iQOO has stopped pretending the next flagship is a secret. In a Weibo post published on September 8, 2026, the vivo sub-brand confirmed that the iQOO 16 and a tablet called the iQOO Pad Ultra will debut in China toward the end of September 2026. Pre-orders for both devices are already live in the country, which is a fairly loud way of saying the hardware is finished and only the stage lighting is missing.
What the company actually shared is design, not data. The iQOO 16 teaser shows the redesigned rear camera module that had leaked ahead of the announcement. The iQOO Pad Ultra teaser is more revealing in its own quiet way — a squarish rear camera island that appears to house a single lens surrounded by a ring-shaped LED flash, a look that has more in common with a compact camera than with the usual slab-of-glass tablet.
iQOO product manager Wang Kan framed the Pad Ultra as a gaming-focused tablet in a compact form factor, built around a next-generation flagship chipset and a cooling system. The iQOO 16, in the company’s own marketing language, pairs Snapdragon’s flagship processor with a custom e-sports chip and a next-generation Monster super-core engine, plus a display developed with Samsung Display and support for ray tracing and shadow effects. None of that comes with numbers attached yet.
The numbers, as usual, come from tipsters rather than press releases. According to Digital Chat Station on Weibo, the iQOO 16 will offer up to 100x digital zoom and will ship in four memory configurations:
- 12GB/256GB
- 12GB/512GB
- 16GB/512GB
- 16GB/1TB
The same source lists three colours for the phone — Light Chaser, Legend and Track — which reads like a motorsport mood board and fits iQOO’s performance branding neatly.
For the iQOO Pad Ultra, the leaked picture is a compact tablet with an 8.8-inch OLED panel, a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 series chip, a 9,000mAh battery, 66W charging, a built-in cooling fan and Wi-Fi-only connectivity. Colour options are said to be Shadow Black and Star Armor Silver. Treat all of it as unofficial until iQOO says otherwise.
Two things are worth flagging. First, the fan: active cooling in an 8.8-inch tablet is a deliberate choice, and it lines up with the console-level gaming pitch rather than the thin-and-light one. Second, the geography. There is currently no information about availability of either device outside China, so the end-of-September event is a domestic affair unless iQOO expands the plan.
Earlier on GismoLand: iQOO 16. The battery leak that shrank by 100 mAh before launch.
