iQOO 9 review

Funtouch 12 on top of Android 12

The iQOO 9 boots the latest Android 12 with vivo's newest Funtouch 12 launcher.

Funtouch 12 significantly departs from Funtouch 11's "core values". The stock-ish looking and functioning main UI elements and menus have been substituted with a highly customized and customizable UI. Some of the changes are pretty nifty, too, including the system menus being tailored toward a single-handed use. Some of the menus' content moves to the lower half of the screen when you swipe down, but not all, which is odd.

Lockscreen • Homescreen • Folder view • Settings menu

The recent apps menu, for example, has one of those useful proprietary features. You can choose between the standard carousel formation and a horizontal tiles layout - sort of like MIUI, only scrollable horizontally.

The app drawer, although stock-ish looking, has an expandable recommended apps category on the top (most commonly used ones), whereas using the vertical scroller on the right would highlight the apps beginning with the selected letter.

Recent apps • Recent apps • Notification shade • Quick toggles • App drawer

The notification shade has been revamped too, in terms of looks mostly - the quick toggles are now square-shaped, and the accent color around the menus (including the quick toggles icons) is blue, and there's no way to change either. Applying different themes would only change the icon pack and wallpaper.

The rest of the UI gets plenty of love, too. In the Dynamic effects sub-menu, vivo has grouped quite a few customizable aspects of the home screen, lock screen, animation effects, etc. There are even various charging and facial recognition animations.

The Ambient light effect gets more granular control with the option to enable it only during a limited time period, or you can choose which apps to trigger it.

Dynamic effects • Ambient light effect

The always-on display settings are in a different sub-menu, however, but the phone still gives you plenty of options to tinker with - a wide selection of animations, clock styles, colors, backgrounds, the lot.

Always-on display

You can also change the animation of the fingerprint scanner, the face unlocks, and even the charging animation.

Animations

Speaking of the fingerprint scanner, it is kind of always-on. Sure, you cannot see the icon, but it lights up the moment you touch the glass around its area. And it is quite fast and reliable, among the fastest UD solutions on the market.

Less secure Face Unlock is available, too, in case you were wondering.

Fingerprint and Face unlock

The Sound menu holds a few pleasant surprises. Just like Samsung, vivo is paying attention to people with hearing problems, and you can calibrate the sound to be heard by elderly people or those with impaired hearing. Additionally, notifications and calls get separate volume sliders. The vibration intensity can be adjusted for calls and notifications independently.

Sound options

The Smart motion menu holds a handful of familiar screen-on and screen-off gestures along with some new additions. One of those requires you to wave in front of the screen during an incoming call to answer hands-free - useful if you're cooking, for example.

Smart motion menu

Holding the volume down key can be used to launch an app or do a certain task, although the list of the latter is limited to launching the camera app, turn on/off the torch or start recording audio. The so-called Quick action feature doesn't work when playing music for obvious reasons. Why isn't there a double-press option for Quick action though?

Quick action • S-capture • Screen-split • Easy Touch

There is a bunch of proprietary system apps that compete with the Funtouch 12 app suite. These include Albums, Browser, iManager, Music and Video.

Albums • Browser • iManager • iManager • Music • Videos

Themes app with many free themes is available, too.

Themes

All in all, the new Funtouch 12 runs great, and you can even make it snappier by disabling most of the animations and speeding up the transitions. Yes, Funtouch 12 gives you the freedom to do so. However, those that want to use Android as Google intended might not be okay with the colorful iconography and the highly customized system menus and animations.

Performance and benchmarks

The iQOO 9 employs the powerful Snapdragon 888+ 5G chipset, a small upgrade over the iQOO 9 SE and its vanilla Snapdragon 888 5G and the second most powerful chipset after the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 within the iQOO 9 Pro.

The Snapdragon 888+ has a total of eight Kryo 680 CPU cores and an Adreno 660 GPU, built on a 5nm process. All but one CPU cores are set up the same way in the Snapdragon 888+ as they were on the Snapdragon 888. That includes the "small" four Kryo 680 cores that go up to 1.8 GHz, as well as the three "big" ones, clocked at up to 2.42 GHz.

The only difference is with the "prime" core, which can go up to 3.0 GHz on the Snapdragon 888+, while it is limited to 2.84 GHz on the vanilla Snapdragon 888.

The Adreno 660 GPU uses the same frequency and hasn't changed since the regular SD888. The Hexagon 780 DSP has been improved, though - it can now handle 32 TOPS (trillions of operations per second), up from 26 TOPS in SD888.

The iQOO 9 is available with either 8GB or 12GB LPDDR5 RAM depending on whether you opt for the 128GB or 256GB UFS3.1 storage model.

And now, let's runs some tests.

Even if the Snapdragon 888+ is no longer the most powerful processor in the Android world, it is still among the best and of flagship speeds.

