Vivo's sub-brand made its debut in the Indian market in February with the launch of the iQOO 3. We recently concluded our review of the device, crowning it one of the fastest phones out there. The iQOO 3 is a gaming-oriented smartphone and offers a very powerful hardware package for its price, ranging from top of the line Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 SoC to the ultrafast LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.1 flash storage. One of the complaints we had with the phone was its lack of a high refresh panel which in our opinion was a big mistake on a flagship phone launching in 2020.

To address this, the company recently launched a brand new flagship in the form of the iQOO Neo 3 which packs a 144Hz panel with essentially the same hardware as the iQOO 3. While there’s no word on when this new phone will arrive in the Indian market, the company has just announced a big price cut on the existing 4G and 5G models of the iQOO 3 in the country.

iQOO 3 XDA Forums

As per the new pricing, the 4G models see a reduction of ₹4,000 from their original prices while the 5G variant receives a ₹2,000 price slash. iQOO 3’s new price will be applicable in the India market on Flipkart and iqoo.com and would be available as soon as e-commerce commences delivery of smartphones.

This price reduction effectively makes it the cheapest Snapdragon 865-powered smartphone on the Indian market right now, making the lack of high refresh rate panel much more palatable. With this price cut, the iQOO 3 is now ₹5,000 cheaper than the base model of the Realme X50 Pro and ₹7,000 cheaper than the newly released OnePlus 8.

Buy on Flipkart

Alongside the announcement of price discounts, iQOO also reinforced their commitment to providing timely software support to the device. The company promised that the iQOO 3 will be among the first smartphones to receive the Android 11 update when it becomes official, adding that that the device will continue to receive security and OTA updates for 3 years since the date of availability.