The iQOO 16 has finally launched in China as one of the first phones powered by Qualcomm's latest and greatest 2nm Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chipset. It also features a self-developed Q4 gaming chipset and an 8,400mAh battery, thereby emerging as THE flagship to beat this year.
iQOO 16 Specifications and Features
Talking about the highlight first, under the hood, the iQOO 16 pairs Qualcomm's 2nm Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 with iQOO's in-house Q4 gaming chip and its Monster Super Core Engine. It also gets LPDDR5X Ultra Pro RAM (10,667 Mbps) and UFS 4.1 storage.
iQOO says the phone crosses 5.57 million on AnTuTu, and an 8,500 mm² vapour chamber and a three-layer graphite sheet handle the heat.
The Q4 chipset is where iQOO leans hardest into gaming. It enables full-scene ray tracing in 10 popular mobile games and 2K super-resolution with 165 FPS super-frame concurrency, and iQOO says more than 100 titles support 165 FPS.
There's also an 8K gaming camera and a streaming assistant that can push 165 FPS live streams. On the input side, iQOO's self-developed Q-flex control tech brings 5,000 Hz instantaneous touch sampling and a 500 Hz gyroscope, which iQOO says cuts gyroscope errors by 83.3%.
The display is a 6.85-inch flat Samsung M16 2K LTPO OLED at 165 Hz. It reaches 10,000 nits of local peak brightness, 2,800 nits of global peak brightness and 1,100 nits in manual mode. It also gets an anti-reflective film and 3,300 Hz PWM dimming.
The camera setup is a triple 50 MP arrangement. The 50 MP main camera uses a 1/1.3-inch OV50Q sensor with OIS, alongside a 50 MP ultrawide and a 50 MP IMX882 periscope telephoto with 3x optical zoom. iQOO also promises up to 100x digital zoom.
Selfies come from a 32 MP front camera. On the software side, there's 4K Live Photo support, a Colour Palette tool, film styles and Humanistic Mode 3.0, along with a new portrait beauty engine.
On the software front, the iQOO 16 runs on Android 17 and sports OriginOS 7 features, which bring AI features led by the Xiao V assistant and the "Atomic Workbench" multitasking tool. iQOO also promises smooth performance for six years.
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iQOO 16 Pricing and Availability
The iQOO 16 price in China starts at 5,999 Chinese yuan (approx. 86,000) for the base 12 GB RAM and 256 GB storage variant. Meanwhile, the top-tier 16 GB + 1 TB variant costs 8,499 Chinese yuan (approx. Rs 1,21,500). In between, the flagship also comes in 12 GB + 512 GB and 16 GB + 512 GB variants.
It comes in Chasing Light (off-white with light patterns on the back), Legend (white) and Track (black) colourways. The flagship is already on sale in China via the official iQOO website.
Nothing has been revealed about the iQOO 16 India launch. Some leaks have claimed that the flagship will not make it to the subcontinent, although we are hopeful that it does. Only time will tell!
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