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• iQOO 9 Pro
  3708
• Poco F4 GT
  3637
• iQOO 9
  3503
• Realme GT2 Pro
  3501
• Realme GT2
  3487
• iQOO 9 SE
  3442
• Oppo Find X5
  3331
• Realme GT Neo2
  3186
• Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G
  2909
• Xiaomi 11 Lite 5G NE
  2832
• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  2801

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Poco F4 GT
  1244
• Realme GT2 Pro
  1238
• iQOO 9 Pro
  1231
• iQOO 9
  1143
• Realme GT2
  1131
• Oppo Find X5
  1110
• iQOO 9 SE
  1095
• Realme GT Neo2
  1019
• Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G
  803
• Xiaomi 11 Lite 5G NE
  787
• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  771

The Adreno 660 GPU is a king in the graphics department and can handle Full HD high-refresh rate content hassle-free.

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• iQOO 9
  65
• iQOO 9 SE
  64
• Realme GT2
  56
• Oppo Find X5
  55
• Realme GT Neo2
  49
• Realme GT2 Pro
  48
• iQOO 9 Pro
  46
• Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G
  35
• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  28
• Xiaomi 11 Lite 5G NE
  28

GFX Manhattan ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• iQOO 9
  110
• iQOO 9 SE
  103
• iQOO 9 Pro
  84
• Realme GT Neo2
  84
• Oppo Find X5
  60
• Realme GT2
  60
• Realme GT2 Pro
  60
• Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G
  57
• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  49
• Xiaomi 11 Lite 5G NE
  49

Naturally, it is not as powerful as the Adreno 730 within the newer Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip, but it is plenty enough for a 1080p display.

3DMark Wild Life Vulkan 1.1 (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• iQOO 9 Pro
  9673
• Realme GT2 Pro
  9487
• Realme GT2
  5879
• Oppo Find X5
  5851
• iQOO 9
  5814
• iQOO 9 SE
  5463
• Realme GT Neo2
  4250
• Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G
  3136
• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  2491
• Xiaomi 11 Lite 5G NE
  2477

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• iQOO 9 Pro
  95
• Realme GT2 Pro
  95
• iQOO 9
  74
• iQOO 9 SE
  73
• Oppo Find X5
  69
• Realme GT2
  68
• Realme GT Neo2
  59
• Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G
  40
• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  33
• Xiaomi 11 Lite 5G NE
  33

And, finally, the AnTuTu compound tests put the iQOO 9 among the best scoring phones in the world, and it is bested only by those running on the most recent Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset.

AnTuTu 8

Higher is better

• iQOO 9 Pro
  862324
• iQOO 9
  745168
• iQOO 9 SE
  727771
• Poco F3
  631850
• Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G
  465534
• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  429675

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• iQOO 9 Pro
  997948
• Realme GT2 Pro
  966251
• Poco F4 GT
  952124
• iQOO 9
  852898
• iQOO 9 SE
  846231
• Oppo Find X5
  810715
• Realme GT2
  810512
• Realme GT Neo2
  726039
• Xiaomi 11 Lite 5G NE
  527663
• Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G
  522490
• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  506432

There is nothing the iQOO 9 cannot do computation-wise thanks to its Snapdragon 888+ chipset - it delivers flagship performance across the board and will continue to ace tasks for the next couple of years at least.

The iQOO 9 is equipped with a large vapor-chamber cooling solution, and it behaved quite well under heavy CPU tasks. The phone scored an excellent CPU stability of 86% and was warm but not hot after 1 hour of heavy CPU usage.

It also scored the incredible 92.4% stability on the 3D Mark Stress test, but the good news ends here.

CPU stress test • GPU stress test

It appears the iQOO 9 does not throttle when using the GPU, and it provides excellent performance for a while. But it keeps accumulating heat and eventually overheats and kills every process and loses a ton of functionality until it cools down. The worst part is that the iQOO 9 becomes unbearably hot when it reaches its critical temperature - so hot that this reviewer had to drop it to avoid getting a skin burn as soon as he picked it up.

Overheating

If the room temperature was above 20C - the 3D Mark Stress Test would not complete due to overheating. Running the test at night within a 19C room helped, and that's when we got the 92.4% stability.

Playing games is a different story. It takes more than 20 minutes (that's how long is the 3D Mark Stress Test), to reach that kind of heat. And it depends on the game. Simpler games will never heat up the phone that much. More intensive ones like CoD may or may not reach the critical point after 1-2 hours, depending on the ambient temperature and, well, your grip, of course.

The iQOO 9 is a properly equipped gaming smartphone with fairly adequate passive cooling. It's the software that fails it at times - it needs to have throttling implemented so it can keep safe both its internals and the hands of the user. While it won't reach the critical temperature often, it still happens, and that is something that needs to be fixed.