iQOO is gearing up to introduce its iQOO 9 and iQOO 9 Pro flagship series in China. The company has just unveiled the iQOO Neo 5s and iQOO Neo 5 SE. Now, it will focus on the next big thing that will come in the form of the new flagships. These devices have been cycling through the rumor mill in the past few days, and we’re getting some interesting details about them. An iQOO official took to Weibo recently to detail a brand new custom camera sensor with improved imaging capabilities. This was later suggested by Ice Universe and Digital Chat Station to be Samsung’s 1/1.57-inch ISOCELL GN5 sensor – a 50 MP camera with 1.0 um pixel size.
Besides the large pixels, the Samsung imager brings all-direction autofocus and should offer a noticeable step up from the iQOO 8 series. The iQOO flagship series never focused much on cameras. After all, the big focus here is a brute force for games. But the iQOO 9 will start to focus more on this particular department.
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iQOO 9 series specifications
Elsewhere, the iQOO 9 series will bring Qualcomm’s latest flagship, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC. This chip will take iQOO smartphones to a new level of performance. It brings AMRv9 design with 1 x ARM Cortex-X2 core clocked at 3 GHz, three ARM Cortex-A710 cores clocked at up to 2.5 GHz, and 4 x ARM Cortex-A510 cores clocked at up to 1.8 GHz. This SoC uses TSMC’s 4 nm process and also brings an Adreno 730 GPU which is Qualcomm’s best GPU to date. These devices will come with up to 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of internal storage. We won’t be surprised to see a variant with 16 GB of RAM though.
The iQOO 9 series will also come with 120 Hz Samsung-made E5 OLED displays with a 6.78-inch diagonal on the Pro variant. Both devices will have 120 W fast-charging, the iQOO 9 Pro has a 4,700 mAh battery, whereas the iQOO 9 has a slightly smaller capacity. According to the reports, the new gaming contenders will make their big debut sometime in January. For now, there isn’t a word on global availability. However, we expect a global to happen sometime in February or March 2022.
Unlike the iQOO Neo 5s and the iQOO Neo 5 SE, we expect the iQOO 9 smartphones to come with an Android 12-based version of OriginOS Ocean. These devices will run FuntouchOS 12 in the western market. The company will certainly use its virtual RAM expansion feature for marketing purposes.
