iQoo 11 review

The best praise I pays the iQoo 11 is I may fortunately use it as my essential telephone for the foreseeable future. That’s not one thing I can say about most of the telephones that come throughout my desk for evaluate.

It’s a pleasing shock given this can be a telephone from the sub-brand of Vivo, an organization that hardly sells telephones in Europe and has no presence within the US. iQoo itself doesn’t promote the iQoo 11 or another telephones formally in these areas.

That’s an actual disgrace as this can be a excellent telephone. It’s the primary to ship with Qualcomm’s high-end Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset and it exhibits. This is likely one of the quickest, most responsive Android telephones I’ve ever used.

The software program may nonetheless use some enchancment and there’s a gross quantity of bloatware pre-installed, however you’ll be rewarded with nice battery life, wonderful cameras, and high efficiency that makes this a wonderful choice for cellular avid gamers if you may get your arms on it.

And that’s the catch right here, as a result of the iQoo 11 is barely on sale in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and India.

Design & construct

• No frills design…
• …Until you get the white one
• Very, very slippery

The iQoo 11 I reviewed is a delicate, plain matt black glass mannequin. It’s delicate however one of many slipperiest telephones I’ve ever used. Though I dislike a budget plastic case included within the field, I used it as a result of in any other case, the telephone was always falling out of my (small) arms and off couch arms.

This mannequin is in sharp distinction to the opposite model, which is a vivid white with BMW branding and a blue and purple stripe down the again. I want the black mannequin.

On the rear of the telephone is an oblong digicam module that’s fairly giant however has flat glass panel protecting defending the triple cameras and flash. It’s a wise look that takes its cues from telephones such because the Samsung Galaxy S20 Extremely.

Metallic rails across the edge are solely damaged by a quantity rocker on the proper above an influence button, with a USB-C port, SIM tray, mic and speaker grille on the underside.

I don’t love the ‘ULTRA SENSING’ branding beneath the digicam housing nevertheless it’s extra delicate than on another telephones on the market and is a small nod to conventional digicam design and lettering. There’s additionally no IP score for mud and water resistance, which is a disgrace.

Display screen & audio system

• Flat Samsung E6 panel
• 6.78in, 144Hz, AMOLED
• Twin stereo audio system

Like many fashionable telephones, the iQoo 11 is completely monumental due to its 6.78in AMOLED display screen. I feel it’s too massive, however I want small telephones due to my tiny arms.

It’s one of many first telephones to make use of Samsung’s E6 show, an AMOLED panel with a 144Hz refresh charge and a 2K decision of 3200 x 1440. It’s excellent and has a peak brightness of 1,800 nits making for clear studying open air.

With that prime refresh charge additionally comes LTPO 3.0 which might intelligently fluctuate the refresh charge between 60- and 144Hz to avoid wasting battery energy. It appears nice, although not as easy to my eyes as comparable tech on the iPhone 14 Professional and Google Pixel 7 Professional.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

It’s additionally virtually inconceivable to inform the distinction between 120- and 144Hz, so that you shouldn’t go for this telephone purely based mostly on that spec. Higher is iQoo’s clunkily named ‘twin monster contact’ which implies you may function the left and proper sides of the display screen concurrently in panorama mode whereas gaming with as much as 4 contact factors for extra versatile management.

Twin stereo audio system are good to see (and listen to!) and are completely satisfactory for gaming and a few informal YouTube watching.

Specs & efficiency

• Snapdragon 8 Gen 2
• Vivo’s V2 chip
• 256GB storage/16GB RAM

Vivo and iQoo made certain the iQoo 11 was the primary telephone to market with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset. It’s nice to see, as typically we see new chips launched however telephones introduced later nonetheless with the earlier era of silicon.

The 8 Gen 2 appears like a stable step up, at the least on this telephone. Generally upgrades are incremental however wanting on the uncooked benchmark scores in addition to efficiency when multitasking and gaming, the iQoo clearly delivers.

Rounds of Name of Obligation Cellular and Asphalt 9 have been flawless with body charges sky-high and no seen lag.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

iQoo has a gaming focus as a model and that’s evident with the inclusion of Vivo’s V2 chip within the telephone which the corporate says will increase body charge and reduces energy consumption. I’m unsure if it’s the chip doing that particularly, however the gaming expertise is high notch and comparable with different gaming telephones, most of which look way more outlandish in design than the delicate black mannequin I used to be testing.

It additionally helps that the telephone comes with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM, a quick and succesful reminiscence customary which means this telephone flies via the whole lot. Plus, 256GB storage is greater than sufficient for me too, however there’s no expandable choice.

The telephone barely ran sizzling even after I put it below intense load, which may be right down to the inclusion of what iQoo calls a vapour chamber liquid cooling system. So far as I can inform, this doesn’t really comprise liquid, as a substitute utilizing skinny layers of graphite and stainless-steel to dissipate the warmth created by the chipset and parts when gaming, for instance.

iQoo says this may cut back the warmth improve within the higher a part of the telephone by greater than two levels centigrade.

The haptics on the telephone are additionally excellent, with little pips for the keyboard vibrations that aren’t nearly as good as on the most recent iPhone however come fairly shut.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

Digital camera & video

• Wonderful 50Mp essential sensor
• 13Mp telephoto/portrait digicam
• 8Mp ultra-wide digicam

The cameras on the iQoo 11 are surprisingly wonderful. The primary 50Mp sensor isn’t nearly as good or effectively calibrated because the equal on the Vivo X80 Professional, nevertheless it appears like Vivo handed on among the picture processing methods of that nice digicam to this one.

