So the iQOO 11 5G is nothing short of a beast in terms of performance. From the design to its battery; to performance, to the display – everything about the smartphone looks and feels premium and top-notch. The software, however, is not the best we have seen on a phone in this segment and the cameras don’t match up to the smartphone’s performance chops.
2023 is here and we finally have our first flagship of the year, the iQOO 11 5G. iQOO’s 11th generation flagship smartphone has generated a lot of interest before its launch and I was super excited to test out this smartphone and experience Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 flagship chipset, in order to get an idea as to what’s coming in the smartphone space this year. The iQOO 11 is a beast of a performer. It comes with bleeding edge specs like a brand new Samsung E6 AMOLED display with 144Hz refresh rate, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset with up to 16GB of RAM, 120W fast charging and much more! So naturally, we were super excited to get our hands on one of the most powerful smartphones out there. Here’s what we think:
iQOO 11 5G: Design
Starting with the basics, the design of the iIQOO 11 5G is beautiful. While it is your traditional glass-slab form factor, the back panel is draped in beautiful white faux leather, with the BMW M Motorsport racing stripes running down from the right side of the back panel. These blue and red racing stripes have a rather gloss-like finish, and to add to the detail, you can see a carbon-fibre-like pattern inside the racing stripes upon looking closely. Very cool attention to detail. The iQOO branding along with the “Fascination Meets Innovation” tagline is right on the racing stripes. The rectangular camera cutout is placed in the top-left corner, which also has a two-tone colour scheme with both grey and black panels. The back panel of the iQOO 11 5G is beautiful to look at and offers a super premium in-hand feel.
Up front, things are rather simple. There’s the flat 6.7-inch E6 AMOLED display with a hole-punch cutout at the top with minimal bezels. The iQOO 11 5G further has a metal frame, which gives you a more reinforced and dense in-hand feel. The display, however, doesn’t flow in the frame seamlessly and looks stuck on, adding more edges to where the display meets the frame. Overall, this is a very nice design from iQOO and the in-hand feel is extremely premium. However, the screen doesn’t merge in the frame as seamlessly as we have seen on some other flagships.
iQOO 11 5G: Display
Coming to display, this is a super-bright, super-responsive, and super-detailed display. This is the first smartphone to launch with an E6 AMOLED display, which means this is probably the best display on any smartphone in the country so far. In reality, things aren’t too different. This display looks and feels premium from the moment you turn on the smartphone. The response is slick with the 144Hz refresh rate. While we are not sure that the refresh rate is a full 144Hz while scrolling through the interface, it surely feels super slick. No games support 144FPS on smartphones yet, but games like Call of Duty: Mobile run on the highest-possible frame rate. According to our Gamebench testing, Call of Duty: Mobile ran at a constant 60FPS at 100 per cent frame rate stability in our test, which is pretty great.
The display is also super vivid, but the colours feel a bit oversaturated. In the “vivid” or “bright” display settings especially, the contrast on this display is really off, and the colours are too saturated. The skin tone is really off, and this blows up the reds in vivid display settings. However, in the normal or “natural” display setting, the colour accuracy is pretty good. We matched the iQOO 11 5G’s picture quality with our winner for the best display smartphone (iPhone 14 Pro Max), and the colours were pretty much the same, but only in certain colour settings. In “vivid” or “bright” colour settings, however, the contrast is completely off and the iQOO 11 5G has a hard time matching skin tones.
In terms of detail, however, this display is very good. Be it watching content or playing games, the detail on this display is superb. There is no haze effect and the detail remains consistent throughout the scenes. You will be able to see details as minor as patterns or textures clearly. During gaming also, the visibility on this display was wide, and the details were very accurate. However, the colour contrast issue persists with games as well, but it's still manageable and in a lot of in-game scenarios, better. Overall, this is a proper flagship display which is super bright, super responsive, and highly detailed. Just the colours feel over-saturated.
iQOO 11: Performance
Talking about the elephant in the room, performance. In terms of performance, the iQOO 11 5G is overkill in every sense of the word. The smartphone is powered by Qualcomm’s latest 4nm flagship chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. It is the first smartphone in India to come with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, which is said to be the most powerful smartphone chip in the world right now. Pair that with 16GB of RAM, and you get a smartphone that is as powerful as many laptops. Naturally, this phone is super fast. The performance is outstanding and the iQOO 11 5G aced all the benchmarks we threw its way. On AnTuTu, the smartphone showed one of the highest scores ever at 1,272,241. Comparing it with some of the recent high-performing smartphones in the graph below, the iQOO 11 5G scores much higher in this benchmark.
On Geekbench 5 also the iQOO 11 5G showed impressive performance but lagged behind the A16 Bionic-powered Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max. It, however, scored higher than the next two highest-scoring Android smartphones – both powered by the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 (Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy Z Flip 4).
