iQOO 13 review

6.82-inch LTPO OLED display

The iQOO 13's display has grown slightly and is now 6.82", up from 6.78" on the iQOO 12. It also has a higher resolution - 1,440 x 3,168px. The rest of the specs are mostly the same - 10-bit color depth, 144Hz refresh rate and HDR10+. We can confirm that it complies with HDR standards on popular streaming services like Netflix.

The panel is BOE's Q10 8T LTPO OLED surrounded by extremely thin bezels. It looks really nice in person. It also boasts OLED Circular Polarization tech that reduces the reflectiveness of the panel ensuring better viewing experience outdoors.

iQOO 13

Off to the tests. The display's maximum manual brightness reaches 515 nits, which isn't very impressive, but we measured 1,804 nits brightness boost and that's pretty good. It's more than enough for comfortable outdoor use, even on the brightest of sunny days.

Refresh rate

The phone offers three refresh rate modes - Auto, High and Standard. The Standard limits it to 60, while Auto and High can go up to 120Hz, but the latter allows you to force 144Hz in apps of your choice.

It's recommended that you use Auto and let the system dial down the refresh rate to 1Hz in certain scenarios. If you are not interacting with the screen, it will dial down to 1Hz. However, we found that Google Chrome, for example, is limited to 90Hz in this mode, while in YouTube, the system doesn't take advantage of the LTPO's capabilities. For instance, 24fps and 30fps videos will all play at 60Hz.

Battery life

The iQOO 13 is fitted with either 6,150 mAh or 6,000mAh battery.

The review unit we had for testing was the 6,000 mAh one and battery life turned out great.

Similarly to the Realme GT 7 Pro, which also scored an excellent battery endurance result, the iQOO 13 showed exceptional endurance in all scenarios - call, web browsing, online video streaming and gaming. We are particularly impressed by the gaming runtime. It seems like Qualcomm put together an extremely energy-efficient SoC.

The jump in battery endurance compared to the previous generation iQOO 13 can't be attributed to the battery capacity alone. Perhaps the next-generation LTPO OLED from BOE plays a key role as well.

Charging speed

Charging hasn't changed compared to the iQOO 12 and the phone relies on vivo's proprietary FlashCharge tech. In this case, the handset supports up to 120W wired charging, but due to the battery capacity increase, charging times have gone up. But only by a couple of minutes.

The iQOO 13 is still one of the fastest-charging devices in its class, completing a full cycle at a little over 30 minutes.

For those of you worried about wear and tear, iQOO provides a toggle for fast charging. You can disable it and turn on Optimized battery charging, which protects the battery from overcharging and learns from your habits. It will turn on fast charging only when necessary.

The Chinese version of the phone running on OriginOS has one additional feature called Bypass Charging, which turns off battery charging when using the phone while plugged in. This feature protects the battery during long gaming sessions on the cable and we hope to see it in the global version running Funtouch OS.

Speakers

The iQOO 13 comes with a pair of hybrid stereo speakers - a main one positioned at the bottom and one that doubles as an earpiece.

Loudness has improved significantly and the handset now has one of the loudest speakers around, earning an "Excellent" -23.8 LUFS loudness score.

We are impressed with the quality as well. Tracks sound rich and full, with plenty of bass and clear enough vocals. There's a little bit of ringing at maximum volume level, though.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.