iQOO 13 review: two steps forward, one step back

When it debuted in December last year, the iQOO 12 (review) received one of our best review scores, and deservedly so. We were impressed by the phone’s build quality, impressive display, capable cameras, and, above all, blazing-fast performance. iQOO delivered all this at an extremely compelling price point. In fact, for the longest time, it was the most affordable handset that shipped with Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (the most powerful flagship chipset in the premium segment till a month back). This kind of value proposition is rare to find in the premium segment but iQOO somehow pulled it off.

While last year, the iQOO 12 didn’t have any competition around its price point, this year, Realme GT 7 Pro with Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset is ready to take on the phone’s successor – iQOO 13. The Realme handset starts at Rs 59,999, which is too close to comfort for the flagship iQOO handset.

I have been using the iQOO 13 as my daily driver for the last two weeks and I’m here to tell you whether it has what it takes to get an edge over the Realme handset and whether it successfully carries the torch from its predecessor or not. Let’s jump right into the detailed review.

Verdict

The iQOO 13 is every bit the performance beast you would expect it to be. The handset comes with the top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset that will power most of the flagships in 2025. The new smartphone from iQOO improves over its predecessor on a lot of fronts but lacks the periscope lens that gave last year’s model an edge over some other handsets in its price range. Having said that, the iQOO 13 is still a capable phone in terms of optics and can click some impressive portrait shots. On the performance front, I faced no issues with the iQOO flagship and got a butter-smooth experience while gaming and even in general usage.

Design and display 

The iQOO 13 looks almost identical to its predecessor in all the key elements. The phone carries the same design ethos and if you buy the Legend Edition, you will be even more hard-pressed to find the differences. However, one clear difference this time around is the ‘Monster Halo’ ring light around the camera module. This dynamic light can be fine-tuned to your liking in terms of colour, and effect speed. You can even choose when it gets activated.

This might appeal to gamers and those who want their phone to stand out from the crowd. As this is a performance-oriented flagship phone that looks set to be a popular choice among gamers, the inclusion of this lighting makes perfect sense. Keep in mind that iQOO has implemented this ring design quite tastefully. I’m mentioning this as it is quite easy to end up with a tacky-looking handset if the implementation isn’t done right.

The Nardo Grey variant of the phone that I received comes with a matte finish on the sides, which ensures that the phone doesn’t feel slippery in the hands. The phone measures 76.71×163.37×8.13mm and weighs 213 grams. I have fairly large hands, so using the phone with just one hand was fine with me but given its dimensions and weight, I can imagine how it can be a bit tricky to handle for some people. In comparison, the Realme GT 7 Pro is much easier to handle and use with one hand despite being a heavier phone.

As mentioned, the latest iQOO iteration skips the periscope camera (more on this later), and the flashlight module, which was earlier present outside the camera module, now sits beside other camera sensors. The brand has also reduced the camera bump by 30 percent to ensure the phone doesn’t wobble when lying on a flat surface. Overall, it boasts a clean look with the official iQOO branding at the bottom half of the rear panel.

You get a tactile volume rocker and power button on the right side of the phone and the speaker grille can be found at the bottom with the USB Type-C charging port and the SIM slot. With the plasticky back, the handset is prone to fingerprints but an easy fix for this would be to go for the Legend Edition, which comes with Enamel Glass. Notably, with IP68 and IP69 protection, iQOO 13 has been claimed to remain unaffected when immersed in up to 1 meter of water or when exposed to high-pressure water jets for 30 seconds, ensuring durability in extreme conditions.

Let’s now talk about the display. The iQOO 13 features a 6.82-inch AMOLED display with a 3,168 x 1,440 pixels screen resolution and a peak refresh rate of 144Hz (while gaming). While the display can hit a peak brightness of 4,500 nits, it is understandably achieved in very specific scenarios.

In the High Brightness Mode (HBM), which is a better indicator of a display’s brightness, the phone manages to achieve an impressive 1,800 nits of peak brightness. The phone comes with HDR 10+ support, which provides you with an immersive viewing experience in supported apps. As this is a flat panel, I found it to be particularly good for gaming and watching videos (without any reflection or accidental touch issues). With a touch sampling rate of up to 300Hz while gaming, this phone truly provides the best gaming performance you can get on any phone right now. As I’ve shared many times before, I personally prefer flat panels over curved ones. In this department, iQOO gets a thumbs up from my side.

Cameras

While iQOO is performance-centric at its core, over the last few years, the flagship models from the brand have offered some impressive camera setups. This is why I had high hopes for the iQOO 13 too.

