for those of you who don’t already know aiku is a sub-branded company of vivo which is a sub-branded company of bbk electronics which is also the parent company of oppo oneplus and realme in august last year bbk electronics released its very first mass-produced smartphone to use qualcomm’s massive 3d sonic max ultrasonic fingerprint sensor in none other than the aiku 8 pro it’s only been 5 months since aiku’s last flagship device and we already have its successor the aiku 9 pro and not only does it retain the same class leading 3d sonic max fingerprint sensor which by the way is the largest and fastest smartphone fingerprint scanner in the world but actually brings some noteworthy upgrades it has kept its gimbal stabilized main camera tech but replaces the average imax 766 main sensor with the world’s first 50 megapixel isosol gn5 sensor it’s got a new fisheye 150 degree field of view ultrawide camera same great telephoto lens improved refresh rate technology thanks to its ltpo 2.0 wqhd plus amoled display latest snapdragon 801 chipsets same great 120 watt wide and 50 watt wireless charging but larger 4700 milliamp hour battery and most
importantly its price has remained the same this is technic and this is my extremely detailed full review of the iku9 pro the iq9 pro comes in two different color variants you can pick it up in burnt engine orange which is actually a carbon fiber vegan leather finish or you can pick it up in the legendary white edition which is the version that i have and it actually has bmw m branding on the back and is mixed up with matte gloss and carbon fiber it looks absolutely phenomenal and slapping on that included case which comes in the box which is of course silicon it really kind of makes the phone look as if it’s not even using a case since it actually matches the exact design of the phone itself really cool little extra touch over there inside the device we are kitted with a larger 4 700 milliamp hour battery as opposed to last year’s hundred million power cell but we keep the same 50 watt wireless and 120 watts of flash wired charging so we’re going to be doing a one to one hundred percent charging test right now since it’s advertised to do 100 in just 19 minutes let’s see if it can actually do so we have a wattage meter at the bottom left-hand corner and it’s sitting at around 40 watts at the start usually it hits the highest wattage peak at the start of the test seems like i could doing something different i did make sure that all optimized charging off on the device pretty much as soon as 25 hits it jumped up to 100 watts so it’s really weird to see how it’s charging its
wattage is changing pretty strangely it’s dropped down to 70 after 80 or so and then it dropped down even more and we got to 100 in 22 minutes and 21 seconds which is not the fastest that we’ve seen around no do bear in mind this does have a larger battery than its predecessor the iq8 pro with a 4500 milliamp battery in the same wattage charging did it in just 17 minutes and while this should have technically done it a bit faster it’s still pretty quick charging time and because of how different it used its wattage at the start and at the end with its fastest time being in the middle means that it actually kept cooler it only added 20.2 degrees in celsius as opposed to the iq 8 pro 27.3 and the iq7s before it adding 30.1 degrees in celsius the device is of course powered by the new snapdragon 8gen1 chipset run on four nanometer processed node technology and we have a new three-dimensional 18-fold vapor chamber cooling system as well as lpddr5 ram ufs 3.1 storage but unfortunately there is no ip68 dust and water certification however the display protection has bumped up to gorilla glass vectors which is fantastic you also get an aluminum frame wrapping around the device as well as a gorilla glass or vegan leather back one of the biggest improvements over its predecessor is its new camera system since the main camera has now jumped up from an imx 766 sensor to the world’s first samsung iso cell gn5 sensor and yes it still has gimbal stabilization its ultra wide sensor has also improved jumping up to an isoscell jn1 sensor and has a crazy 150 degrees field of view and completing the trio is a 16 megapixel telephoto sensor which is unchanged from last year the 150 degree field of view ultra white sensor takes a great crystal ball effect photo also 50
megapixel native fisheye we can also bend that down to 12.5 which looks even better we have 50 megapixel ultra wide at 119 degrees field of view and we can bend that down too the gn5 main sensor natively at 50 megapixel looks fantastic even better 12.5 thanks to ai pixel binning 16 megapixel telephoto 2.5 optical zoom looks pretty decent five times digital zoom looks okay ten times is not too bad but as soon as we hit 30 times it’s really not the best around we do have that ultra wide sensor which is honestly the best thing about this device it is a gimmick on most phones but since we can actually record video and take 50 megapixel native stills using it within the iq 9 pro which is not apparent in other phones with the same sensor it’s actually a huge plus if you do decide to pick up this device it actually takes some pretty good portrait shots i guess you could say of myself flipping the phone around over there and getting up close and personal to a subject using that ultra wide camera does do a pretty great job in terms of dynamic range and you don’t have ai distortion with the 150 degree field of view mode but you kind of want that effect for the fisheye you can take portrait shots at 2.5 x which look great and you can get super close with the ultrawide sensors using the super macro mode at 119
degrees or 150 degrees field of view they both come out crystal clear and we also have 4k 60 fps video recording at 150 degrees i’m just testing out how macro would work over here in this kind of situation there’s no macro video mode but if you get close and personal with a subject at 119 150 degrees field of view it looks pretty darn good super close up you can also see the difference going from the main sensor to 119 degrees field of view to 150 degrees field of view it’s absolutely out of this world just walking around and just for fun i thought it would be pretty cool to see what a selfie video would look like using the back cameras and using that incredible 150 degree field of view ultra wide camera i mean look at this this looks amazing so many other phones out there that have released with the same sensor cannot record video with the 150 degree field of view mode so it’s really cool to see haiku doing something different do bear in mind though that there is no stabilization when recording at 150 degrees field of view using the ultra wide camera there is however stabilization for the 119 degrees field of view ultra wide and both can record all the way up to 4k and 60fps most phones with regular ultrawide cameras can’t even hit 4k 60.
