The iQOO 16 and a new tablet, the iQOO Pad Ultra, launch at the end of September. iQOO’s flagship product manager Wang Kan confirmed the date on September 8, and both devices went up for pre-order on vivo’s China store the same day for a CNY 9.9 package, about KES 190. It is the first official word on either device. The iQOO 16 spec sheet we ran on September 7 was a leak, and most of it still is.
iQOO is vivo’s performance brand. It sells in China, India, Southeast Asia, Russia and the Gulf, and not in Africa. The iQOO 15 units on sale in Kenya come through independent retailers, and the launch announcement covers China only.
What is confirmed
The iQOO 16 is positioned as a “technology performance flagship”. It has a new self-developed esports chip, a new generation of iQOO’s Monster super-core engine, Qualcomm’s top Snapdragon flagship platform, better ray tracing in games and a screen built with Samsung Display. iQOO’s line is that it delivers more than a Pro Max under a standard-model name. The teaser image shows a redesigned rear camera block. None of the leaked numbers, such as the 8,400mAh battery or the 165Hz screen, are confirmed yet.
The Pad Ultra is iQOO’s first flagship small tablet, and iQOO calls it an “esports new species”. The five confirmed points are a next-generation flagship chip, multi-finger touch response, AAA games, a full-area cooling system iQOO calls a “breathing esports chassis”, and a size that fits a pocket. The pitch is a device that sits between a phone and a tablet, and the teaser render shows a square camera block with a vent cut into it.
The tablet spec sheet may look like this:
- an 8.8-inch OLED screen with a centred hole-punch camera,
- a Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 on a 2nm process,
- an active cooling fan and
- a 9,000mAh-class battery,
- colors in black and silver.
A vivo tablet with the model number iPA2691 has passed China’s 3C certification with 66W charging, and that is almost certainly this device.
Why 8.8 inches
An 8.8-inch gaming tablet is an existing category, and iQOO is not the first into it. Lenovo has sold the Legion Y700 at that size since 2022, and the Gen 5 model from March pairs a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with a 9,000mAh battery and a 165Hz LCD from CNY 4,299, about KES 83,000.
ZTE’s RedMagic Astra 2 is 9.06 inches with an OLED panel, launched in China on June 30 and went global in July at USD 749, about KES 97,000. The Astra 2 is the Pad Ultra’s direct rival, and the leaked spec sheet reads as an answer to both tablets: Lenovo’s battery size, RedMagic’s OLED, and a fan that neither of them has.
An 8.8-inch tablet has close to twice the screen of a flagship phone for about 1.6 times the weight, and under half the screen of a 13-inch tablet for a little over half the weight. Held sideways the screen is about 19cm across, so both thumbs reach it without a clip-on controller, and the whole thing goes in a jacket pocket. A 13-inch tablet sits on a table or a lap, while an 8.8-inch one is held like a handheld console.
The bigger body is also what makes the hardware possible. There is room for a fan, and for a battery 2,000mAh larger than the iQOO 15’s 7,000mAh.
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