iQOO Neo 9 Pro

The iQOO Neo 9 Pro focuses on a basic yet refined camera experience. The rear camera module includes a 50MP primary and an 8MP ultra-wide camera. There's no periscope-style telephoto camera, which remains limited to the flagship iQOO 12.Photos captured during my review include a mild sepia-like effect, which can look pleasing but at the cost of accurate colours. The primary camera captures crisp details without increasing the noise in the image. I compared the primary camera's results with the OnePlus 12R, and iQOO Neo 9 Pro exhibited better performance in both day and low light. The 50MP camera also excels at capturing portrait shots, delivering a rich bokeh effect. However, portrait shots may exhibit excessive saturation, which can be cumbersome to fix during editing.Photos with the 8MP ultra-wide camera are average at best. There's a degree of consistency between photos with wide and ultra-wide lenses, which is a good feature. But ultra-wide images can often lack sharpness.The iQOO Neo 9 Pro still utilises a 16MP front camera, capable of capturing fantastic selfies in daylight. The front camera may occasionally oversaturate skin tones, although details remain crisp. Portrait shots with the front camera also exhibit clarity, but edge detection can be inconsistent. While the overall performance of the selfie camera in daylight is reliable, images taken at night may lack consistency in both accurate skin tone detection and details.As mentioned, the phone can record 8K videos, which can be tricky to use. While colours in controlled lighting may look good and balanced, the file size may be difficult to manage. For instance, a 20-second 8K footage is around 135MB, while the same file in 4K would be around 60MB. The phone also tends to heat up faster in 8K than in 4K, and there's very poor stabilisation. I advise you to take videos in ultra stabilisation mode (Full-HD, 60fps) as the results will be more than satisfactory.The front camera sadly still gets full-HD recording at 30fps.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC on the iQOO Neo 9 Pro offers a big performance leap over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC-powered iQOO Neo 7 Pro. The variant I am testing includes 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 256GB of UFS 4 storage.In the Geekbench single-core and multi-core tests, iQOO Neo 9 Pro showed roughly 20 and 28 percent gains, respectively. Even the AnTuTu score improved by approximately 24 percent. The CPU Throttling test also showcased impressive stability, though the result seemed too good to be true. One explanation could be iQOO Neo 9 Pro's larger 6,043mm sq vapour chamber cooling. Better stability could also be due to the dedicated Q1 performance chip. It could also be due to a bug in the app.At least the phone ran without stutters and lags in real life. Even the gaming experience is refined, thanks to 4D haptics (via gaming mode) and flat display. I compared the gaming experience by playing BGMI and Call of Duty on iQOO Neo 9 Pro and the OnePlus 12R, and the former provided a relatively more refined experience.But when it comes to a clean Android experience, the OnePlus 12R is a step ahead. The iQOO Neo 9 Pro is eligible for three years of major Android OS, which is decent, though this could be better to compete with the likes of Samsung and Google.

The iQOO Neo 9 Pro now houses a relatively bigger 5,160mAh battery, which can provide all-day battery with standard usage. With performance mode enabled, I was getting around 8.5 hours of screen time, which is quite good. Unfortunately, we were unable to conduct the backup test on PCMark's battery test due to a bug in the app. We will update this section later.With the bundled 120W charger, the iQOO 9 Pro attained full charge in around 35 minutes.