4k 60 using the main camera over here looks pretty great great stabilization too thanks to that gimbal stabilizer at the back which the main gn5 sensor is sitting on this is 4k 60fps with stabilization completely off i’m literally sprinting over here doing the same test with standard stabilization on now you can see it’s a lot more stable but the quality really takes a huge knock now you can turn ultra stabilization on but this is capped at 1080p 60 where the previous two modes were sitting at 4k 60 and now 1080p 30 is the max cap for horizon leveling stabilization which only uses the ultrawide camera we can also do 8k at 30fps but this is actually a 6k upscale using the main sensor and ak24 which is actually native 8k because of the native frames per second count over there it looks pretty good but once again no
stabilization we can also use our telephoto lens over here to record 8k 24 or 8k 30fps over here though once again no stabilization at 8k it still looks nice and crispy clear using it at night with 2.5 times optical zoom in that telephoto lens at 30 or 24 fps at 8k it looks all right a bit hazy 8k 24 fps over here using the main camera not the telephoto this time around once again it looks okay it’s ak is not meant to be used at night i would stick to 4k or 1080p as you’ll see in a second but recording 4k at 30fps at night is probably the sweet spot since it has stabilization it brightens up the colors a lot there aren’t really any granules hitting the screen it’s not too pixelated it looks okay but it’s not as steady because of the 30 fps mode at 60 fps it’s nice and silky smooth over here but it’s a lot dimmer at night when recording in a low lit situation but it still packs in loads of quality detail same thing can be said with 4k 60 fps 150 degrees field of view ultrawide mode and when you drop it to 30 it actually reverts to 25 fps it’s brighter but it loses quite a bit of detail and quality same thing can be said with the 119 degree field of view mode it dips down to 4k 25 fps when shooting at 30 fps but you can also do 4k 60fps i feel like this is the sweet spot for
ultrawide at night though it’s a bit dimmer it seems to handle light a lot better taking a photo with the crystal ball mode at night with the 150 degree field of view lens looks okay fisheye mode you can use with night mode you can’t do it with the crystal ball mode it makes a bit of a difference same thing can be said with the 119 degree field of view mode night off not on it’s not much of an improvement over here same thing can be said with the main sensor too it doesn’t really make a drastic change over here even though the new snapdragon 801 chipset promises five times better night mode photography and it’s not really doing that and when we go from 2.5 all the way up to 5 10 times zoom it doesn’t actually use the telephoto lens as soon as you hit 10 times zoom the telephoto lens then kicks in which is super strange for night off and on and at 30 times the same thing but below 10 times zoom it doesn’t actually use the telephoto lens at all which is
super weird night mode on over here close up and personal with the main sensor and then portrait night mode on 2 looks pretty good and now when we use 2.5 times optical zoom it actually uses the telephoto sensor so the camera system may have its few drawbacks but overall it’s an incredible camera system that takes phenomenal photos and videos you have a textured power button on the right hand side as well as a non-split volume rocker at the bottom we have a dual sim 5g tray over here for two sims that is no expandable storage though there is a water resistant seal we have usb type-c 2.0 at the bottom so strange that there’s no 3.1 speeds and we do have dual stereo speakers with a super audio over here and at the top of the display we have a 16 megapixel selfie cam which is unchanged from last year it takes some pretty crisp photos over here and takes some more than decent portrait mode shots too though there is some bad edge detection around my hair as you can see in most shots when using portrait mode it doesn’t do the most perfect job but overall the detail and quality of the selfie cams are pretty decent so i think i’m right when i say the iq 9 pro is probably the best phone released this year so far it’s really shaping up to be a great device but one huge deal breaker for me is the fact that the selfie camera can only shoot 1080p at 30fps this is a flagship device from a massive company there is no 4k or 60 fps option when recording using the selfie cam nevertheless let me know what you guys think of the audio and video quality when recording a video using the selfie cam on the brand new iku9 pro it’s really unfortunate that the selfie video is kept at 1080p and 30fps and at night it looks okay because it’s 30fps so things are nice and bright but not the most detailed there is no night mode for the selfies when taking photos at night so you can only use the flash and the portrait mode looks really whack at night even with the
