Alongside the X100 Pro, vivo also passed us the iQOO 12 for a quick look. While it was not the first phone that was announced to be sporting the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, a company sounded pretty confident that it will be the first phone with said chipset to land on our shores.
Compared to the vivo X100 Pro, the iQOO 12 is on the lighter side of things but still well balanced. Put these two factors together and you have a phone that you can comfortably hold in your hand for a very long time. You could certainly have an endurance race between yourself and its 5,000mAh battery, if you choose to do so.
For a gaming line of phones, the iQOO line started out pretty flamboyant, gradually mellowing out over time. The iQOO 12 continues this tradition, looking pretty unimposing, especially for a gaming-centric phone. The exception to this may be the white BMW Motorsport edition, but that’s the car maker’s branding doing a lot of heavy lifting. Beyond what’s visible on the back the iQOO 12 also has flat sides, so it doesn’t immediately scream premium.
With its gaming lineage in mind, it makes sense that it packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. While I didn’t have it for long enough to push the device performance-wise, its other functions not related to gaming worked as well as the chipset suggests. Having 16GB of RAM helps too. Well, minus one aspect, but we’ll get to that later.
Helping along with the smooth user experience is the 6.78-inch 2,800 x 1,260 display and its 144Hz refresh rate. There’s also the Q1 chip which is claimed to provide low latency frame insertion, superframe, and super-resolution supersampling, among other improvements.
For sound, the iQOO 12 sports stereo speakers. However, it’s unclear if the sound from the top half of the phone comes from the earpiece or the grille. Maximum output is pretty high, and it didn’t sound like there was any sign of distortions either.
Finally, we come to the cameras of the iQOO 12, which consist of a 50MP OmniVision OV50H sensor with OIS, a 64MP telephoto with zooming ranges up to 3x optical, up to 10x hybrid and up to 100x digital, as well as a 50MP ultra-wide with macro setup. Despite these and the presence of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, it is similar to most gaming phones in that imaging is not a top priority. You can still get perfectly serviceable shots due to the sheer hardware performance, but with software being the bottleneck, expect it to struggle when faced with tricky lighting situations.
Speaking of tricky, vivo representatives were very tight lipped about when the iQOO 12 will be making its way to the Malaysian market. Ditto the kind of price tags that they will come with. The only bit of detail that they were willing to share was that it will be happening at some point.
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