iQOO 12 is the first global phone equipped with Qualcomm’s new flagship chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. iQOO is a spin-off brand from Vivo that mainly caters to the Indian and Asian markets. The latest IQOO 12 is their most feature-packed flagship yet.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 performance
After all, that’s what sets the IQOO 12 apart from any phone we’ve seen before. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is what we’ll see in flagships going forward through 2024, and it brings several advancements. These include a faster CPU, a more powerful and power-efficient GPU with better racing, a new AI engine, and improved camera processing.
Dowload interesting ringtone for your phone: ringtonesonic.com
Benchmarks test
The IQOO 12 is considerably more powerful than last year’s flagship generation. When it comes to the CPU, we’re seeing a jump of 20 to 30% over phones with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. GPU benchmarks also saw about a 20% improvement over the previous chipset, and in specific racing tasks, the scores were 45% better. At the moment, the IQOO 12 is the most powerful Android phone you can get, topping the charts. But it’s not just about raw power, and the IQOO 12 actually managed to do a decent job when it comes to sustained performance. It was quite stable during our CPU stress test.
There was significant throttling during the GPU stress test, but it was still better than many other flagships out there, so gamers should be happy. Overall, the IQOO 12 flies through your everyday tasks too.
Design and build
The phone brings a premium look and feel in the white colorway. The glass back looks like porcelain, glossy and flat, but it curves at the edges into a flat and glossy aluminum frame. The phone is also rather slippery. Also, on the back are a huge rounded square camera bump and a small logo from BMW Motorsport. The IQOO 12 has Ingress Protection rated at IP64, meaning it’s good against dust and light splashes or rain, but avoid submerging the phone in water.
Screen specs and features
The display of the IQOO 12 is a flat 6.78-inch AMOLED with a 1260×2800 resolution and a 144Hz refresh rate at 453 PPI. This screen is quite sharp, and you get support for 10-bit color depth and HDR 10 plus video, with colors that can be very accurate depending on the settings. The brightness of the IQ 12’s display is rather impressive. We achieved a maximum of around 500 nits with the manual brightness slider and over 1,400 nits in auto mode when needed. The highest 144Hz refresh rate is reserved for games and compatible apps. In general, the phone uses 120Hz while swiping and scrolling and 1Hz when idling to save energy.
Audio and Storage options on IQOO 12
For audio, there’s a pair of stereo speakers, the top one having both an earpiece and a grill on the top of the frame. The speakers have very good loudness, but the audio quality is just decent with not much bass. You can wake up and unlock the IQOO 12 with the optical under-display fingerprint reader, which is quite responsive.
The phone comes with 256 or 512 gigs or a terabyte of UFS 4.0 storage that’s not expandable through microSD.
Android 14 and UI
The interface of the IQOO 12 is Vivo’s FunTouch 13 on top of the new Android 14. It has some aesthetic differences compared to stock Android, like the shape of the quick toggles. One cool feature is that you can map a shortcut for an app or task to the volume down key. Since the IQOO 12 has an IR blast BL, you can use it to control appliances, and there’s an ultra game mode available with an in-game overlay like you’d find on dedicated gaming phones. As far as software support goes, the iu2 has promised three major Android updates and four years of security patches.
Battery endurance and charging test
The phone has a 5,000 mAh battery, and the battery life is good with an active use score of 13 hours and 30 minutes, comparable to the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. But what you get here that you wouldn’t find on any Samsung phone is extra-fast 120W charging with the bundled adapter. We were able to charge the IQOO 12 from 0 to 69% in 15 minutes, and a full charge took 26 minutes.
Cameras
The IQOO 12 has a 50-megapixel main cam, a 64-megapixel 3 times telephoto, and a 50-megapixel ultra-wide camera. The main camera’s 12.5-megapixel photos are nicely detailed and sharp with pleasant-looking processing. You also get great dynamic range and contrast. The colors are a notch more saturated than reality but not over the top. There are various imperfections, though, especially in areas of high complexity. These often manifest as random blurry spots, and it seems to be due to some processing errors and failed image stacking. Portraits can be taken with all three cameras, but the default is from the main cam with 2x digital zoom.
These have great quality with a well-exposed and detailed subject and proficient separation from the background. Low-light photos taken with the main camera are excellent, with a lot of resolved detail, great exposure, solid noise reduction, and good color saturation. If you decide to use the night mode, the result is a slightly brighter photo.
Videos
The main camera’s 4K videos are acceptable in quality, but we expected more, with mediocre resolved detail and somewhat washed-out colors. The main cam can also record video in 8K at 30 FPS, and the level of detail is very good. The electronic stabilization on the IQOO 12 works great too. At night, the main cam supports 4K night mode video. It’s bright and detailed with punchy colors and wide dynamic range. You can see some noise in disguise, but it’s nothing too bad.
Telephoto cam
Its 16-megapixel photos at 3x zoom are excellent with a high level of detail, balance, sharpness, lively colors, and low noise. The contrast and dynamic range are great too. You can also take macro close-ups using the telephoto cam, and they’re really good—sharp and detailed with nice color reproduction and a natural bokeh. IU advertises a 10 times lossless zoom, and these are surprisingly good. The detail level isn’t on par with the three-time zoom shots, but it’s still decent.
