iQOO 8 Pro Review: 1st Step into Premium Market, And Well Done

1. Introduction

From up-and-coming brand to mainstream, iQOO has taken just three years, why? This starts in 2019 when the cell phone market is almost a foregone conclusion, Huawei and Honor, Xiaomi and Redmi, dual-brand strategy can be described as very successful, the latter’s huge shipments, a steady stream of stabilization for the former, to stabilize the cost of high-end technology research and development.

With the former planted trees, iQOO to Vivo sub-brand debut, and then independent, to the price performance of the long, in one fell swoop. How is iQOO made? In addition to brand awareness, the most important thing is the phone, almost every one of them has a very high-cost performance, even if they never admit that the main cost performance, but rather performance-oriented.

Why deny it? I think it may be that I do not want to be bound by it, because the cost performance-oriented brand to create a top flagship is a very difficult thing, once the impression of cost performance is established, then the pricing of 5,000 yuan (above 50,000 INR) will be an insurmountable threshold, can go down, but not up.

At the release of the iQOO 8 Pro, Feng Yufei said iQOO never main cost performance of the phrase, 4999 yuan starting price, and the cost of absolutely nothing, which is what makes the machine iQOO released since the first top flagship.

2. iQOO 8 Pro Specifications

3. Unboxing, Design, and Build

iQOO 8 Pro is divided into the legendary version and the track version, in the author’s hands this is the legendary version, and the previous generation of the legendary version of the same style, both in cooperation with BMW, with three color stripes.

The iQOO 8 Pro’s screen is a double-curved centered hole pattern, while the standard version is a straight screen, there are differences in how to choose between the two, but for now, the top flagships generally use a slightly curved, double-curved to increase the sense of premium, and high-quality screen panels are generally double-curved design.

There is also a problem is the under-screen camera, iQOO internal certainly have an under-screen camera program, but ultimately not mass production, part of the reason may be to pursue the quality of the screen, review the new generation of iQOO, really need a model such as iQOO 8 Pro to support the field.

Parameters, iQOO 8 Pro with a 6.78-inch AMOLED E5 dual-curved screen, the first Samsung E5 material, power consumption than E4 material reduced by 25%, but the brightness has improved, including local peak brightness 1500nit, the global maximum brightness 1000nit.

And this screen has 3200 × 1440 resolution, PPI sub-pixel resolution 571. It is iQOO’s first model to support a high-division screen, support 120Hz refresh rate and 300Hz touch sampling rate, the introduction of LTPO technology to achieve 1-120Hz free switching, as well as 1.07 billion colors, P3 color gamut, HDR10+, etc. In addition, the machine debuts ultrasonic 3D wide-area fingerprint, this is put on the back of the demonstration.

Since last year, iQOO crossover and BMW joint name launched the legendary version as well as the track version, of which the legendary version of the design continues to this day, unique and obvious, and only this one, recognition pulls full.

Different from its predecessor is the material, iQOO 8 Pro back cover of the three color stripes using a new process, some flashpoint and other special materials embedded in the back shell, so that this color has a metallic texture. The back cover also has a new coating process this time, touching a kind of sandstone material, but it is really vegan leather.

It is said that CMF designers from the racing car interior/steering wheel to get inspired, and process engineers to do a month of verification to find this solution and feel, used to AG frosted glass or warm ceramic, this has a coarse material but a different feeling.

The weight of the iQOO 8 Pro Legend Edition is 202.5g, which is acceptable, and the case that comes with the package is about the same feel as the back of the phone.

The rear camera is really worth boasting, rectangular camera layout, including three cameras, which also has a micro cloud platform four-axis anti-shake, specific parameters later, integrated many components, but no obvious bump, almost flat on the desktop, thanks to the stepped design of the camera layout, both recognizable, but also visually do thin, I would like to call it one of the most reasonable camera layout program.

4. System Experience

iQOO 8 Pro is running on Android 11-based OriginOS 1.0 for iQOO. IQOO and Vivo’s ROM are basically the same. The animation layout has considerable changes, especially desktop icons, bringing a new architecture system “Huarong grid”, re-arrangement of desktop elements. Officially, it is more neat and efficient than in the past, but of course, you can also switch to the regular 5×5 style.