flash on so yes the selfie camera sensor is definitely a bit of a mixed bag not the best i’ve seen around but it still does the job i guess if you are a selfie enthusiast or a vlogger this is probably not the phone for you it is the phone for you though if you like super fast super large ultrasonic fingerprint sensors this uses the qualcomm 3d sonic max the largest and fastest in the world and to set it up you literally just tap give one jab on your screen and you’ve registered your fingerprints you can change the size of the area as well as the animation there are a bunch of different animation styles which you can change within different wallpapers too it is 0.2 seconds in speed as opposed to 0.5 seconds for the ultrasonic gen 2 that we saw in last year’s samsung and it is nine times bigger than the size of the one that we saw within the s21 series last year it is 20 by 30 millimeters in size which is absolutely enormous there are loads of different always on display options for you to choose from and when it is being displayed it displays at one hertz thanks to that new ltpo 2.0 tech we do have 2d face unlock here which utilizes the selfie camera it’s not 3d face unlock unfortunately but it still gets the job done and the display is largely similar to last year’s it is a 6.78 inch e5 amoled display which is curved though subtle curves it has a resolution of wqhd plus and a ppi of 518.
It has 1.07 billion colors hdr 10 plus support 112 dci p3 and 140 srgb wide color gamma rating and 1500 nits of peak brightness which is once again unchanged we have a screen to body ratio of 89.6 thanks to pretty symmetrical bezels from left to right and top to bottom and aiding in that wonderful 1440p resolution display is the new low temperature polycrystalline oxide display which can refresh between 1 and 120 hertz and using an fps counter over here with that ltpo 2.0 technology you can see that frames pretty much go down to zero or one frame most the time when the phone is not being used and is just still but when you’re moving it around it adjusts and goes up to 120 or it goes to 60 or 90 so on and so forth and we also have 300 hertz touch sampling rates though it’s not hitting the thousands that we’ve seen from very recent bbk electronic made devices 300 hertz is still more than enough and ltpo 2.0 technology is actually working perfectly fine on this device we obviously can change the brightness levels we have eye protection if you want to read late at night we do have different screen color options as well as adaptive color display and visual enhancements too as well as dark mode which you can have
scheduled and you can also adjust if you want it to be a lighter dark mode or a darker dark mode it has nice deep blacks and adjusts your wallpaper and widgets too it can be used for third-party apps as well as a bunch of first party apps as well and flicking back to the lighter side of things we do have origin os ocean skinned over android 12 in terms of software it is absolutely phenomenal and kind of looks like a mix between android and harmony os and ios it’s a bunch of all of them mixed up together and i absolutely love it there are loads of different customization options you can even change the color of your control sensor you can group things together within your app drawer you can go to nano kits within your app drawer so that you can get widgets more easily there are a lot of different first party widgets and you can go down to your extra widgets for all your apps you can also adjust to a five by nine home screen app layout and we do have something called mood cube in order to quickly change your wallpaper on the fly as well as your themes on the fly you can change window styles to have your wallpaper blurred or monochrome or add a sky so that it picks up the weather that’s currently happening or the time so the sun rays are shooting at your screen at different parts of the day so that you kind of have adjust of the time we can change icons we can change the rounded or
square corner boxy looking things within the control sensor we can link and unlink apps on the home screen we can get shortcuts coming through those as well as peek at our performance we can also adjust app icon sizes as well as folder icon sizes we can change the color folders over here too though you can’t just tap on an icon within the folder to go into it you always have to open up the folder you can adjust how it looks when you’re in the recents tab you can also jump into split screen and once you’re in split screen you can switch between the top and bottom app and you can also create a combined split screen icon on your home screen so it automatically reopens that split screen going forward if you ever use those two pretty often you can also go into a floating window and put an app to the side although if you open a second one it can only pin one you can’t have two pinned apps on the right hand side of your device and the haptics are absolutely phenomenal pretty much the best that you can get around but what about the audio we are kitted with dual stereo speakers and of course super audio built in so how does it stack up against the xiaomi 12 pro on the left and oneplus 10 pro on the right the speakers sound fantastic when playing music but what about playing games let’s go ahead and give them a listen when in a game you can pull in from the left for ultra game