The handset ships with a triple camera setup, featuring a Sony IMX921 VCS True Colour primary camera with 1/1.56-inch sensor size and f/1.88 aperture, a Sony IMX816 telephoto camera with 1/2.93-inch sensor size and f/1.85 aperture, and an ultra-wide-angle camera with 1/2.76-inch sensor size and f/2.0 aperture. At the front, there is a 32MP Galaxycore GC32E1 camera with a 1/3.15-inch sensor size and f/2.45 aperture. 

I’ll address the elephant in the room right away. The handset doesn’t feature a periscope lens, which enabled the iQOO 12 to offer up to 3x optical zoom. Instead, the iQOO 13 can only support up to 2x optical zoom. iQOO states it had to skip the special lens to keep the pricing more aggressive. I still want to clear that this phone is no slouch when it comes to cameras.

The iQOO 13 lets you click portrait shots in four focal lengths – 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 100mm. While the portraits clicked in 24mm and 35mm turned out to be spectacular at times, the drop-off in quality at 50mm and 100mm was quite noticeable with the same subjects and lighting conditions.

In general, the quality of the primary camera setup was quite decent and the phone did a good job even in some challenging lighting conditions. As far as shooting modes are concerned, the phone offers High Resolution, Pano, Ultra HD Document, Slo-mo, Time-lapse, Long Exposure, Supermoon, Astro, Tilt-shift, Pro, Fisheye, and Live Photo modes. However, my personal favourite was ‘Snapshot’ mode. I was surprised by how well the phone captures fast-moving objects. As I mentioned in the camera overview of this phone earlier, the iQOO 13 managed to grab a clear still shot of a BMW M4 moving at a speed of more than 200kmph.

As far as selfies are concerned, the front-facing 32MP shooter does a good job of capturing facial details and accurate skin tones. The edge detection in the portrait mode can be inconsistent while clicking pictures with the front camera, the final results are pretty good.

Let me share some camera samples to give you a better idea of the camera performance.

I compared the phone’s cameras against Realme GT 7 Pro and the OPPO Find X8 to find out how the new iQOO flagship fares against its primary competitors. Find out the results below.

Daylight 

In the daylight shot that I took with these smartphones, let’s first compare the shots taken from the iQOO 13 and Realme GT 7 Pro. As you can see down below, the GT 7 Pro boosts the colour unnaturally. While the Realme handset appeared to have captured more details at first than the iQOO 13, on closer inspection, I found that the aggressive processing on the Realme handset had distorted the image quite a bit.

If we compare the shot taken from the iQOO 13 with the one taken from OPPO Find X8, the latter took the image with more details and colour accuracy. Although the Find X8 was also guilty of distorting the image, it was nowhere close to the issues presented by the Realme handset.

Wide-angle

In the wide-angle shot, I found that the image taken from the iQOO 13 showed a lot more grain towards the edges in comparison to the image taken from the GT 7 Pro. While the image was still more colour accurate in the case of iQOO handset, the GT 7 Pro produced an overall better image.

Here again, the OPPO Find X8 took the best image out of all three smartphones with better detail and colour accuracy.

Portraits

As far as portraits are concerned, the Realme GT 7 Pro visibly struggled with the application of the bokeh effect. The iQOO 13 captured the skin tones and facial details much better than the Realme handset. The application of the progressive bokeh effect by the handset was also the best among these three smartphones.

The OPPO Find X8 was the most colour-accurate handset out of the three in terms of capturing skin tone and in edge detection too.

Night mode

In the night mode, the Realme GT 7 Pro struggled with capturing details and ended up producing shots where part of the images were blurry. In comparison the image taken with the iQOO 13 was quite clear, despite being slightly oversaturated.

Even in comparison with the OPPO Find X8, the image taken with the night mode on iQOO 13 was far better in terms of details.

Performance and Software

This is perhaps the most crucial aspect of any iQOO smartphone. Powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, the iQOO 13 is a performance beast. The Snapdragon chipset comes with a 2 + 6 all-big-core architecture and has been developed using the 3nm fabrication process. The chipset manages to achieve the industry-best clock speed of 4.32GHz, resulting in a performance improvement of 45 percent over its predecessor. In terms of efficiency, you get a boost of 44 percent over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The handset comes with up to 16GB of LPDDRX5 Ultra RAM and 512GB of UFS 4.1 storage that ensures loading times are bare minimum. But not just this, the phone comes with Supercomputing Chip Q2, which is the next-generation iQOO gaming chip. The brand claims it generates superior graphics with low energy consumption.

The 2K Super Resolution feature on the iQOO 13 aims to deliver “PC-grade graphics quality” with a verified 144fps consistent frame rate with zero-latency frame interpolation. This feature supports PUBG Mobile and Genshin Impact while the Standard Super Resolution feature covers over 20 games. The handset uses a smart, comprehensive clock modulation technology based on frame payload. Frame-rate-aware scheduling recognises gaming scenarios frame by frame and calculates load to achieve accurate scheduling, reduce power consumption, and stabilize frame rates. The phone features all-new smart scheduling strategies to optimise MLQ scheduling with algorithms to address occasional frame drops caused by non-game threads consuming excessive resources, improving smoothness in multitasking gaming scenarios.