In fact, the author have not been very interested in OriginOS so-called icons, because a bit for the sake of change and suspicion of change, the whole by rectangular, square stack, compared to the regular desktop, but more occupied space, icon size defined by the system, such as settings, why rectangular? Why is the album so large square.

And since it is in pursuit of neatness, below the phone information and other common icons are normal round, although the increase in the rectangular rounded transparent frame to reduce visual fragmentation, but can see that the designer wants to change drastically, but had to compromise for the sake of convenience, of course, this is only the author’s subjective ideas, everyone has different aesthetics, plus the ability to switch to the regular desktop, Huarong grid is not used.

The function is very complete, such as display a piece, in addition, to refresh rate and resolution, there is a screen color adjustment, the screen parameters have, and support the system default font free adjustment of thickness and size, worth a nod, currently support this adjustment is not much, OriginOS function is a lot more than before.

OriginOS includes a setting option called dynamic effects, you can touch screen animation, desktop transition animation, fingerprint recognition animation, and even bright screen animation settings, providing many options, with 2K + 120Hz refresh rate, has a pretty good animation effect, smooth and follow the hand.

Privacy is the focus of the cell phone industry in the past two years, but also the trend, OriginOS for privacy has information protection, clipboard privacy protection, etc., while you can set the positioning accuracy of a single App.

iQOO phones initially in addition to the main performance, there are gaming aspects, the built-in game magic box contains the popular game features, such as light effects, vibration, etc., in addition to iQOO 8 the whole system built a unique display chip, support for game frame insertion, automatically enhance the game dynamic screen playback frame rate, before the iQOO Neo5 will have been used.

5. Performance

iQOO 8 Pro is equipped with Snapdragon 888 Plus processor, the standard version of Snapdragon 888, with LPDDR5 quad-channel memory (6400Mbps) and UFS 3.1 flash memory, the current performance of the Iron Triangle, built-in VC power pump liquid cooling, is the current common cooling specifications and materials, to see how it scores.

After the actual test, iQOO 8 Pro AnTuTu Benchmark score of 851982, this score is higher than the previously reviewed Snapdragon 888 Plus models, after viewing the CPU and GPU scores are normal performance, mainly in the UX scores, thanks to 2K + 120Hz refresh rate, and the author’s hands this or 12GB + 512GB version.

Storage, the machine sequential read speed of 2016MB/s, sequential write speed of 772.4MB/s, belonging to the normal performance of UFS 3.1 flash memory.

Then there is the ultrasonic 3D wide-area fingerprint, iQOO 8 Pro used under-screen fingerprint recognition solution, based on Qualcomm 3D Sonic second-generation sensor technology jointly developed, mainly faster entry, recognition range is greater, the specific performance to see the video demonstration.

6. Camera

iQOO 8 Pro rear for three cameras, respectively, 50-megapixel micro cloud platform main camera (IMX766V sensor, 1/1.56″, micro cloud platform, Gimbal stabilization) + 48-megapixel ultra-wide-angle main camera (114° wide-angle, IMX598 sensor) + 16-megapixel portrait camera (60mm equivalent focal length, OIS anti-shake ), which supports 20x digital zoom.

The IMX766V of the main camera feels like a reworked version of the IMX766, and there are no official details about the upgrades, but from the sample photos, the performance is not very different, and it should be customized to match the micro cloud platform.

The Micro cloud platform is a new anti-shake program proposed by the Vivo factory in the past two years, iQOO 8 Pro with the expected, with six degrees of freedom in the YAW axis and Pitch axis (pitch and skew), small jitter is eliminated through EIS and XY jitter processing, to achieve better anti-shake effect, the traditional tilt angle of only ±1°, while the introduction of the micro cloud platform is to achieve ±3°. Its handheld photos can achieve the effect of a tripod, here no longer too much to see the video anti-shake comparison.

