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This is the IU 15, rocking the newest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, up to 16 GB of RAM, a 7,000 mAh battery, and arguably one of the best displays ever put on a smartphone. Now, Aiku's marketing is making some big claims with this phone, as all phone marketing does. So, we partnered up with them to test how well this phone actually holds up in our lab, as well as looking at the rest of the device. But there's one feature on here that immediately stuck out to me before I even looked at the specs, and that is this LED ring that goes around the camera housing. It's pretty subtle. I didn't even know it was there until it lit up, and it's fully customizable however you like. It's pretty cool. But
the star of the show is the display. This panel is Samsung's all new M14 lead OLED, coming in at a resolution of 1440p, a global brightness of 2600 nits, which we'll get back to, while also being polarizer free. Now, the way most OLED screens work is they have polarizers to help reduce reflections and maximize contrast. And depending on the type of polarizer a display has, it can cut up to 50% of the light that the pixels are emitting since, you know, there's a physical layer that they have to go through. But with the new M14 lead OLED panel, this phone doesn't require it. So, like in theory, you get either higher brightness at the top end or the same brightness levels while using less battery. Both of which sound pretty
good. When it comes to color, Iiku is claiming 118% coverage of the P3 gamut, which you might be wondering why does that matter? And the reason is most movies are mastered in P3. So, full coverage of it means when you're watching something like Avatar, your display can reproduce the exact shades of blue that James Cameron intended. Plus, the displays are just how you interface with your phone, whether it's Tik Tok, Instagram, or really any app. And you'd want all of that to look its best. So, we tested it using a colorometer, where the dotted line here represents the P3 gamut. And ideally, you want something that can fully cover it all. So, for comparison, this line is the OnePlus 15's display, which covers a respectable 95.6% of the gamut. This line is for the
Galaxy S25 Ultras at a little bit better at 96.3%. And then this is the IU 15s with it exceeding the other phones and the gamut itself at 115.2%. Now, it didn't fully reach the 118% that IU is claiming. And you know, this could possibly be a margin of error thing, but all phones were tested with their widest possible gamut modes. And these were the results we got. So, like while it isn't 118%, 115% still a pretty impressive number. Now, we also tested the viewing angles on the phones by having our robot rotate the screens on all three phones and they were about neck andneck about what you'd expect from a modern OLED
panel. Though, I will say the OnePlus here was better at retaining its brightness and like it didn't color shift as much at the very edge cases. So, it does get the win here. Although, you know, at normal viewing angles, all three phones are perfectly fine, unless you happen to look at your phone like this. On the gaming side of things, the IQ 15 has a refresh rate of up to 144 hertz. And in addition to that, the instant touch refresh rate has been cranked up from last year's model, which was at 2,000 Hz up to 3,200 Hz. But obviously, having that capability means nothing if the hardware can't actually keep up. It'd be like having a Ferrari that's stuck in first gear. So, this
phone features a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. It has up to 16 GB of LP DDR5X RAM, which is probably where half the cost is nowadays, and super fast UFS 4.1 storage. On top of that, the separate Q3 chip that IU puts in here also enables things like super resolution upscaling, frame interpolation, and ray tracing on a phone. On the left here, the game is running at its native resolution. And on the right, we enabled super resolution where you can see just how much more the details are popping in comparison. It's especially visible in the character and like that barrel in the background with everything just looking more detailed and popping more. In terms of frame interpolation, we took slow-mo footage
of the phone with super frame rate both on and off. And you can see just how much smoother the game looks when it's on. like it really shows up in the cape during this jump animation as well as even when you're just running in a straight line. And because of the chip, you can do both super frame rate and super resolution at the same time. Of course, these features are on a game by-game basis. So, like unfortunately, they're not systemwide, so it won't work in all games, but in the games that are supported, this thing flies. In terms of general gaming performance, we ran 3D Mark on the phone where it scored over 7100 in the first loop and was able to keep its score over 4,300 by the 20th
with a stability score of 60%. Which pretty much puts it in line with some of the other Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 phones we've tested. However, one thing worth noting is it looks like IU sometimes uses less aggressive profiles for certain games. So, like some games will take full advantage of everything the phone's got, while others don't quite give you the max performance, probably due to like thermal and battery life concerns, which can make sense, but a great middle ground would be to let the user choose when they absolutely want to max things out. But, you know, still in most apps and games, this thing cruises.
