Vivo has been busy with its smartphone lately as the company seems to be on a launching spree over a couple of months in India. With entrenched competition from brands such as Xiaomi and Realme, vivo has ramped its efforts to deliver smartphones that only look attractive but also come at a pleasing price point.
Continuing this streak, vivo revealed its V17 smartphone in India this month. Let’s take a good look at this new offering.
Design and display
The design of the V17, despite its borrowed resemblance with the V17 Pro, has subtle changes such as a punch-hole display on the front and a rectangular camera cut on the back. The hole is crafted with utmost attention to garner minimal attention from the awestruck screen experience it can deliver. Furthermore, the company claims the hole to be the smallest one on a smartphone available on the market.
The rear quarter panel made from plastic feels sturdy and lightweight. The entire smartphone weighs just under 176 gm, which makes the form factor extensively nimble and light on its feet. The Glacier Ice color adds a different stint to the pinkish looking hue underneath the direct sun, which looks classy at best.
The smartphone gets a 6.44-inch Super AMOLED Display, same as one of the V17 Pro, which offers crisp quality visuals and high viewing angles all together. The WideVine L1 certification makes it competent for streaming videos via Netflix and Amazon Prime in Full HD resolution. We also liked the color saturation of the screen, which adapts the display to match the outdoor lighting.
Cameras
The main factor of the V17 comes through its quad-camera setup of 48MP primary sensor (f/1.8), 8MP (f/2.2) ultra-wide-angle lens, a 2MP depth sensor, and a 2MP macro lens on the back. The setup is constructed in an L-shaped arrangement with three sensors vertically arranged and a fourth sensor present just below the LED flash.
Vivo has bundles its usual camera modes such as super night mode, ultra-stable video, portrait mode, super macro mode, super night selfie, AI scene recognition, AI HDR, amongst others.
The camera performance in real life was especially impressive as the unit was versatile enough to fair through every situation. The camera captured some detailed shots using its pixel binning technology and accounted for the right level of saturation and dynamic range. The AI assists the camera in detecting various scenes and adjusting the setting automatically to give you that perfect looking picture.
The wide-angle lens captures more than a 110-degree field of view, and the macro lens comes in handy when taking pictures of objects close by. The resolution of images taken was detailed until you zoom in too much, as the lack of depth and pixel framing becomes all too apparent. The low lighting performance was excellent due to the super night mode but soon became noisy when we stretched it too far.
Coming to the front-facing camera, the smartphone gets a 32MP selfie camera tucked right underneath the punch-hole display upfront. The camera holds well under low lighting conditions due to the various assistive modes. These overall helps the camera in capturing some real color selfies under certain situations.
Performance and software
Vivo decided to use the same Snapdragon 675 SoC used by the V17 Pro, which is a tried and tested processor on the market. Despite its dated outlook, which might dissuade the audience in the wake of more capable Snapdragon 720’s lying around, the processor holds up its prowess.
Paired with eight gigs of RAM, the V17 handles anything and everything with sufficient ease. Games like PUBG, Asphalt, Call of Duty runs decently under the default setting, and we barely noticed any undue lag or stutter during our exhaustive 2 hours of the gaming session. Such high gaming performance meant web browsing and social media use was no problem as the device felt adequately smooth and lag-free during our use.
The V17 ships with Android 9 Pie out of the box with FunTouch OS 9.2 on top. This OS, despite its nagging problems, has come a long way since its launch. The navigation can seem tricky at first but gets going when you get the hang of it. Users can find an Apple-like control center where they can find anything from volume control to frequently used apps by swiping up from the bottom.
This usefulness comes at the cost of a considerable amount of bloatware such as PhonePe, Helo, Opera, Flipkart, Web novel, Gaana, and Dailyhunt app, which fortunately can be uninstalled. The in-display fingerprint sensor on the front feels snappy and accurate, but we often relied on the face unlock, which was quicker and more responsive to use.
Battery life
The Vivo V17’sV17’s 4,500mAh battery is fairly large for its size as it renders an all-day battery life though all types of use. The battery drain on standby is minimal due to substantial optimization, and users won’t suffer from charging anxiety due to an 18W Dual-Engine Type-C cable that rapidly charges the device from 5 to 80 percent in under 60 minutes.
Gizmo Verdict
For all the fanfare, we found the Vivo’s latest addition to the company company’s portfolio, especially worthy. The smartphone brings a whole lot of features such as a minimal hole front-facing camera, supreme rear-facing camera, 8GB of RAM, and a colourful looking design to the table.
That being said, we think the price point of 22K seems a bit on the higher side, considering we have Redmi K20 with 730 chipsets at the same value. For people who liked this design, we recommend to go for it, else wait for Vivo to slash the price point under 18K, which seems excellent value for money segment.