In addition to anti-shake, iQOO 8 Pro’s most novel feature is the horizon anti-shake, no matter how the body shake, the video will not shake, first look at how effective.

iQOO 8 Pro of this anti-shake is similar to the Go Pro horizon correction function, and not the use of the micro head to achieve, but a wide-angle lens, and micro cloud platform has nothing to do with. The wide-angle lens is responsible for shooting a larger picture to a horizontal line as a standard, and then intercept a portion of the image, then use the algorithm to calculate the angle of the screen how much offset, reverse compensation offset angle, the final image can always be a stable picture.

iQOO 8 Pro relies on this requires a certain amount of AI arithmetic as a prerequisite to achieving the viewfinder frame preview is also a stable picture, remember that Sony specifically to the micro single to do a similar function of the software, but the cell phone field should be the first application, although not much daily recording video, but quite pleasing when used. Now, look at how the sample performance of iQOO 8 Pro.

Daytime Samples

Night Samples

Before the sample, to explain a problem, iQOO 8 Pro in the night photo environment, the default automatically into the night algorithm, even if the night mode is not turned on, so in the case of more than enough light, open or close the night scene basic imaging the same, unless there is almost no light environment, only to open the extreme night mode, collect light and pull up the ISO, so the following joined and ordinary flagship, not Open Night View, and iQOO 8 Pro open the comparison of extreme night mode.

7. Battery Life and Charging

In terms of battery life, the iQOO 8 Pro has a built-in battery with a capacity of 4500mAh and is equipped with the higher power consumption Snapdragon 888 Plus, to see how the battery life performance of the device will be. Use the AnTuTu stress test function to conduct a superpower consumption test.

The stress test is a function built into the AnTuTu review, which tests the stability of the device’s performance by performing high-load calculations that require the CPU to perform a lot of calculations, so the power consumption is greater compared to scenarios such as video and daily use.

Test conditions: no SIM card inserted, device connected to Wi-Fi, positioning turned on, fully charged, screen brightness turned to the highest, all background services turned off, and 2K resolution + 120Hz refresh rate turned on. Open AnTuTu stress test, an uninterrupted test, every 30 minutes to record the remaining power of the device.

In the superpower consumption test, iQOO 8 Pro persisted for 140 minutes, this time is a bit unexpected, as a comparison of Xiaomi MIX 4 is 180 minutes, although the latter does not have 2K high resolution, the gap of more than 40 minutes, this view and compared the original data, found that the iQOO 8 Pro CPU most in the high-frequency state, while the MIX 4 is in the balanced mode, with the frequency-limited operation (open performance release high frequency), so that the two have the gap between the endurance time.

Finally, the endurance estimate, because this result is based on the CPU has been in the case of full load, taking into account our daily use and bright screen time, so this data should be converted into multiples, resulting in iQOO 8 Pro can have more than 4 hours of continuous use, note that it is continuous use, not daily screen off, back to the message, etc. But the good thing is that there is 120W wired fast charging to make up for the battery life, to see how it performs.

After the actual test, iQOO 8 Pro took 16 minutes to charge to 100%, including 9 minutes to charge 68% of the battery, 12 minutes to charge 82% of the battery, the speed is faster than the MIX 4, the charging process continues at higher power. In addition, the machine is also iQOO’s first model to support wireless charging, support 50W wireless fast charging, needs to be combined with a 50W vertical charger.

8. The significance of iQOO 8 Pro

iQOO 8 Pro definitely belongs to a top flagship, compared to previous generations, this is an evolutionary update, in fact, it can be said that the inevitable process, both in terms of price and configuration, both, making the brand has enough heritage to do.

What’s more, the machine also really put in the effort, such as Samsung E5 material and support 2K + 120Hz screen, full-featured core configuration, 120W wired charging, never before 50W wireless charging, as well as a micro cloud platform, horizon, and other imaging technologies, have become the stepping stone to being a top flagship.

Of such a view, it seems no regrets? It is not, the machine is not IP68 dustproof and waterproof, the battery life also has weaknesses, for 2K + 120Hz high brush screen and Snapdragon 888 Plus power consumption to be tuned, after all, in addition to heaps of configuration, the use of experience is also quite an important part.

Unlike other cell phone manufacturers, iQOO 8 Pro shows the technology, more towards the steady-state, no radical revolutionary technology, but indeed already among the top flagships, can give the feeling that it is short of a foot in the door, think again and again the result may be the tone, such as Huawei Mate, Xiaomi MIX, OPPO Find, this kind of thing needs time to polish, the rush can not. iQOO as an emerging brand established less than three years ago can have such performance, enough to impress.

Note: This review was originally published on AnTuTu Benchmark by Tangzheng.