iQOO Z10 review – budget gaming phone done right?

In the category of “budget gaming phones”, there is literally a sea of them. There are way too many choices – so how can we choose one? Well, we can help by suggesting you to take a look at this iQOO Z10. It’s a budget smartphone that holds a lot of power in its thin body, and games run very well on it too.

Performance

Being an affordable gaming phone, the chipset that iQOO chose for the Z10 is the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3. It’s quite a decent chip, all things considered. We can run most games comfortably and get rather good frame rates too. Do take note that the chip in itself has a low power ceiling, so we can’t push in more power to get more performance. That also means that the thermals are low as well.

Genshin Impact, at the medium graphical settings, can run at at around 30-ish FPS, though we do suggest to run it at the lowest graphical settings to get even better and more consistent frame rates.

Zenless Zone Zero is stuttery at certain parts even when playing at the lowest graphical settings, so you have to keep that in mind.

Wuthering Waves, at the “performance” preset ran okay as well. However, there is some weird optimization issue with it if we head to the Hekate boss fight. It stutters badly – probably having the same issue as Zenless Zone Zero where it just loads everything within the arena.

Overall, the chipset performance is actually quite decent for this phone’s price point.

Battery life

With a low-powered chip also comes a superbly long battery life. But iQOO even stuffed in an enormously large battery inside the phone so that we’ll never complain about the battery life of this phone. Packed within it is a 7,300mAh battery, and it can last bot 27 hours in our standardized battery life test. That is astonishingly long.

Charging speed

The charging speed is no slouch either. It comes with a proprietary 90W charger in the box, and it charge from 15% to completion in around 66 minutes or so.

Now, we can head into the settings menu and turn on the fast charging option – and that’ll speed up the charging speed by… not much, actually. It cuts down to around 54 minutes to charge from 15% to completion, and takes about 6 minutes less to reach the 50% mark too. Overall, not a huge difference.

Surprisingly, if we use the USB-PD PPS charger, the iQOO Z10 can actually take in around 42W maximum. From our test, the iQOO Z10 can indeed charge from 15% to completion in about 56 minutes. That’s very good, and that means we don’t have to use the proprietary chargers to get fast charging. Good job.

Screen

The screen is something that I want to highlight too. It comes with a 6.7-inch OLED screen with a resolution of 2392×1080 pixels, and goes up to 120Hz refresh rate too.

It can go up to around 1110 nits in auto brightness mode which is pretty good and still works fine under bright sunlight. The color acuracy is also pretty good as it covers 98.6% of sRGB and 95.26% of DCI-P3 color gamuts. Overall, very good screen.

Software

What’s not so good is the software. FunTouch OS is a decent Android skin that works well and it’s smooth yet doesn’t hinder the battery life or performance – but the amount of ads is quite annoying. We can mitigate it by disabling some apps and whatnot but not all of them can be silenced.

If iQOO – in extension vivo – needs to change how the ads are presented on the phone.

Design

The design of the iQOO Z10 is actually rather unique. We have it in this Glacier Silver colro and it look absolutely stunning. It’s also rather thin for a phone with such a humongous battery capacity.

Though, it’s quite disappointing to see that the aesthetics got ruined by the humongous circle for the cameras.

Camera

And yet, there’s only one usable camera in this huge cutout. The other one is a depth sensor – which I thought went out of fashion since 2024 but here we are.

To have a look at the pictures taken with the iQOO Z10, watch our video at the top of this review.

A few more things to mention

And a few more things to mention about this iQOO Z10. It comes with a USB 2.0 port at the bottom with no display output capability – that is to be expected. It also has a dual SIM card slot.

Another thing that I need to point out is that this phone has a mono loudspeaker. If you’re listening to anything using the loudspeakers… then only the bottom speaker makes noise. The earpiece speaker is not a loudspeaker. Kinda yikes and I realized this when I was doing the gaming test for this phone.

Should you buy the iQOO Z10?

Now, should you buy the iQOO Z10 then? Well, it’s obvious that iQOO had to cut some cost somewhere – and hence the camera and speakers are like this. I mean, I don’t mind the cameras much since this is a budget gaming phone but the speaker situation is surely a disappointment.

Either way, if you use USB-C earphones or anything like that – then it’s not an issue. For the price of only RM1,399, this is a great phone – and I think you should check it out.