I was impressed not just with the phone’s stutter-free and smooth gaming performance with high frame rates but also the haptics on offer with the 1016H ultra-wide vibration motor. Notably, the 4D game vibration supports top games with customised character and skill vibration sensations. This covers most games in the industry and exclusively supports Genshin Impact among some other popular titles.

Let’s now talk about benchmarks and how the handset performed against the competition.

While the GT 7 Pro scored slightly higher than the iQOO 13 on this benchmark, it is abundantly clear that these phones are both mighty powerful and far ahead of other handsets on the market.

Again, in single-core performance, iQOO 13 and GT 7 Pro are neck-to-neck. In the multi-core test, the iQOO 13 performs better than the GT 7 Pro. Both phones outperform the Dimensity 9400-powered Find X8. This suggests that these Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered phones will handle multitasking and demanding tasks with ease. In fact, the numbers registered by these phones are so impressive that they can handle literally any app or game you throw at it with utmost ease. While my real-life experience was on similar lines, it is important to note that these phones struggled with the Burnout test.

In this test, the Find X8 managed to perform the best as the handset managed to deliver 63.60 percent of its peak performance while the other two handsets struggled to even crack the barrier of 50 percent. Again, I must point out that this test pushes the phone to its absolute limits and can make certain phones behave in an unexpected manner. In real-life usage, both iQOO 13 and GT 7 Pro perform really well even in demanding scenarios.

Now, it is time to discuss software. The iQOO 13 runs Android 15-based FunTouch OS 15 out of the box. With 56 pre-installed apps (nine third-party), the handset does pack a lot of content even when you boot it up for the first time. If you’ve used FunTouch OS before, you already know that you will be treated with Jovi Home, iQOOCloud, Game Space, and other services that we’ve come to expect from iQOO phones. What you get with the new iteration of FunTouch OS is custom wallpapers, limitation on sideloaded apps (the system automatically limits some sensitive permissions to ensure your sensitive data remains safe), new screen on/off animations, intelligent classification in photos app, redesigned Ultra Game mode to easily access performance panel, improved global search, and more.  

Overall, if you can ignore the pre-installed apps, the experience of using this phone is quite smooth as the animations are fluid and the capable processor ensures there are no hiccups of any kind in navigation. The brand has promised 4 years of OS upgrades and 5 years of security updates for the phone, which is pretty decent in my opinion. 

Battery and charging

The iQOO 13 comes with a 6,000mAh battery that easily lasts around a day and a half in regular use and around 2 days in light usage. In the PCMark test, the handset lasted around 13 hours, which is a respectable score. In the same test, the GT 7 Pro lasted more than 17 hours and 30 minutes, and the OPPO Find X8 lasted just over 10 hours (despite offering decent battery life in real-world usage).

Overall, you can be assured that the handset will offer enough juice to last the whole day on a single charge even if you are a heavy user.

As far as charging speeds are concerned, the iQOO 13 supports 120W fast charging. The great thing here is that you also get a bundled 120W charger inside the retail box, which ensures the phone gets charged up really quickly.

In our charging test, where we charge the phone from 20-100 percent, the iQOO 13 fuelled up fully in just 38 minutes. In other words, you can simply plug the phone in for charging ahead of a shower before heading out for the day and you will get enough juice to last through the day.

Final verdict

In some ways, iQOO 13 is an easy sell as it does what you might have expected it to do.

Much like its predecessor, the iQOO 13 is a performance powerhouse that far exceeds the processing capabilities of other handsets in its price range (except the Realme GT 7 Pro). The bonus add-ons from last year are improved durability (IP68 and IP69 ratings), better display, larger battery capacity, and a better selfie camera. While the handset misses out on the periscope camera from last year, which enabled up to 3x optical zoom, I would say that this might not be a dealbreaker for most people. In a similar price bracket, you can also go for the GT 7 Pro, which also comes with the same processor but delivers inferior camera performance to the iQOO handset.

Overall, iQOO has put out a solid performance-centric phone at a price point most people would be reasonably happy with. 

Editor’s rating: 8 / 10

Reasons to buy:

• The iQOO 13 is a performance beast, thanks to the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset.
• The phone ships with an impressive AMOLED display with a peak refresh rate of 144Hz.
• The iQOO 13 comes with top-notch durability, thanks to IP68 and IP69 ratings.
• The Night mode on the handset is quite capable of taking clear shots.

Reasons to not buy:

• The phone comes with a lot of pre-installed apps.
• The periscope lens from the last year’s model has been removed.