iQOO Neo 6 review: An unassuming gaming phone that also delivers great value

iQOO Neo 6 is basically an iQOO 9 SE Lite. Like the iQOO 9 SE, here too, the idea is probably to give you a high-end gaming experience at a slightly more affordable price.

If you are looking for something like this you can probably check out the iQOO 7. It is selling for almost the same price as the Neo 6 at the time of writing. But as great as it is, it won’t be as future proof whether it’s in software (it’ll be updated to Android 13 top) or 5G (it, infamously, only supports one band). We understand that some of you might be okay with it, in which case, the iQOO 7 should be the way to go.

The Neo 6 naturally runs the latest Funtouch OS 12 with Android 12, and will get two major OSes and three years of monthly security updates, iQOO has confirmed. It also supports more 5G bands – to be precise – which is always a good thing. There are some other advantages. It has a bigger battery, and can charge faster (80W versus 66W). The design is also being refreshed a bit. So is the main camera.

But perhaps the biggest sales pitch is the asking price. The price of iQOO Neo 6 is under Rs.30,000.

performance and battery life

The iQOO Neo 6 with Snapdragon 870 is one of the most powerful phones you can find in this segment. The chip is probably a year old, but it’s easily one of the best made by Qualcomm. It is fast, reliable and very efficient. Sticking to its guns, iQOO is once again pushing this hardware to its limits, squeezing out nearly every ounce of the SD870’s performance in the process. And to keep things cool, it has added a new “Cascade Cooling System” inside the phone that includes – among other things – an elaborate 5-layer 3D graphite cooling plate.

At a time when many brands are limiting performance in their high-end phones, partly because almost every new flagship Qualcomm chip runs hot, iQOO is probably doing the opposite by giving you more performance per watt than any other brand. Is. can think about. This is easier said than done in a more affordable midrange phone like the Neo 6 – say a high-end one iQOO 9 Pro (Review) — because there, you also have the cost factor to look at. Good thermals and tuning are something that are often overlooked to keep the price down. A phone like the iQOO Neo 6 is breaking with tradition there too.

We believe that the choice of chipset is important here. iQOO could have gone with the Snapdragon 888 or Dimensity 1200 for that matter, which – on paper and in benchmarks – makes the Neo 6 a little more powerful than it is with the Snapdragon 870. But it would have come with its own set of challenges and perhaps the Neo 6 might not have turned out to be “value for money” eventually. It is quite clear that iQOO was not able to price the phone in a certain way, which is probably why the Neo 6 launched in India is different from the variant sold in China. There, the same phone is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. But we hold back.

The Neo 6, with the SD870, does almost everything you throw at it with ease and barely a hiccup. It is more than capable of handling day to day tasks. High refresh rate gaming is not a problem for this phone, except in some fringe cases like the Genshine Impact and Fortnite. (To be clear, you can play these games on the Neo 6 at medium graphics settings.)

The phone also doesn’t give you consistently good, consistent performance. Most importantly, it runs quiet. The Neo 6 was able to complete the 20-minute 3DMark Wildlife Stress Test with 98.5 percent stability—which is impressive. We ran a 45-minute AnTuTu stress test on this phone for 30 minutes along with CPU throttling, and again, the phone remained as quiet and confident as ever.

All of this is naturally good for battery life. The 4,700mAh battery inside the Neo 6 helps you go through the day with ease. The phone lasted 13 hours and 28 minutes in our video loop test, which is a respectable figure. Apart from this, you get 80W fast charging. The compliant charger charges the phone from 0-100% in about 39 minutes.

design and performance

The Neo 6’s design is in familiar territory. You can tell that this is a Vivo/iQOO phone quite easily. The colors, the gradients, the copious use of plastic, the two-stage camera assembly, the overall smoothness are all instantly recognizable. As is usually the case, with such new launches there are almost always some new shades. The Neo 6 is also getting its showstopper “Dark Nova” finish which is a shade of green at heart, but turns deep, almost black when viewed from certain angles. It’s very stealthy, very premium, very good looking.

Build quality is standard for an iQOO phone, which is to say, it’s good. The back has a soft matte, almost textured, finish that slowly melts into the sides—they lay flat. Ergonomics are decent but it’s still a big phone so your mileage may vary. For what it’s worth, the weight distribution is pretty spot on. Plastic phones can feel hollow and cheap. It is not so here. The Neo 6 is a well-built phone with a good amount of heft and no loose ends. iQOO still doesn’t offer any penetration protection.

On the front, you get a 6.62-inch 1080p flat E4 AMOLED display with 120Hz refresh rate and a hole punch cutout – similar to the iQOO 9 SE and iQOO 7. You get up to 1200Hz instant (in supported games like Call of Duty) and 360Hz touch sampling rate and native support for HDR10+ playback in apps like Netflix. The panel can peak 1300nits. It’s a decent display with rich colors, ample brightness, and almost all the bells and whistles you’d typically expect from a phone in its class. Biometrics are handled by an optical in-screen fingerprint reader. It is fast and reliable.

camera and software

For photography, the Neo 6 packs a triple rear camera setup consisting of 64MP OIS Main, 8MP Ultrawide and another 2MP Macro camera. Gaming phones generally have a reputation for having less than ideal cameras, but, if you’ve come that far—and know a thing or two about iQOO—you’ll know that the Neo 6, or that Case for any iQOO phone, doesn’t want to be just another gaming phone but it all.

We can’t confirm its secondary and tertiary cameras, but we can confirm that the Neo 6’s main sensor – which is a Samsung GW1 – has immense potential. It can capture fine detail with a fairly wide dynamic range and natural, almost true-to-source colors, especially when there’s a lot of light available. The sensor works well mostly indoor/artificial and even in low light, but there is room for improvement. Ultrawide is a bit overwhelming. It takes soft(er) photos regardless of the lighting. The 2MP Macro is just a typical-filler and nothing to write home about.

You can record video at up to 4K@60fps, but stabilization is only available at 1080p@30fps – these are nice and crisp, with natural tones and wide dynamic range.

The 16MP camera on the front is the same as the iQOO 9 SE and iQOO 7. It takes good selfies, and takes pleasing portraits in good light. Selfies could be better in low light. Front video recording tops out at 1080p@30fps.

The software inside the iQOO Neo 6 is quite likeable, with a look and feel close to stock Android, but there are some weird twists and turns here and there. For example, Google’s Android 12 Material U theme could be implemented a bit better. There’s a chance you won’t even notice it’s there in the first place. Our review unit runs the April 2022 security patch at the time of writing. We didn’t encounter any strange bugs or stuttering during our testing. This phone has some bloatware, some spammy notifications too, but we’ve seen worse than that.

iQOO Neo 6 | should you buy it?

The iQOO Neo 6 follows in the footsteps of the excellent iQOO 9 SE (and iQOO 7) and tries to bring some of its most loved traits and features to a more accessible price point. Purely on the performance front, iQOO has knocked it out of the ballpark here. But there is more to this phone than speed.

The Neo 6 is well built, has a decent display, a pair of good-sounding stereo speakers, nimble haptics, a competing main camera, great battery life, and quick charging. It is an all rounder phone in every sense.

And iQOO has priced it well. The price of the Neo 6 version with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage starts at Rs 29,999. A variant with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage will set you back Rs 33,999.

There is a lot of competition at this price but iQOO has its job cut out. Like the iQOO 9 SE, the Neo 6 is yet another winner that has pulled out of its hat.