, the resolution is quad HD Plus or 2K, so it’s a very sharp panel with 510 pixels per in pixel density. There is no mention of the glass used for protection though.
Now this panel has 144Hz refresh rate with 8T LTPO tech, so the refresh rate can be varied as needed. iQOO boasts of a brightness Peak 1,800 nits and in my testing the iQOO 13 actually output a little more than that, 1850 nits. There is Wild Vine L1 too 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 has 2592Hz high frequency PWM dimming in case you’re sensitive to OLED flicker.
I really like how iQOO has 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.
Anyway, the display here, it’s paired with asymmetrically played stereo speakers that are pretty rich. The asymmetric placements ensure, you don’t cover both of them up when you’re gaming no matter which way you’re holding the phone.
iQOO 13 Review – Performance
Talking about gaming the iQOO 13 obviously, it’s powered by Qualcomm’s Flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite. This time Qualcomm’s taking big gains thanks to using their own custom Orion cores and we’ve been seeing mind-blowing synthetic benchmark numbers. But amongst the multiple 8 Elite phones so far one thing’s been common, they’ve all struggle to tame this Beast of an SoC.
So, that said iQOO’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 and like I’ve mentioned, the 8 Elite is 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.
By the way the Snapdragon 8 Elite, it’s paired with 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of UFS 4.0 storage and 12GB or 16GB of LPDDR5X 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-mega transfers per second, but most brands so far have been using 8,533-mega transfers per second RAM. iQOO though, they’ve used 9,600-mega transfers per second RAM here on the iQOO 13 and hence they’re branding it Ultra.
iQOO 13 Review – Software
When you have such top shelf internals, you’d expect the user experience to be very good and OriginOS 5 here built it up Android 15, it’s been excellent. Now when this phone launches globally it will not be running on OriginOS, but rather FunTouchOS. But it is a safe bet to expect the user experience to be just as good.
The software here is pretty similar to what we saw with the Vivo 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.
OriginOS 5 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.
iQOO 13 Review – Cameras
Anyways, let’s now talk about cameras. Over the years iQOO flagships have predominantly been performance focused smartphones. Last year though iQOO tried to changed that, they tried to cater to a wider audience by stepping up their camera game. With the iQOO 13, they seem to have walked that back. The primary here, it’s actually a downgrade.
Last year what we got was the 50 megapixel Omnivision OV50H, a 1/1.3 inch sensor on iQOO 12. But on the iQOO 13 this time, they’ve gone for a much smaller sensor the Sony IMX 921 or LYT-702 whatever you want to call it. It’s a 1/1.56 inch 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 performs above average, not as good as camera focused flagships, but not bad at all.
Now low light performance, that’s going to be the litmus test and here the iQOO 13 it’s still competent. The processing is fine, the highlight control is good but definitely not as good as we saw on say the OPPO X8 Pro or the OnePlus 13. So, the primary here is definitely a step below compared to other flagships we’ve been seeing.
Guys here’s where I noticed a weird issue as I was shooting samples and the light I started seeing foggy images, 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 samples, I ended up shooting blurry images, fogged up once again. To be fair the temperature where I am is low, so this could be a reason.
Anyways, the point is this kind of fogging should not really be happening. 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 iQOO and Xiaomi and this year it’s not happened with Xiaomi and it’s a little disappointing that it’s still happening with iQOO.
Anyways what wasn’t disappointing was video. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised 8K@30fps was actually stable and usable. There were a few drops at 4K@60fps, 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 if iQOO with downgraded optics on a phone, that’s not even focusing on cameras can get the primary camera to shoot such beautiful video, I have no idea what Xiaomi is doing.
Now talking about jittery video, iQOO offers that too, but via the selfie camera. This camera can shoot 4K@60fps which was added after an update, but this is not good 4K@60fps. This 32 megapixel 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 auto focus, so it does pull double duty for macro shots. The third camera here’s the other downgrade, no Periscope this time. Instead, we get a Sony IMX 816 a 1/2.93 inch sensor that’s paired with another optically stabilized f/1.9 lens. This gets you 2X optical zoom. It’s basically there for portraits and it’s good.
iQOO’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. 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 iQOO has cut most corners. So, if cameras are a primary priority for you, this phone is 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.
Final Thoughts
Honestly, I like a lot of what iQOO’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 IP68 rating, the choice to still provide a charger in the box.
So, anyways, that’s everything about iQOO 13. what do you guys think about this phone? let me know in the comments.