Dynamic vary is superb, and pictures have lots of vibrancy, however the auto mode boosts blue skies and inexperienced grass to fairly saturated ranges. The sky within the first 4 pictures of the slide present exhibiting St Pancras Resort was as orange as they give the impression of being – it’s the digicam capturing the scene effectively somewhat than making it weirdly orange.

Some footage are additionally over sharpened, giving a man-made feeling. I needed to faucet to focus a number of instances to get improved outcomes, which the principle sensor is unquestionably able to. Within the beneath picture, the dangling chains from among the cranes should not correctly processed, and the picture could be very over-sharpened:

Henry Burrell / Foundry

However within the beneath photograph the extent of element is superb and the dynamic vary could be very consultant of the scene:

Henry Burrell / Foundry

The imaging inconsistency is predicted at a telephone of this worth, and for the big half, the principle digicam excels. The ultrawide is serviceable however much less spectacular, although the 2x optical zoom of the telephoto lens is sweet to have and retains an excellent stage of element and high quality regardless of utilizing a much less highly effective f/2.46 13Mp sensor.

I additionally had to ensure default settings for filters and sweetness modes have been turned off to keep away from some funky software program processing. It’s maddening that a few of these are turned on by default, however this can be a telephone bought in markets that may want these types of options.

Video seize can be first rate, and zooming in whereas recording is easy and there’s an excellent diploma of stability, even at 10x. The telephone can report as much as 8K at 30fps, too.

Battery & charging

• Excellent battery life
• Tremendous fast 120W quick charging
• In-built cooling for gaming

Battery life on this telephone is unimaginable, notably when contemplating the ability of the chipset and the big, vivid display screen. In PC Mark’s battery take a look at, it ran for 17 hours and 51 minutes, the all-time rating we’ve recorded for a flagship, and the second-best we’ve ever recorded (behind the loopy 24 hours 52 minutes for the mid-range Sony Xperia 10 IV).

Day-to-day utilization on 4G and 5G with my essential SIM card in it, the telephone simply lasted a day and normally a number of hours right into a second earlier than I used to be reaching for a charger.

The 120W charger comes within the field and actually modified how I charged my telephone. No extra plugging in in a single day vital when you may plug it in whenever you stand up and it’s totally charged in a mind-boggling 27 minutes. There’s no wi-fi charging compatibility, although.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

See also  Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 Classic review

Software program & updates

• Android 13
• Tons of bloatware
• Solely two years of updates

The iQoo 11 runs Vivo’s Funtouch OS based mostly on Android 13. It’s good to see the most recent model out of the field, although the corporate solely guarantees two platform updates to Android 15.

It’s a disgrace that Funtouch OS is so, effectively, boring. It contains neat touches like a nano music participant widget however the Materials You color theming from Android 13 is nowhere to be seen. The telephone’s menus nearly really feel like an Android telephone from 2017.

The telephone comes with a gross quantity of bloatware put in, too. Once I first booted it up I got here throughout a pre-installed folder known as ‘Scorching Apps’ which, to be honest, hasn’t really put in 60 (!) apps however they’re a one-click set up away. There’s an analogous folder known as ‘Scorching Video games’, each of which set up these apps through Vivo’s V-Appstore.

Whereas it’s widespread for Android telephones exterior of Western markets to have a couple of app retailer, it’s nonetheless galling to have what principally quantities to folders filled with app adverts pre-loaded onto a telephone you’ll have paid good cash for. iQoo additionally pre-installs its personal Cellphone and Messages apps however you should use Google’s in case you want.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

There are a number of different pre-installed apps equivalent to Viu, SnackVideo, Shopee and Lazada. Fear not, Google Play Retailer is right here and the telephone runs Google companies with no hitch. I ran the telephone with all my regular apps accessible.

Higher software program additions are the gaming modes that auto-run whenever you hearth up a sport. Swiping in from the left whereas in-game provides you a panel with learn outs of CPU and GPU utilization and tabs to pick three gaming modes together with monster, which jacks up the telephone’s efficiency for the perfect gaming expertise doable.

Value & availability

The iQoo 11 is on sale in Indonesia for IDR10,999,000 which is about $720/£590 on the time of evaluate in January 2023.

The telephone can be on sale in India from ₹61,999, in Thailand from ฿27,990.00, and in Malaysia from RM3,499.

Verdict

The iQoo 11 is straightforward to suggest. It has gorgeous efficiency in a plain design (in case you get the black one) which is able to swimsuit avid gamers on the lookout for a succesful telephone however don’t need a garish design.

The battery life is superb, the flat display screen is excellent, and the cameras are excellent for the value vary. Extra annoying is the quantity of bloatware and the final blandness of Funtouch OS, with a measly two years of model updates.

Should you dwell in a rustic the place the iQoo 11 is bought, then it’s a advantageous buy and some of the performant telephones you may get on this worth vary. For anybody else, I recommend shopping for one thing in-country somewhat than importing the iQoo 11 and probably shedding out on guarantee and after-purchase service from the corporate.

Specs

• Android 13 with Funtouch OS 13
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2
• 6.78in 3200 x 1440 144Hz AMOLED show
• 256GB non-expandable UFS 4.0 storage
• 16GB LPDDR5X RAM
• 50Mp f/1.88 essential digicam sensor
• 8Mp f/2.2 ultrawide
• 13Mp f/2.46 2x optical telephoto
• 5000mAh battery
• 120W wired quick charging
• Bluetooth 5.3
• GPS
• NFC
• 164.86 × 77.07 × 8.40 mm
• 208g