Vivo has today announced the launch of its new S-series with the launch of Vivo S1 in India. The smartphone comes with a starting price of Rs 17990 and it is available for purchase from Flipkart starting from tomorrow.
With this, Vivo is giving you a new gradient finish at the back panel along with some interesting display and hardware. So, the question here is, can it create some space for itself in this competitive market? We got the time to spend some time with the device and this is what we think of it.
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What we like about Vivo S1
The first thing you will notice about the Vivo S1 is the gradient finish at the back panel. The smartphone comes with two different colour options and both of them have a different design language. The Black variant we got comes with Diamond-like texture concentrated at the centre of the back panel. Interestingly, whenever the light falls on it, it changes the shape, which gives a pretty dope look in our opinion. The phone is quite comfortable to hold in your hand and you will face no trouble with the design of the Vivo S1.
Coming to the display, the Vivo S1 features a 6.38-inch Full HD+ Super AMOLED Display with a screen Resolution of 2340 x 1080 pixels. It is good to see that Vivo is giving a Super AMOLED display at this price point. The screen looks punchy and the colour reproduction is on point. Being AMOLED, you also get Ambient Display, which shows notifications, time and date etc when the screen is turned off. The company has also given an option to select different colour mode according to one’s need.
In terms of performance, the Vivo S1 almost does a good job. The phone can handle most of the daily tasks with flying colours and multi-tasking is a breeze with this smartphone. In terms of gaming, the phone handles most of the casual games like Candy Crush Friends, Crowd City and more without breaking a sweat. Moving on, the phone is equipped with an in-display fingerprint sensor, which is quite fast to unlock the device. The face unlock feature is also fast in recognising the face and unlocking the phone in seconds.
The battery performance of the Vivo S1 is decent as well. The phone is equipped with a 4500mAh battery and the company has bundled an 18W dual-engine Fast charging adapter with it. The battery easily lasts one and a half-day of normal usage. Under power usage, which includes multi-tasking, video streaming, music, gaming, using Maps for navigation and more, the phone still lasted till the end of the day. Coming to the charging time, the phone gets fully charged in 2 hours.
What we don’t like about Vivo S1
The one is where Vivo S1 fails to impress is in the camera department, especially, in the low light department. The phone is equipped with a triple-camera setup with a combination of 16-megapixel primary sensor with an f/1.78 lens, an 8-megapixel secondary sensor with an f/2.2 Wide-Angle lens and a 2-megapixel tertiary sensor with an f/2.4 lens. It comes with 32-megapixel AI selfie camera with an f/2.0 lens.
The daylight performance is decent and the phone delivers some good shots when the light is ideal, however, we thought that it macro shots it shimmers a bit. The low light performance is quite average as photos came out to be full of noises and grains were quite prominently shown in the images. The daylight selfie performance is decent, though selfies taken terms of video, the device supports 1080p for both front and rear camera, which is quite odd most of the phones does offer you 4K video recording support.
Vivo S1 runs on FunTouch OS 9.0, which is based on Android 9.0 Pie. The user interface does offer some good features, though the App drawer support is still missing in the user interface. Furthermore, the user interface comes loaded with a noticeable amount of bloatware. There are different third-party apps like Amazon Shopping, Helo, Webnovel, WPS Office and more. You can delete third-party apps, but no company’s owned applications. The user interface still looks like it is inspired by Apple iOS, which is not a good thing.