mode overlay and you can open up small windows such as calculator app over there you have game tools to enhance the display and we also have performance tools so we can go into monster mode which is the huge performance boost that this phone has to offer as well as 120 fps mode though this game generation impact that we’re starting off with here is capped at 60 so even though the phone can go up to 120 the game itself is kept at 60 so the max that we could get is 60 and we’re getting an average between 33 and 60 fps which is okay the average snapdragon 801 on my channel sits between 34 and 58 so i guess it’s on par with those i guess it’s kind of more to blame qualcomm than it is to blame iq over here and when it comes to bullet force even though we have 120 fps mode enabled we’re capping at 60 even though this game has an unlimited frames cap and most phones on my channel running the new qualcomm snapdragon 801 chipset are sitting between 113 and 122 even though this phone can easily hit 120 fps in this game it is capping at 60 hopefully this changes with a future software update same thing can be said with real racing 3 over here once again another game that has no restriction in terms of frames per second cap but this device is capping it at 60 now this has nothing to do with qualcomm or its display this has to do with the software implemented within arkoo’s origin os ocean hopefully this has changed going forward we do have 12 gigs of rpddr5 ram that can be bumped up to 16 gigs using extended ram though do bear in mind that uses ufs 3.1 storage and we are kitset of course with four nanometer
process node technology driven chipset the snapdragon 8 gen 1 which is supposedly 20 more powerful and 30 more power efficient but what does that mean in terms of benchmarks well we’re gonna enable the monster mode within the battery settings over here so that we can get the absolute best results we’re also going to be testing out the battery percentage as well as the temperature at the start of the test we’ll compare this at the end of the three benchmarks and we kick starting things off here with antutu version 9.2.9 to test our gpu and cpu and now we’re going to be going into geekbench version 5.4.4 to test out just cpu and ending things off for 3dmark wildlife to end off with just gpu testing and getting to the battery results at the end we drained by 10 with a 31.33 milliamp hour per minute drain rate which is a tad less than the average snapdragon 8gen1 powered smartphone that i’ve tested in the same test on my channel but the temperature was a lot cooler on the iq 9 pro only adding 16.5 degrees in celsius as opposed to the average addition of 25 degrees in celsius when it comes to antutu the iq 9 pro scored a crazy 130 395 points which pretty much leaves every single other snapdragon 8gen1 powered smartphone in the dust but when it comes to cpu benchmarking using geekbench version 5 over here it didn’t quite get the highest single core score at 1241 which is actually only 20 points away from the top leading
dog over here the oneplus 10 pro but its multi-core score got a score of 3824 which is heaps ahead of the rest of the devices here and when it comes to 3dmark wildlife it sits slapbang in the middle of the pack of all snapdragon 8gen1 powered smartphones getting an average frames per second of 58.6 the iq9 pro has a subjectively good looking design thanks to its bmw m branded backplate that has a carbon fiber matte gloss finish and while the camera bump on its back doesn’t protrude all that much it’s absolutely enormous and unnecessarily so since there is no rear display here however inside that huge camera visor sits three incredible sensors the main 50 megapixel gn5 sensor takes some of the best photos and videos i’ve ever seen on a smartphone not to mention it has gimbal stabilization the 15 megapixel 150 degree field of view ultrawide camera is fun to use and can actually record 150 degree videos all the way up to 4k 60 fps and its 16 megapixel telephoto lens while not upgraded since last year still takes some very detailed optically zoomed shots underneath the display sits the largest and fastest fingerprint sensor in the world the 3d sonic max and while the selfie camera is not under the display and is unchanged from its predecessor still takes more than decent pictures but unfortunately lacks night mode and caps video at 1080p 30fps once in the device we are kitted with origin os ocean skinned over android 12 which is largely similar to
origin os 1.0 but ditches the parallel world feature which previously allowed us to use regular fun touch os for a more typical android experience this is a bold move since origin os is a bit of a learning curve but it’s still excellent software that packs in more features and customizations than you could ever begin to imagine we get loads of lpddr5 ram on board and aiku’s latest flagship is powered by the new 4 nanometer run snapdragon 8gen1 chipset which aids in a smooth user experience thanks to ltpo 2.0 technology that allows the display to refresh between 1 and 120 hertz gaming on the iq 9 pro is a bit of a mixed bag it plays most games at stable frame rates but seems to cap high refresh rate games at 60 fps which i truly hope is fixed in future software updates the display is identical to its predecessor which is not necessarily a bad thing since it packs in wqhd plus resolution one billion colors 112 dcr p3 and 140 srgb coverage and 1 500 nits of brightness not to mention it now uses a second generation low temperature polycrystalline oxide display refresh rate technology charging wattage has remained the same at 50 watt wireless and watt wired but it only managed to reach a peak of 100 watts in my wired charging test which yielded a slightly longer charging time than its predecessor but it managed to stay significantly cooler in terms of temperature gained and also houses a larger 4 700 milliamp hour battery cell which makes it easy for me to not only recommend the iq 9 pro as a great upgrade over its predecessor but as the best flagship smartphone to release in 2022 so far
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