iQOO 3 : Worth buying in 2021?

iQOO, for those of you who don’t know, is a subsidiary of Chinese manufacturer Vivo, whose Parent company, in-turn is BBK Electronics. The first smartphone that iQOO launched here in India was the iQOO 3, which quite surprisingly launched at a good price, considering what it came packed with. It was launched at 37K INR. But in a year’s time, the price’s has dropped significantly. It currently retails at 25K on Flipkart.

iQOO 3 Shot on iPhone 5s (Blogger compression killed it -_-) 

Having got it on Flipkart, I’ve been using the iQOO 3 for about two weeks now and here’s my review of the same. 

Performance

The iQOO 3’s got 2020’s flagship SoC, Snapdragon 865. And just like any other flagship chip, this too performs exceptionally well. Day-to-day tasks are child’s play and graphically intensive tasks too are handled really well. For me, who previously used the Redmi 7, with the Snapdragon 632, this feels so much faster. What betters the experience is the 8 Gigabytes of DDR5 RAM and 128 gigs of UFS 3.1 Storage. The 8 gigs of RAM are more than sufficient for multitasking and the fast storage cuts short app opening times significantly, while retaining efficiency. 

Display:

Here’s a gorgeous 6.4” AMOLED panel with a 1080 x 2400p resolution, support for HDR10+, a 180Hz Touch Sampling rate and 800 nits of ‘peak’ brightness. The refresh rate’s 60Hz though. Just like anyone else’s description of an AMOLED panel, it’s got inky blacks and vibrant colours. If you’ve got, or getting an smartphone with an AMOLED display, I’d highly recommend you to use it on Dark mode. It’s so much better than what I had on my old Redmi 7, which was more Grey-mode than Dark. The front’s also got a tiny punch-hole, with the selfie shooter. 

Though iQOO’s cut corners with the refresh rate, where it’s not is the fingerprint scanner. It’s got an in-display fingerprint scanner, which’s pretty quick and really accurate. One more feature that’s restricted to AMOLED displays is AOD (Always on Display), which the iQOO 3 does feature. 

Battery: 

While getting the iQOO 3, the only concern I had was the battery life. With 5000mAh batteries on most mid-range smartphones being quite common, the 4400 on the iQOO seemed quite low on paper. But it’s a whole different story in real life. I’ve been using it for day-to-day tasks like scrolling through Twitter, playing few not-so-heavy games, receiving calls and watching YouTube and the battery life’s been great. It easily lasts me a day and a half. And what’s icing on the cake is the fast charging. The iQOO 3 comes with a massive 55W power adapter in the box, which according to the company can charge the device from 0 to 50% in just 15 mins. In my experience so far though, it takes about 45 mins to charge from 20-95%. 

Cameras: 

Quad-Camera Setup on the iQOO 3  Shot on iPhone 5s (Yet again killed by compression -_-)

This’ something that the iQOO 3 received some criticism for. But that was considering its launch price, which was, as mentioned above, 37K. Now that it costs 25K, I’d say its cameras are pretty good for the price. It’s got a 48-Megapixel Primary shooter, a 13-Megapixel Ultrawide and Telephoto, with 2x Optical Zoom and a useless 2-Megapixel Depth sensor. Thanks to the SD 865, the primary can shoot 4K at 60 frames per second, with no stabilisation though. It also features a 16-Megapixel front camera, which coupled with the optimisation takes very soft photos. The skin-tones aren’t great and I’ve got no idea why most of the Chinese smartphones do this, they overly saturate the lips, making them look so bad. 

Build and design:

Unlike certain phones in this price-bracket, the iQOO 3 features a glass-sandwich design, giving it a premium in-hand feel. Just like any other glass back panel, this too takes up a lot of fingerprints. But the Tornado Black variant that I’ve got doesn’t really make the fingerprints stand out. The sides, they’re aluminium, adding on to the premium feel. 

When it comes to the design of the back panel, the Tornado Black variant, when placed against light, has got a nice purple patch. It also’s got quite a camera bump, which makes typing while placed on a flat surface difficult. 

What’s unique to the iQOO 3 in terms of build is the integration of touch sensitive buttons on the RHS frame. They can be used as triggers while playing shooter games or can be mapped for any other function on other games too. 

Software: 

This was something Vivo’d had a really bad reputation of. But it’s not the same story here. Out of the box, the iQOO 3 featured iQOO UI, based on Android 10, similar to Vivo’s FunTouch OS. With FunTouch OS getting so much better, this too has. As soon as I setup the phone, I received quite a few updates, the first two being minor ones. The third one though, was major. It brought with it Android 11 and a so much improved UI. Earlier, the animations were bad, in fact it never had proper app-closing animations, it just abruptly used to get you to the Home Screen. But the Android 11 update’s got it all. The notification shade too has improved a lot, with better icons and blurring out the Home Screen when brought down. The company’s promised 2 major Android update and if that holds true, the iQOO 3’ll probably get Android 12 too.

It’s also got a lot of customisations. You get to change animations, AOD and so much more. 

Final Verdict: Is iQOO 3 a potential contender of my ‘best under 25K’? 

The answer to that question is a big YES! Though there are a few corners cut, the value for money it provides is just insane. If you’re okay with the refresh rate and don’t mind having a 215g phone in your pocket, the iQOO 3’s surely not the phone you’d not want to consider. Actually, you can get it for even lesser if you’re okay exchanging your old smartphone for it, unless you’ve damaged it. 

Thanks for reading till the end! 🙂

#iQOO #iQOO3 #Smartphones