Now, so far, the phone's been pretty solid, and it's lived up to or at least come close to a lot of its claims. But we wanted to test one of the more impressive ones where they claim 6,000 nits of peak brightness like in a small little window with global brightness of 2600 nits, which you know, if you could reach anything close to that, it would be pretty mind-blowing. Now, sustained brightness specifically is important since below a certain nit level in the sun, it could be nearly impossible to see what's on your screen. We've all been there. But if what IQ is claiming is true, this would make the screen visible even on the brightest of days. And to test that, we're going to have to
go outside. But we're not actually going to go outside. To simulate sunlight in a controlled environment, we use a highowered light to blast enough light at the phone to basically force it into high brightness mode while the phone is still on a fully white screen. Where through the first 6 minutes of our test, the Galaxy S25 Ultra hovers around 1,200 nits. The OnePlus 15 started at almost 1,000, but then it quickly dropped to around 800. And then the IQ15 doubles that at over 1,600 nits. Over the next few minutes, all the phones did drop by a bit. The OnePlus dropped to 600. The Galaxy went even further to about 330, while the Iiku held pretty strong at just above a,000. And it actually
managed to stay above 1,000 the entire time. So, while not quite the 2600 nits that Aiku was claiming, having 1,600 nits in the beginning and then never dropping below 1,000 is still the best we've ever tested, which means you're going to be able to see the screen easily anytime you're outdoors. But, of course, you're not always outside. Minimum brightness matters as well, where you want to be able to use your phone in the dark without getting flashbanged. And for the minimum brightness, the phone actually beat the one nit claim that IQ made, managing to put out only.91 nits, which is pretty close to the competition. Of course, transitioning between those two states is also important because again, you don't want
to get flashbanged. So, we also wanted to test how well the ambient light sensors can adapt to your surroundings, with this actually being the first phone I've seen with three of those sensors. And to test this, we surrounded the phone with different lights and automated them to both ramp up and down to see how well the phones keep up. And all the phones started off pretty similarly. But one thing that was interesting is when we cut the lights, the Galaxy was quite a bit slower than the other two when it came to ramping its brightness down. Although, when we kicked the lights back on, it was pretty much identical. Now, whether or not this is a good or bad thing might just depend on how your eyes adjust to light. But
one clear win for the IU was when we turned on our light that was behind the phones, it was the only one to be able to fully compensate for it. While the other phones only had small adjustments, probably due to the reflections in our lab. So, this is almost certainly due to the extra sensor that this phone has that the others lack, which should mean that this phone will be generally better at adapting its brightness to your environment. But, of course, there's more to a phone than just performance and display, like the camera. Now, the IO 15 has three different cameras on here. All three are 50 megapixels where you get a wide, a periscope telephoto, and an ultrawide. Although, I would
probably put an asterisk on that ultrawide since it just isn't as wide as a lot of the competition. But, nonetheless, the camera system on here is pretty good, especially that telephoto where even when you zoom past its native 3x zoom, it still produces some really good-looking shots. And then one thing that actually surprised me with this camera was the action mode where despite putting like a bunch of motion in front of the camera, it was able to produce some pretty clear stills. Like I was fully expecting these shots to be blurry, but the phone just kept nailing them. Like it's honestly the best that I've seen. Now, in terms of the battery, at 7,000 mAh, you kind of have high expectations. And luckily,
the phone didn't disappoint. Over the course of our 2-day battery test, it was breezing through all of the apps that we tested, achieving a total time of 30 hours and 17 minutes, officially slotting it second overall in our rankings. In terms of the sound and haptics on here, the speakers are decent. Not exactly the best in class, but they're obviously serviceable. And then for haptics, the new dual access motor on here feels pretty good actually. It's great for gaming and also just interfacing with the OS in general. Which speaking of the OS, Iiku has abandoned Funouch OS in favor of Origin OS. And you know, in my experience, the OS is fine. Like, it's running on Android 16. And while it doesn't have as
much AI as some of the competitors baked in, there is still stuff like AI photo editing. Although, there is one thing that I want to nitpick with this phone, and that is the amount of bloatware that's on it. Like, there's Facebook, there's LinkedIn, there's some of Vivo stuff, and there's even folders with links to download other apps. Like, it's not the worst thing in the world. like you can just take a few minutes and disable or uninstall them. But I do think it's mildly annoying to have on a flagship phone. But on the bright side, unlike some manufacturers, Iiku is offering 5 years of major OS updates and 7 years of security patches. So that's good. Now, the phone does cost a little
bit more than last year's model, but with all the improvements that IQ made, plus the extra software support, I think it could still be worth it in this bang for the buck flagship category. And yeah, that's the IU 15. The display certainly lives up to a lot of the hype that they're putting behind it. And if you're okay with Iiku's flavor of Android, if you're okay with the speakers and maybe the not so wide ultra wide angle, I think this is a compelling option for anybody who wants just like a really great media experience and arguably one of the best displays on a phone. But anyways, that is it for me in this video. Big thanks to Iiku for sponsoring the showcase. Thank you guys
for watching and as always I'll see you in the very next
