iQOO Z9 Review
iQOO has turned up the throttle this year. A company once only focused on performance has now come out with one of the best all-rounders in the sub-₹20,000 smartphone segment. The iQOO Z9 is a jack of all trades – it has the BEST performance under ₹20K, a fantastic primary camera that does extremely well in most conditions, and a gorgeous AMOLED display. The battery life is also pretty decent; it should easily last most users a full day. The only two areas where iQOO could step up more are design and UI.
iQOO smartphones prioritise power above all – that’s the iQOO DNA we have become familiar with over the years. However, in the cutthroat smartphone market of 2024, that’s simply not enough. A focus on camera quality, battery life, and display is nearly essential. To that end, iQOO has taken it upon themselves to offer more holistic options across various budgets. The iQOO Z9 embodies this reform. While it boasts the fastest chipset under ₹20,000, it also features a robust camera system, a larger battery, and an improved display compared to its predecessor. The sub-₹20K price segment is extremely competitive, with rivals such as the Realme 12+ 5G (review), Motorola G84, and Nothing Phone (2a) (review). Let’s see if the iQOO Z9 can carve out a space for itself in the competitive budget smartphone market in my review.
The iQOO Z9 is priced at ₹19,999 for the 8+128 GB variant and at ₹21,999 for the 8+256 GB variant. You can avail a flat ₹2,000 discount on certain bank cards such as ICICI and HDFC cards. The phone is available for purchase on iQOO’s official website and Amazon India.
The iQOO Z9 is well-built. It has the essentials such as an IP54 dust and water resistance rating, a matte back panel and a matte frame that resists fingerprints, and a super slim profile at just 7.83 mm thickness. It’s decently comfortable to hold and non-slippery as well, so you may actually get away with not using a case. However, the flat sides may dig into your palms at times.
The frame and rear panel are plastic, and this is where the iQOO Z9 falls behind. Competitors such as the Moto G84 and Realme 12+ 5G come with a sweet vegan leather back panel, which looks infinitely more premium.
The iQOO Z9 is available in two colourways – Brushed Green and Graphene Blue. I got the former for review. It has a feather-like pattern on the back that shows up when light reflects on it. The design could be considered as garish by some, while some may like it; so it comes down to your personal preference.
The camera module is situated on the top left of the rear panel; it is a glossy black module that houses two cameras, the dual flash, and some text that reads “Aspherical Premium Lens”. The iQOO branding sits on the bottom. The right side of the frame houses the power button and volume rocker while the left is completely blank. On the bottom, you have the USB-C charging port, one of the two speakers, and a SIM/SD card tray.
Up front, the bezels are pretty slim on three sides, but the chin is considerably thicker. The iQOO Z9 houses an in-display fingerprint sensor, but it is not the fastest I’ve experienced at this price. All in all, I like the build quality of the iQOO Z9; it uses plastic but doesn’t feel very cheap. However, the vegan leather backs cropping up in the sub-₹20,000 segment pose serious competition to the iQOO Z9 in this regard.
Last year, the iQOO Z7 (review) boasted a display measuring just 6.38 inches – a rarity in the budget segment where compact phones have nearly disappeared. It’s sad news for compact phone lovers as the iQOO Z9 ditches the compact form factor and adopts a more traditional 6.67-inch display size. So, this year you get a 6.67-inch AMOLED display with Full HD+ resolution and 120 Hz refresh rate support. The phone has Adaptive Refresh Rate support as well, but weirdly enough, the phone doesn’t support 120 Hz scrolling in any app I tried including YouTube, Snapchat, and even Chrome. The only time it stays at 120 Hz is when you’re scrolling through the phone’s UI, which is quite disappointing.
Refresh rate issues aside, the display is quite impressive given the affordable price tag. It has 394 PPI, meaning it is sharp enough. The display also supports 16.7 million colours and is HDR-compliant. When I watched HDR content on YouTube and Netflix, everything looked crisp and vibrant. The AMOLED display produces deep blacks and enhanced contrast. The phone is also sufficiently bright. It is rated at 1,800 nits of peak local brightness, and in my tests, I got a reading of over 1,300 nits in Auto Brightness Mode under bright sunlight.
The dual stereo speakers enhance the content consumption experience; it is a huge leap over the single speaker that was present in its predecessor, the iQOO Z7. The speaker produces full sound with good bass and vocals.
Everyone expects iQOO to top the performance charts and the iQOO Z9 successfully does that in the sub-₹20,000 price segment. It features the powerful MediaTek Dimensity 7200 chipset which has a maximum clock speed of 2.8 GHz. It has 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM and up to 256 GB of UFS 2.2 storage, with the option to expand it via SD card. The UFS 2.2 storage speeds are slower compared to the newly launched Realme 12+, which has UFS 3.1.
