The IQOO 9 has arrived in India and this is the phone that’s targeting the OnePlus 9RT. You may think how? because, OnePlus is far ahead with its unique designs and improved tech compared to Vivo smartphones. Read the whole thing and you will get exactly what I’m trying to tell you about.
IQOO 9 has eight 5g bands which is pretty good and the phone supports carrier aggregation so no issues there.
Indian Variant Vs Chinese Variant
Firstly let me make it clear that the IQOO 9 Indian variant is very different from the Chinese variant. There’s no 8 Gen1, no wireless charging, the cameras are different. Basically it’s a different phone altogether.
In China the IQOO 9 is a different phone altogether, the Indian version on the other hand is pretty similar and well matched with OnePlus 9RT beat on the design, the display, cameras or even things like the 5G bands.
DESIGN AND BUILD
The IQOO 9 is pretty looking, it’s slim and not heavy. The look at the back makes it attractive, you could feel that luxurious design and definitely the design is inspired by the BMW design.
It has the matte gorilla glass 6 back with the pattern signifying the BMW partnership.
There’s a camera module with the gimbal camera text. The frame is aluminium and the power buttons are not too curvy or not too flat, with the blue colour they seemed to ke as the intermediate design between the both.
The design looks fine but just to make it clear, the IQOO 9 doesn’t have the same finish on the back as the 9 pro.
Both phones look kinda similar in design, the exception is the back camera module which is huge on the IQOO 9 pro. IQOO 9 pro is definitely the better looking phone which actually makes sense.
On the IQOO 9 on the bottom you get the USB c port which like on the 9RT is USB 2.0. There’s no micro sd slot, no headphone jack and no ip rating, no wireless charging but you do get stereo speakers, there’s a speaker at the bottom and there’s a speaker in the earpiece on the top.
As for the size it’s not a huge or massive phone which is something I personally prefer.
Display
The screen is FHD +, 120Hz, 6.56″ AMOLED screen powered by Schott Xensation UP Glass. It’s a good quality panel because it’s Amoled, so the colours and the blacks all look great. I also like that this display is bright and nice and it supports the widevine L1 licence along with HDR in the NETFLIX app.
Playing some HDR shows on Netflix looks really good so yeah the display seems good. One thing to note is that the IQOO doesn’t have a good Ideal Gorilla glass screen protection but it does have Schott Xensation UP Glass protection, not sure if the Gorilla glass is better or this is better but at least there’s some protection so it’s fine.
The fingerprint scanner is inside the display and it’s fast and nice.
Hardware
When it comes to the hardware specs the IQOO 9’s main highlight is the Snapdragon 888+, plus is nothing but a slight upgrade compared to the Snapdragon 888 chipset.
This phone comes with LPDDR5 RAM (8/12GB with 128/256GB) and you have a 3.1 storage.
These are the benchmark test result which I ran a couple of days before.
Geekbench 5.4.4 benchmark results -854425
Single core – 1147
Multi core – 3442
As you can see the scores are pretty good and when it come to day to day performance I haven’t used this as my daily driver but I’ve used this phone quite a bit ( Thanks to my friend Gulzar for providing me his phone for the testing purpose) the phone feels like a high-end flagship, responsive fast phone and gaming is good too.
In BGMI I suppose the max graphics ultra HD and Ultra frame rates and the gameplay was very good in the couple of sessions I played.
CPU throttling issues
I tested the phone for sometime and I felt that this smartphone is having some serious thermal throttling issues, in 15 minute 20 thread test the IQOO 9 throttled to 83 percent of it’s maximum performance which is good but I wanted to put some stress on the phone so I also did a 50 threads 30 minutes test and in this test the phone did throttle a bit but it was fine at 71 percent.
I also conducted an extreme 100 threads test and the IQOO 9 here was decent throttling to 72 percent of it’s maximum performance. So it’s not very good when it come to throttling but it’s not bad either.
SOFTWARE
Apart from the performance I like the fact that IQOO 9 comes with thw latest Android 12 update on board, there’s obviously fun touch Operating system and all of it’s features and quirks but, the fact that it has Android 12 means it will get to Android 14. IQOO has confirmed two major Android updates and three years of security patches.
As of the Junkware IQOO 9 comes with a lot of IQOO specific apps but, when it comes to third party apps some apps are pre-installed like Josh, Netflix, Cred, Facebook etc and you can definitely uninstall them.
CAMERA
The camera setup is not any unusual. It’s comes with a gimbal camera system which has a triple camera setup with the IMX 598 primary camera and for the photos I’ve taken so far the camera seems promising.
In day time I like that the colours in photos are mostly natural not boosted or anything and most photos have good details, good dynamic range.
In low light IQOO 9 almost always turns on the night mode by default with it’s gimbal OIS system making sure there’s no blurry photos and the photos are almost always bright and sharp which is very nice.
The Ultrawide angle camera is kind of fine, it captuy shadows and highlights well and even though it lacks the details like most ultrawide angle sensors the colours are good.
The other 13MP potrait sensor which brings 2x optical zoom works pretty well and I personally liked it. It’s not out of the world or extraordinary but it’s kind of decent. The potrait shots have the unnatural colour in them, edge detection is good but the colour it bit strange.
When it come to video shooting, the rear camera supports up to 4K@60fps video recording and there’s also the very cool gimbal system for the better stabilization.
Front camera
The IQOO 9’s front camera works great, the selfies from the phone looks very good with the camera capturing good skin tone and details on the face. One thing to note is that the IQOO 9’s front camera only shoots at 1080p, there’s no 4K support which is something I kind of expect in this price range.
Battery & Charging
IQOO 9 comes with a 4350mAh battery with the 120W Flash Charge. Now the battery is something I tested and the 120W flash charger is insanely fast as you’d expect.
It takes the phone from 10 to 50% in a crazy 6 minutes! and it fully charges the phone in 18 minutes! This is super fast.
Price of IQOO 9
At the time of writing this blog I don’t know the exact price of this smartphone but, I’m expecting it to be priced around 42 to 43K INR
Pricing @ masterofphones.in
The pricing published on masterofphones.in is meant to be used for general information only. While we monitor prices regularly, the ones listed above might be outdated sometimes. We also cannot guarantee these are the lowest prices possible so shopping around is always a good idea.
Don’t forget to check out blog on OnePlus 9RT
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