Other CPU benchmark tests like PCMark Work 2.0, and the iQOO 11 5G lagged behind other higher-end smartphones like the iPhone 14 Pro Max and the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4. Further, GPU benchmarks of the iQOO 11 5G showed better performance than the above-mentioned smartphones. Here's a look at a graph comparing GFXBench scores of the iQOO 11 5G, iPhone 14 Pro Max, and the Galaxy Z Fold 4.
In other benchmarks that test the smartphone's CPU while doing everyday tasks, the iQOO 11 5G was neck-and-neck with some of the top-performing smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 and iPhone 14 Pro Max. In storage speed tests, however, the iQOO 5G blew the competition out of the water. In sequential read speeds, the iQOO 11 5G showed close to double the speed as compared to the iPhone 14 Pro Max. In other storage speed tests, the iQOO 11 5G was well ahead of higher-end devices like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 and iPhone 14 Pro Max. This is due to the new UFS 4.0 storage used on the iQOO 11 5G, which, according to our tests, has shown a significant jump in read and write speeds. Here is a graph to give you a fair idea of the difference in storage speeds of the iQOO 11 5G against other high-performing smartphones in the market.
While the performance here is enough to easily call the iQOO 11 5G a full-blown gaming phone, one area where users don’t even think about all the performance overkill is the software. The iQOO 11 5G runs on Vivo’s FunTouch OS, which is not the best Android skin out there. There is still a bunch of bloatware, and the amount of things that you have to turn on or give permission for makes the setup process rather infuriating. However, once you are used to Vivo’s UI, there are a bunch of customisation options that do help make the experience more smooth, but this still takes a bit away from the overall premium or bleeding-edge experience that the iQOO 11 5G otherwise offers.
iQOO 11 5G: Battery
Coming to the battery, the iQOO 11 5G also has impressive battery optimisation. The smartphone’s battery lasted quite a while. In our video loop test, the smartphone lasted for over 15 hours while playing a video in full HD resolution at full brightness. The smartphone, in other battery tests, only drained 4 percent of the battery in a 15-minute long session of Call of Duty: Mobile on full graphics and the highest FPS setting. Further, the smartphone only lost 6 percent battery after 1 hour of GPS navigation, and it lost 5 percent of the battery while streaming a video in 2K resolution for 30 minutes. The charging on the iQOO 11 5G is also super fast. The 120W fast charger was able to charge the iQOO 11 5G from 0 to 100 in just over 27 minutes. That is blazing fast. Overall, the battery experience of this smartphone is very good and it's tough to imagine any kind of user asking for more out of the battery.
iQOO 11 5G: Camera
Coming to cameras, this has to be one thing where the iQOO 11 5G is just above average. The triple rear camera setup comes with a 50-megapixel primary shooter, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide angle lens, and a 13-megapixel telephoto lens. Now, this is a very standard camera configuration – with a higher resolution primary lens, an 8MP or 13MP wide-angle lens, and a telephoto lens. While it is a very good shooter for ideal lighting conditions like a studio or bright outdoors, in a lot of environments, the camera blows up the colours.
The 50-megapixel primary shooter is able to capture good detail, but the camera algorithms on this are far from what Vivo has mastered with its flagship smartphones in the X-series. Although there are features like a natural mode that puts out more true-to-life images with minimal processing, without it, the images are more vibrant and the colours seem slightly blown up. iQOO has also used the Vivo V2 image processing chip, which also helps with post-processing, but there are not too many camera smarts here that absolutely require a separate chip.
The wide-angle lens on the iQOO 11 5G is also just above average. While there is very minimal colour shift while switching from primary to wide angle lens, the wide-angle shooter doesn’t produce detailed images as the primary shooter does. The telephoto lens is good for 2X optical zoom, which does the job without losing much detail. Furthermore, the portrait mode on the iQOO 11 5G is good. The edge detection, while it does the job nicely, looks evidently computer-generated. The front camera on the iQOO 11 5G is also decent. The skin tones are accurate, but the front camera at times, overprocesses the images and lacks detail in many shots.
iQOO 11 5G: Verdict
So the iQOO 11 5G is nothing short of a beast in terms of performance. From the design to the battery to performance, to even the display – everything about the smartphone looks and feels premium and top-notch. The software, however, is not the best we have seen and the cameras don’t match up to the smartphone’s performance chops. Overall, however, the iQOO 11 5G gives us an idea of what is in store for the coming year in the smartphone space. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is super fast and matching that with 16GB of RAM and an ultra-responsive 144Hz E6 display, the experience is just super smooth.
iQOO 11 5G Key Specs, Price and Launch Date
| Release Date: | 10 Jan, 2023 |
| Market Status: | Launched |
Key Specifications
Screen size (in inches)
6.8
-
Rear Camera Megapixel
64
-
Battery capacity (mAh)
5000
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Storage
256
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