That aside, the iQOO Z9 pretty much destroys every other phone under ₹20,000 when it comes to raw power. The iQOO Z9 is the fastest phone you can get your hands on under ₹20,000. And this is confirmed by a slew of benchmark scores. The phone was much faster than other phones under ₹20K, so I’m comparing it with phones from the ₹20-₹25K price bracket. The phone scores 7,30,223 in AnTuTu v10, which even beats the Nothing Phone (2a) featuring the same processor. In GeekBench, the iQOO Z9 scores a whopping 1187 points in the Single Core test – higher than all its competitors. In the Multi-Core test, the POCO X6 5G pulls ahead, but it did launch at ₹22K. The phone also gets a score of 11649 in PCMark Work, which is pretty good.
In GPU benchmarks, there’s no contesting its power. The phone outputted 4133 points in 3D Mark Wild Life and 1151 points in 3D Mark Wild Life Extreme, showcasing the potential of its GPU. In all the tests I ran in GFXBench, the iQOO Z9 once again came out on top.
Real-world performance is also top-notch. The phone showed no signs of throttling even under sustained workload, which is confirmed by the CPU Throttling Test scores where no throttling was detected.
Everything from browsing social media to playing heavy-duty games runs smoothly here. You can even play Call of Duty: Mobile at 90 fps, and it’s super smooth with minimal heat and frame skips. So, performance-wise, the iQOO Z9 can handle pretty much anything you throw at it.
Moving on to the UI, the iQOO Z9 comes with Funtouch OS 14 based on Android 14. The company offers two years of software updates and three years of security updates, which is standard at this price. Funtouch OS looks a bit clunky and comes with quite a bit of bloatware. It’s not nearly as bad as some Realme phones, but third-party apps such as Snapchat, Netflix, Agoda, Candy Crush, and more are preinstalled. I hope iQOO fine-tunes its software more to meet 2024 standards in its future launches. Especially since the Nothing Phone (2a) with essentially no bloatware is available at ₹24K.
iQOO has done a fantastic job tuning the Z9’s camera. The iQOO Z9 houses a 50-megapixel Sony IMX882 primary sensor with OIS support. There’s no ultrawide shooter, which is a bummer; you just get a nominal 2-megapixel depth shooter. Up front, you’ve got a 16-megapixel selfie camera as well. While the lack of an ultrawide camera can be jarring to some, the primary camera has improved by spades compared to the predecessor. The Sony IMX882 camera is capable of clicking some surprisingly stunning photos in daylight and low-light situations.
In daylight, the main camera clicks fantastic shots. Images look crisp, colours look surprisingly close to natural, and the shadows and highlights are well-exposed. The dynamic range is solid for the price, it compares to some ₹30-35K phones I’ve tested from last year. You can also click 2x in-sensor zoom images, and these look nearly indistinguishable from the 1x shots, which is very commendable. Close-up pictures are excellent too; with a natural bokeh effect.
1x and 2x portrait shots come out looking good with close to natural representation of skin tones. The edge detection could be better in some cases, but these results are quite good for the price.
The iQOO Z9 also allows you to click full 50-megapixel shots and the dynamic range doesn’t take much of a hit here, which is great to see. Details are enhanced, especially when you pixel peep and the colours remain close to natural. I’m adding some 50 MP samples below, but do note that they’ve been compressed for the web. There’s also a macro mode, and you can click some half-decent shots here as well.
The iQOO Z9 shines when it comes to low-light photography. There’s minimal noise and lens flare, and the results generally look very polished. The shadows may lack some detail, but you have to remember that this is a ₹20K phone, so it is a nitpick. Check out the low-light camera samples below, they look excellent for the price.
The selfie camera is decent, not the best pictures in low light, but daylight performance is definitely usable. The iQOO Z9 can also shoot 4K video with stabilisation, and it works wonders. So, good job here iQOO!
The iQOO Z9 comes with a large 5,000 mAh battery. According to iQOO, this is the biggest battery on an iQOO Z series smartphone yet. The battery life of the iQOO Z9 is better than the likes of the Realme 12+ 5G but the Moto G84 does last longer. Nevertheless, I got a screen-on time of nearly 5-6 hours daily, which is pretty decent. My days consisted of clicking lots of pictures, browsing through social media, and some light gaming.
The phone has decent efficiency – one hour of GPS navigation drained the battery by about 9 per cent and 30 minutes of streaming Netflix depleted the battery by 6 per cent. The iQOO Z9 supports 44 W fast charging which charges the phone from zero to full in 74 minutes. This is much slower than the Realme 12+ which charges to full in just 48 minutes.
iQOO has turned up the throttle this year. A company once only focused on performance has now come out with one of the best all-rounders in the sub-₹20,000 smartphone segment. The iQOO Z9 is a jack of all trades – it has the best performance under ₹20K, a fantastic primary camera that does extremely well in most conditions, and a gorgeous AMOLED display. The battery life is also pretty decent; it should easily last most users a full day. The only two areas where iQOO could step up more are design and UI. The design looks a bit cheaper than other similarly priced options and the UI feels clunky and has quite a bit of bloatware. These are minor issues though. The iQOO Z9 is one of the easiest phones to recommend under ₹20K – it checks all the major boxes and is priced very competitively.
