iQOO Z6 5G is the latest entrant in the competitive mid budget segment. It's a nice-looking phone with flat edges and rounded corners that offer a comfortable grip. The handset is fairly thin at 8.25mm and the weight is manageable as well, so it's easy to handle with one hand. This chromatic blue colour variant is very eye-catching and shifts between blue and pink when viewed from different angles. The phone has a plastic build and a soft finish on the rear panel which does an excellent job of resisting fingerprints. The front, however, feels a bit dated with its large bottom chin and water drop notch design. At least, there is some protection in the form of Panda glass and a pre-applied screen guard.
In terms of utility, the Z6 gets a 3.5mm audio jack, a single firing speaker, and a Hybrid SIM-card tray with up to 1 TB micro-SD card expansion slot. There's also a side-mounted fingerprint scanner here, which unlocks the phone very quickly, and rarely gave me any failed inputs.
The iQOO Z6 5G features a 6.58-inch with a 120Hz high refresh rate and a 240Hz touch sampling rate. This means you get a very fluid experience while scrolling and gaming. You can toggle the screen refresh rate between 60hz, 90hz and 120Hz or leave it at Smart Switch that automatically adjusts to the most appropriate refresh rate for the task. Despite being an LCD display, colours are quite vibrant, brightness is adequate enough outdoors and everything looks crisp thanks to that FHD+ resolution. There is no HDR10+ certification but you do get WideVine L1 support for HD content on OTT platforms like Netflix. As far as audio is concerned, the single loudspeaker doesn't get very loud, so I suggest using a good pair of headphones if you're planning on listening to music or watching movies.
The iQOO Z6 5G runs on the Snapdragon 695 chipset with 8GB of RAM, and it breezes through day-to-day tasks and general multitasking.
As for gaming, I played Call of Duty Mobile at HD” graphics and hig” frame rate settings. I didn't notice any stutters during gameplay and experienced no heating issues at all, which I'm guessing is the work of the liquid Cooling System that iQOO has fitted on this device. It's worth pointing out that the iQOO Z6 gets only two 5G bands - n77 and n78.
iQOO Z6's camera setup includes a 50MP primary sensor, a 2MP portrait sensor and a 2MP macro sensor. The highlight here is certainly that main camera. It takes some nice shots in daylight with plenty of detail on offer. Colour reproduction looks natural and there's a good amount of background blur in close up shots.
When it comes to low-light photography, the phone has a dedicated Night Mode, which does a respectable job of brightening up darker areas in the image. However, at times, I did struggle with capturing blurry free pictures as there's no form of image stabilisation available here.
For video, you can shoot at a maximum 1080p at 30 fps, but again, due to the lack of both optical and electrical image stabilization, you're not going to get the smoothest pans out of this camera system.
The 16-megapixel front camera shoots decent selfies and portraits, as long as there's good lighting. However, facial features do look a bit soft, especially when you're taking photos indoors with mixed lighting.
Battery life is one of the key highlights here on the iQOO Z6, as it gets a large 5,000mAh unit. It easily delivers a day and a half of use on a single charge and gave me on average around 7 hours of screen on time, even with the 120Hz option turned on. The only real disappointment is the 18W charging speeds, which isn't quite fast for a battery this size, and going from flat to full took me over 2 hours.
There's Android 12 out of the box on the iQOO Z6 5G, which is good to see, and Vivo's custom FunTouch OS 12 ran quite smoothly during my usage. It offers decent customization options, a dedicated gaming mode and also includes a virtual RAM feature that lets you reallocate a portion of the phone's unoccupied storage as memory. You do get to see a bit of bloatware here, and while most third-party apps can be removed, it's just annoying to have so many to begin with.
Pricing for the iQOO Z6 5G starts from Rs 15,499 for the 4GB RAM model while the 6GB RAM and 8GB RAM variants cost Rs 16,999 and Rs 17,999 respectively. Overall, this is a decent value-for-money phone with competent specs in the sub 20,000 Rupees segment. The compromises it makes aren't a deal breaker if you're just looking for good gaming performance on a budget and a reliable daily driver.
