The curtain was about to fall for 2024, but before the year wrapped up for good, we got a glimpse of what is to come in 2025 for smartphone enthusiasts. So far, things look good. Batteries are getting bigger, the performance bar keeps rising, and cameras are leaning more into pro-grade and artistic wizardry.
Yet, the rising costs are also a lingering concern. Of course, barely any innovation comes sans a handsome price. However, some outliers are still carrying the mantle once championed by the likes of OnePlus.
The Red Magic 10 Pro surprised me with an all-out power-packed approach to sway mobile gaming fans. Yet, it was not without its own set of compromises. Enter the iQoo 13 from the house of China’s Vivo.
Rocking the same $650 sticker price as its predecessor, the latest iQoo phone boasts everything that will shine atop this year’s flagship phones. It’s so good that the current-gen iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones look like a bad deal.
Performance without a tax
Soon after Qualcomm revealed the Snapdragon 8 Elite, we started hearing rumors of its successor and a slightly watered-down trim to offer a more affordable option to smartphone makers. The latter isn’t an alien strategy for the chipmaker.
The latest outing from Qualcomm was the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, which went for a less powerful core cluster, a slower cellular modem, and a few cuts in the camera capabilities.
It has allowed the likes of Motorola to make less expensive foldable phones, while Chinese smartphone labels have been able to deliver fantastic midrange phones. Some brands, however, duck that cost dilemma and go all-in.
iQoo is one of the wallet breavehearts.
The iQoo 13 is one of the first phones with the Snapdragon 8 Elite to hit the shelves. It’s not a gaming phone, mind you. As such, my expectations were pretty modest, especially with thermal management and performance throttling.
Surprisingly, this phone surpassed my expectations. Even under sustained load, the massive 7,000 square-millimeter vapor chamber did an admirable job of keeping the phone cool and running in the top brackets of its peak performance.
Look at the throttling graph below after running the device at 40 threads. The phone only dropped to 85% of its peak processing power, but it’s the stability metrics that impress the most.
For comparison, the Samsung Galaxy S24 (which starts at $800) dipped as low as 60% of its peak performance, with a continued downhill trend. Also of note is that at no point did the iQoo 13 run hot enough that I would want to keep it aside.
Seeing temperatures under the 50-degree Centigrade mark after running a 3DMark stress test is a rarity, but the iQoo 13 also managed to pull that off. As far as gaming goes, there are a handful of surprises in there, too.
While I mostly killed time in Diablo Immortal and Devil May Cry at the best graphics settings they can offer, I also dipped into other titles. In Genshin Impact, Call of Duty: Mobile, Call of Duty: Warzone, and BattelGrounds Mobile India, I could easily play the games at peak graphics settings and revel in the glory of a smooth 60 frames per second (fps) experience.
This is also where Vivo’s custom Q2 chip comes into the mix. It performs an interpolation and upscaling trick to boost the resolution and frame rate of certain optimized games to 2K and 144 fps figures.
There are only a few titles that can take advantage of the extra oomph at the moment, but when the Super Resolution and Frame Interpolation tools are enabled from the game center panel, you can clearly feel the added dash of fluidity and fidelity in the games. Even the likes of Apple or Samsung haven’t gone that far.
Who needs a power bank?
One of the best trends I saw in 2024 was the innovation in battery engineering. The development of semi-solid state batteries and those with silicon carbide anode has yielded benefits such as improved longevity, better heat management, enhanced safety, and most importantly, higher energy density.
The net benefit for an average smartphone shopper is larger batteries in a smaller package, with faster charging being the optional perk. The iQoo 13 eagerly laps up all those benefits and serves them atop a platter’s worth 6,000 mAh capacity.
For reference, the Galaxy S24 offers only a 4,000mAh battery and much slower charging. On the iQoo phone, you get support for blazing-fast 120-watt fast charging.
A 120W charger comes bundled in the box.
To give you an idea of just how fast this charger is, even against a massive 6,000mAh battery, it filled up an empty tank in just 36 minutes. That figure is still slow as trickle charging ensues in the latter phase.
When you start, the rate is quicker. This battery can reach the halfway mark with just about 15 minutes of plugged-in time. That’s insanely fast and a lovely reassurance that even if you’re in a rush, this phone can offer enough electrochemical mojo within a few minutes to last at least half a day.
Of course, the per-change endurance is fittingly fantastic. I fall in the heavy user class. I juggle between Teams and Slack, almost all-day music listening over wired headphones, frequent texting, intermittent Instagram Reels bingeing, an hour or two of gaming, and loads of Gemini AI usage.
That should give you an idea about my questionably “over-engaged” phone habits. Thankfully, I haven’t had a single day where I felt the need to charge the iQoo midway.
The only reason I ever carried a power bank was for the iPhone 16 Pro in my other pocket. I am desperately hoping the next wave of top-tier phones we get in 2025 at least make a respectable jump in battery capacity and top-up pace.
A sum total of terrific parts
As I mentioned above, the iQoo 13 is quite a surprise firecracker of a phone. The looks aren’t exactly a head-turner, though the halo light around the camera module does deliver a functional side as a notifications blinker.
What matters more here is the phone’s certified resilience. It comes with an IP68/IP69 dust and water resistance rating. That’s the best you can get in the smartphone industry right now.
I spend an unhealthy amount of time digging into user reports on Reddit and official product forums. They are littered with tales of users running from pillar to post to get water damage and dust ingress fixed. I’m looking at you, Nothing!
“Spillproof” is not enough. Every time you see a brand making tall claims about liquid exposure resilience, reduce your real-life expectations by a whole notch.
With IP68/IP69 ingress protection on the iQoo 13, you have the peace of mind that the phone can survive an accidental drop in the pool or a tumbled glass on your work table.
I would take this structural tenacity over an extra camera or any other fancy trick that smartphone brands often spend waxing poetic about. Talking about cameras, though, iQoo isn’t dealing with weak cards in the imaging department.
You get three 50-megapixel cameras at the back, and they click nice shots with steady hands. Notably, the iQoo 13 has inherited the imaging engine and algorithm from Vivo’s impressive phone cameras, and it shows.
The weaknesses are situational overprocessing, aggressive denoising in lowlight frames, and a modest zoom output. The latter isn’t exactly garbage, as you can see from this 4x (digital zoom) shot of an eternally restless cat.
And here’s a macro shot, which is rich in surface details, but the exposure is slightly off the mark. On the positive side, it did better than the iPhone 16 Pro, which delivered a macro shot in which the white balance was noticeably haywire.
The iQoo 13 is yet another signal that phones with a sticker price of around $700 (hey, Apple) can — and must — offer a high-refresh-rate panel. If it’s an OLED screen, even better.
What you get here is a 6.82-inch OLED panel with QHD resolution and a 144Hz refresh rate. The brightness figures are respectable, while the UI interactions feel silky smooth. It isn’t going to set any vibrance records, but you can safely scroll webpages and social videos in daylight.
Dear brands, please pay attention to this!
The iQoo 13 is not without its weaknesses. But if you view them from a $650 spending lens, almost all of them appear reasonably redundant. The lack of wireless charging, limited optical zoom range, and UI bloatware issues are there, but they are not nuclear red flags.
Four years of assured OS upgrades and an extra year for security maintenance aren’t the best available, but it’s not alarming either, especially when compared to the top-tier phones that big dogs like Apple and Samsung have to offer.
But more than just being a fantastic phone, the iQoo 13 is a template of what is to come in 2025. It’s just a surprise that a brand with barely any notable presence in the West has managed to outpace the upcoming shift.
Let’s just hope the top labels get the hint!
