Earlier this year, Vivo announced that it has cut the ties from its sub-brand iQOO. This way, the company would be able to act as a separate company and the first step would be launching a powerful Global campaign taking India as a key market. The company announced iQOO 3 as a gaming-focused smartphone. The handset came with the Snapdragon 865 SoC, LPDDR5 RAM, and UFS 3.1 storage. Unfortunately, the device wasn’t equipped with a high-refresh-rate display, sticking with a 60Hz refresh rate. It probably was the most underwhelming part of this handset, since other competitors in this range came with 120Hz and even 144Hz displays.
To fix this “mistake”, iQOO released a brand new flagship dubbed iQOO Neo 3. It carries similar hardware specs but boasts a 144Hz panel. Unfortunately, the device remains exclusive to the Chinese market. While there’s no evidence of a release in India, iQOO announced a price cut on the existing 4G and 5G variants of the iQOO 3 in the country.
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With the new pricing, the 4G models are down INR 4,000 (~$53) reaching a new price tag of INR 34,990 (~$463,93). The 5G variant, on another hand, has a less expressive price cut. The 5G high-end model is down INR 2,000 (~$26,51) reaching a new price tag of INR 44,990 (~$596,52). The new price will be available via iQOO official store and local online retailers as Flipkart.
Right now, the iQOO 3 is the cheapest Snapdragon 865-powered smartphone on the Indian market right now.
I think these are decent price tags for a 5G variant. Hopefully it will come down to below 40k eventually.